DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, IN HIS OWN WORDS
IN
MEMORIAM | September 19th 2008
The world
of letters has lost a giant. We have felt nourished by the mournful graspings of sites dedicated to
his memory ("He was my favourite" ~ Zadie Smith), and we
grieve for the books we will never see. But perhaps the best tribute is one he
wrote himself ...
Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE
This is the commencement address he gave to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. It captures his electric mind, and also his humility--the way he elevated and made meaningful, beautiful, many of the lonely thoughts that rattle around in our heads. The way he put better thoughts in our heads, too. (Many thanks to Marginalia.org for making this available.)
(If anybody feels like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead,
because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling up his gown
and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings
["parents"?] and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of
2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an
older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys.
How's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then
eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is
water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment
of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out
to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if
you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish
explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the
wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious,
important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but
the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal
platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you
on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed
to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the
degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a
material payoff. So let's talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the
commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so
much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about "teaching you how
to think". If you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing
this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody
to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a
college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm
going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be
insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that
we're supposed to get in a place like this isn't really about the capacity to
think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total
freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time
discussing, I'd ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just
a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting
together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is
religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence
of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And
the atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not
believing in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God
and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that
terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it
was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out
'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if
you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the
atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says,
"After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes.
"No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by
and showed me the way back to camp."
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