This is Water by David Foster Wallace
by Parker · 27 things on NewTwos
- This is Water by David Foster Wallace youtube video
- Kenyon College Commencement Speech 2005
- The most obvious and important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about
- Learning to think gives you the choice of what to think about
- How we construct meaning is a matter of personal, intentional choice
- Blind certainty: a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up
- Teaching you how to think allows you to be a little less arrogant. Have a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties
- So much of what we are certain about turns out to be totally wrong and diluted
- Our default setting is that we are the absolute center of the universe and we are completely wrong about this
- Choose to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of our natural, hard wired setting which is deeply and literally self centered
- People who are able to do this are often described as being well adjusted which is not an accidental term
- It is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside our own head
- Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to chose how you construct meaning from experience
- The mind is an excellent servant but a terrible master
- Learning how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out
- Petty, frustrating crap is exactly where the work of choosing is going to come in
- Most days, if you are aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look at events differently
- If you really learn how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred
- The only thing that is True is that you get to decide how you are going to see it
- This is the freedom of education. You get to decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to decide what to worship
- Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. The compelling reason to worship some type of God is that pretty much anything else we worship will eat us alive
- If you worship money or things, you will never have enough. Worship your own body and beauty, and you will always feel ugly
- The trick is to keep the Truth upfront in daily consciousness
- Worship power and you will feel weak and afraid. Worship intellect and you will feel stupid, a fraud always on the verge of being found out
- The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing
- The Truth is about live before death. It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over. 'This is water.'
- It is unimaginably hard to do, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out