David Foster Wallace was a beautiful fucking person who said a lot of beautiful fucking things.

‘the really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and being able to truly care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over every day. that is real freedom.’ continuing my tradition of starting off the new year with some words of reflection and perspective (see previous years: 2021, 2020, 2019, and 2018).this address is a little different from most of the uplifting and positive words that are usually shared with graduates. DFW pulls back the curtain and real

‘This is Water’. Water - Now I love that metaphor. I end up addressing many things and their traits and their progresses and their declines through this unbound source of immense satiation. But how does this fit into a speech delivered to students, facing a future that’s unknown and by that very virtue, intimidating?Ah well, the thoughts weaved into this beautiful message says it all. For a text that I ended up highlighting half of, I would like to take this particular insight with me, forever.

This may come as a surprise to people who know me, but I never read this before it came out in book format. I knew it existed, but like most of the occasional and short pieces by DFW I held off on reading them. At the time his writing came out so infrequently, that I always wanted to have things of his to read at some point in the future, when I would really want something new of his. Of course that has changed to their being nothing new to release, except for unpublished things that might see t...

So much of the language I use everyday is centred around 'I'.I feel it too.I get you.I understand what you're going through.I. Me. Mine.Somewhere within these juxtapositions of the objective reality as it exists and my personal view of it, lies the fine line between empathy and self-obsession. I sometimes worry that I'm so far beyond the line that I'll forget there ever was one. I sometimes worry that our language structures are evolving to support more self-centredness.This is water is a short

My basic problem with This is Water is how it's contributed to the Cult of DFW, who (don't get me wrong for a second) was a terrific writer who deserves a place in any sort of canon you can imagine. I'd still put him as my favorite writer and still put Infinite Jest as my favorite book if I was pressed, but the more I learn about him as a person, the more I realize he was in many ways a dick, and the more I realize his dickish tendencies contributed to what's so good about his fiction. That is t...

This is water.And I have to learn to breath in it.This is water.

FURTHER UPDATED REVIEW (consolidation of general remarks of mine from review comment threads for this book/speech):Is This Speech Depressing?I have to respectfully disagree and say that I found this to be uplifting in a really serious way--like my version of a Chicken Soup For The Soul sense of uplifting (er, uh, something)--which is a feeling of redemption via facing messy truths and feeling my own thoughts to be extremely validated by his beautiful ideas and phrasings. I'd read it many times o...

If you want something to make you think about the every day life, here. read.

People get used to the sadness of everyday life. Then they find a goal that then becomes the anchor they cling to in order to survive.People live without awareness like the Lotus-eaters in The Odyssey: they live only to live; in and of itself.People I know, above all in the city, are unhappy. They think that the system framed them. Sometimes it happens to me as well.You wonder why you are doing things that you wouldn't normally do. I like my life and I am a positive person: after a good walk all...

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?"My first literary quote shirt (received as a present). On the shirt, the utterances make up the fish themselves. I'm waiting for the day when someone sees my shirt, walks up to me, and says "This is W...

Ωραία ομιλία!Ο Wallace δεν λέει κάτι πρωτότυπο-αλλά οι γνωστές αυτές αλήθειες ξεχνιούνται εύκολα,και μας τις θυμίζει με όμορφο τρόπο.Το κείμενο κυλάει γρήγορα κι εύκολα! "A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the re...

so. it gets five stars because of how terribly sad i still am. i read this online, of course, years and years ago, but i reread it in book form, just to see if anything had been added. it hasn't. just the fact of his death on the flap. i'd really rather have added material than that fact, wouldn't you? and i also would have liked this to have been delivered at my graduation (i mean, i had quincy jones, i can't complain too much, but still... despite all the good advice in this book, i am a compl...

I listened to this speech online and there is something about listening to David Foster Wallace talk that I find soothing As a speech it’s worth reading or listening to and offers a more compassionate way to view life.

Better heard spoken for the full sting. A powerful speech but the message seems to be rather simple: don’t be a selfish asshat. Or is that a little reductive? Anyway—one star for the cash-in and four stars for the speech. Coming soon from Little, Brown in DVD & books: The Best Hesitant Pauses on KCRW’s Bookworm, The Ten Best Awkward Selfconscious Squirming Moments on Charlie Rose, and Half-Remembered Conversations Anyone Has Ever Had With DFW. Also available from the DFW Tacky Cash-in Emporium:

As I came here to post my review of this book, I stumbled onto reviews posted by others. The general perception seemed to be a sense of sadness. Perhaps it's because of what Wallace did ultimately. But I read this speech differently.I read it as a generous gift delivered by a deeply troubled and pained person of unusual intelligence. And while this is an address to graduates, it seems to me that he speaks, in a way, to try to convince himself too. He says,"...there are all different kinds of fre...