This Is Water (2005)

I really like your analysis. But rather than falling apart, for me, it reifies the truth of the entire piece.

As Tarsul points out elsewhere in the thread, he was a profoundly sad man and killed himself a few years after this speech.

At the end of the day, neither the old fish nor the young fish could escape the water.

Well, he was sad and lonely, and dealt with severe depression. He took his life a few years after this speech.

Let’s go ahead and caption this comment “On The Cusp of a Revelation (2021)”

Yeah I don’t see what the hype was about this guy. He was physically abusive towards his girlfriend, was creepy with her son, and he killed himself. Seems like a loser.

Children are the audience for freshmen orientation.

Isn't the idea that, by the time you are being given a commencement speech, you are an adult? Isn't that kinda the point of this speech? "Society says you've finished school and you're an adult now, but it's not gonna be that easy".

I really like this address but your comment made me reflect that what I like most is probably DFWs delivery and style rather than the content of his message, which I don’t find to be especially profound. But also, he was a writer and a often depressed one so when you invite that kind of person what you might get is really well delivered performance by someone who knows how to sound wise and not cliched- and in that respect I think he succeeded. Though of course it is true that after the relatively meaningful period of college (for many) the absolute mudanity of the adult world is like a slap in the face.

The central message of his talk is that one of the biggest challenges in life is choosing what to think about, and where to focus your attention.

How is that a message exclusively for 'sad lonely men'?

That's what they get for inviting a depressed existentially angsty speaker! He was never going to make some uplifting speech, that's not who he was. The speech is true to himself and that's a good thing. But yeah, as a fan of his, I wouldn't invite him as a commencement speaker...

I feel like it would be disingenuous to invite a chronically depressed man and expect an upbeat discourse about how exciting life can be in college. I think it's a defining feature of depression to fill one's consciousness to the extent where there's little left for acknowledging other things or other people. The works I read of David Foster Wallace's seemed different ways of him expressing his discontent about the world and how little importance he gave it.

This is great. Thanks for posting it

Thanks for the film tip, I thought I was relatively well versed in the DFW universe, but had never heard about it.

I... I think you entirely missed the point of the commencement speech.

The point of his speech is NOT that the world is hard, and difficult, and in order to combat, survive and thrive in that environment you need to reshape your viewpoint so as to see the world in an easier light, or amend yourself to better accept your situation.

The point of his speech is that from childhood through college, the average American life changes dramatically every few years. New experiences, new schools, new friends. But after college, most of us begin to develop routines. Many of us specialize. We do so in a way that is unfamiliar to us before that age, as it is only after college that life has the potential to stay stable for many years in a row, and thereby allow many of us to begin building routines, foundations, and patterns that can last a lifetime.

Routines of habit also go hand in hand with building routines of thought. In school, high school, college, you are constantly bombarded with new ideas and experiences. But 10 years into the workforce, depending on how you chose to live your life, you may find that this happens less frequently. That you've automated some parts of your life mentally. That you've fossilized some aspects of your thinking, in order to focus on other aspects and goals of your life.

And DFW is pointing out that this is both extremely common, and dangerous.

> "The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive"

What he's saying is that if you adopt any specific ideology as fixed, then the persistent problems you will encounter in your life will be precisely the ones your current ideology is unable to fix. (Almost tautologically, because otherwise, you would have fixed them already.)

The point of the speech is not that you have to change your viewpoint in order to make yourself amenable to the outside world.

The point of his speech is that you need to be willing to always look at a situation from outside your current perspective, and be willing to continue growing, learning, and upgrading your current beliefs and viewpoints in order to be able to reassess and potentially solve your problems, goals, life and ambitions.

His 'fear' is that many of the students will think that their learning part of their life is complete, because they have graduated college.

DFW is trying to instill in them that college did not finish their requirements to learn. College merely taught them how to learn, in the hope that they would continue learning for the rest of their lives.

That is literally the opposite of stoicism.

DFW is literally saying that if someone adopts a completely fixed and stoic mindset, they might as well kill themselves. Because it is only by getting over one's routines, and consciously choosing to look at one's own problems from new perspectives, and then employing their collegiately taught skills of learning that one finds new approaches and philosophies and perspectives and SOLUTIONS to their problems. And it is by doing that, that one can ultimately find a fulfilling and successful life. Failing to do that, getting permanently stuck in mental rut, will lead to missing out on so much of what makes life positive, successful and happy, that he compares such people to the walking dead.

Which would be the stoic viewpoint.

Wallace is pleading to us to hear the call of primitivism (this is no stoic plea, AFAIK). Awareness as a reversion to the primeval, which is a common act for everything perfect according to Rilke. Husserl cries: "Back to the things themselves!" Merton could only write the lines "[l]ife is this simple: [w]e are living in a world that is absolutely transparent and the divine is shining through it all the time..." from a primordial ground. Being conscious by considering a "landscape as it is when [we are] not there...” as mentioned by Weil.

Wallace is implicitly telling us that it is only through the annihilation of the self that we can pay proper attention (and see the truth), am I the only one who views it this way? I read no solipsism in his speech, the contrary rather: "[l]ove dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty" notes Carson. Bachelard writes, "[f]orgetting the earth and disavowing our earthly being is a double necessity for whoever loves the water with a cosmic love... then, there is nothing before water... above water, there is nothing... [w]ater is the whole wide world"; water was everything for Wallace.

>a top-tier philosopher and then branched out to writing

I probably can't replicate the experience for anyone else, but I was astounded by learning the year in which Infinite Jest was released only after finishing it. The only other fiction that's led me to totally misapprehend the year of publication like that is Parable of the Sower.

FWIW, his venture into math writing with Everything and More [1] was widely criticized.

The wikipedia has links to the full text of three reviews: "laced through and through with blunders of every magnitude." "Any reader keen to gain insights into the infinite would do better to go back to Aristotle." "The presentation grows increasingly frantic and disorganized. Nothing makes sense."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_and_More_(book)

The crowd clapping and cheering approvingly at his example of how not to think is a great moment.

This shortened version with some video/music around it is also pretty nice: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eC7xzavzEKY

"Good Old Neon" reads entirely different in the context of his suicide. It's almost a different story when you put it in that space.

the editor for ij released his edited version of a book dfw left, or remnants of a manuscript called pale king. have you read it?

End of Tour is enjoyable and most of the words are his own, but there is a clear need to make it a story about a guy who later commits suicide, and so all the acting and tonal stuff is inflected to that end. Having read the book first, the movie just seemed so much sadder and devoid of a lot of the joy that made the book so incredible.

I watched the movie recently and semi-liked it (actors great, plot kind of dull, and all in all not exactly that enlightening), also read some negative reviews. What was the inaccurate part, was there any massive miss or so?

I have read most of his stuff, including The Pale King. It is absolutely worth reading, but also recall that it was published in an unfinished state posthumously. It is not a particularly easy read but has some extremely compelling themes.

Oh wow, you've got quite a journey if you decide to dive into the life and work of David Foster Wallace.

A troubled, but absolutely brilliant mind. Enjoy!