This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life,   ISBN:9780316068222

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My sister gave me this book about a month ago for my birthday. I had read it a long time ago on the internet, but I'd just scanned over it with mild interest and quickly had forgotten it.

I was a fool, of course, that time I read it. I'd done exactly what Wallace so eloquently warns against in "This is Water." I'd read it while entrapped within the prison of my self-concern. I had read it without full mindfulness, in a rush to move on to other things. And look what I had missed.

It's a beautiful book that reminds us of truths that float around us in many forms (he points out cliches) but that we somehow never seem fully to grasp. Wallace reminds us that if we live unconsciously, according to the default settings that focus on ourselves, we can end up living cynical and bitter lives. He instead urges awareness, so that we may experience even the most banal of experiences as "not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars -- compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things..."

Like I said, it's a beautiful book that I find worth reading over and over, just to remind myself, again, to pay attention.

One more note. I do very much appreciate the book form This is Water takes. The small volume is attractive. The speech is published with one sentence per page which serves to help the reader enact the skills that Wallace so urges in the book: awareness and thoughtfulness. It's a perfect example of form matching content, and even if This is Water is still available for free online, the book is well worth the cost.

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This speech (as well as a lot of other awesome stories, articles, essays, quotes, first-lines, jokes) is included in the 2005 Best American Non-Required reading, which was edited by Dave Eggers.

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Spend less money, and get a lot more out of it!

By the way, the speech is a great speech. You really should check it out.

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First of all, this commencement address, in whatever form, is worth the price. I have the book form, or at least, did. Evidently my 18 year old took it with him to college.

Now, the audio form. From Audible. It is read by Wallace's sister, Amy, which I find distracting because:

(1) Wallace was not a woman and this is a first person address which should be read by a man. And don't give me any sexist equality nonsense on this. This speech is delivered from a man's POV, not a woman's. It's not something that is gender specific, but in my view, it is not something expressed in a way that a woman would express it.

Actually, since there is, as I understand it, an actually video of DFW reading it himself, there's no reason that the audio, however poor, should not have been stripped, enhanced, and sold instead of Amy's reading;

and (2) Amy "reads" it rather than "delivers" it. You can tell the difference. This reading requires an actor, or at least an actress, not a reader.

But still. This is the commencement speech your child should hear or read BEFORE going off to college. And after. And every year thereafter.

You, too.

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This speech is 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 freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying. The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to think."

He's talking about existence, and the freedom to love. And to love is to rebel against periods of depression and unhappy listlessness and repetition and pain and absurdity, to care about others and to sacrifice. It's a Sisyphean existence. I subscribe to that. The struggle itself is enough to fill a man's heart. I think Camus said that.

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I have very mixed feelings about this little book. On the one hand it prints in full for the first time in book form David Foster Wallace's brilliant 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College. That speech will be remembered as one of the seminal documents of the early 21st century, to be spoken of in the same breath as one of Emerson's essays. Wallace manages to compress into a brief space some stunningly profound insights into cognitive psychology, religion, and humanitarianism--in short, how to live one's life. I don't see how you can read it and not be changed. If you want to begin reading Wallace, this is the place to start.

On the other hand that's all there is in this 137 page book: Wallace's relatively short talk, printed in large type and surrounded by lots and lots of white space. In other words, it's an overgrown greeting card. And it smacks just a little bit of exploitation of Wallace's tragic 2008 death. So if you are willing to pay $25.00 for something you can easily and legally find on the Internet then be my guest. I was at a loss how to rate this book: five starts for the content, and one star for the cheesy presentation. So I compromised on three stars, with the above warnings.