Reflection on Module Readings

David Foster Wallace,

Kenyon Commencement Address

Background

This speech was originally delivered by David Foster Wallace as the

2005 commencement address at Kenyon College.

Speech Transcript

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?”

If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the

wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't

be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is

that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones

that are the 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

life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract

nonsense. So let's get concrete…

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 realest, most vivid and

important person in existence. We rarely talk about this sort of natural,

basic self centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's pretty

much the same for all of us, deep down. It is our default-setting,

hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: There is no

experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center of. The

world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to

the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other

people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you

somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea.

But please don't worry that I'm getting ready to preach to you about

compassion or other-directedness or the so-called “virtues.” This is not a

matter of virtue-it's a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow

altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default-setting, which

is to be deeply and literally self-centered, and to see and interpret

everything through this lens of self.

By way of example, let's say it's an average day, and you get up in the

morning, go to your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten

hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and

all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind

for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get

up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there's no

food at home-you haven't had time to shop this week, because of your

challenging job-and so now after work you have to get in your car and

drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the workday, and the traffic's

very bad, so getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and

when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of

course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to

squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously,

fluorescently lit, and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop,

and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, but you can't just get

in and quickly out. You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's

crowded aisles to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver

your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts,

and of course there are also the glacially slow old people and the spacey

people and the ADHD kids who all block the aisle and you have to grit

your teeth and try to be polite as you ask them to let you by, and

eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns

out there aren't enough checkout lanes open even though it's the

end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is

stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady

working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your

food, and wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and

then get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of

death, and then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of

groceries in your cart through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot,

and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything doesn't

fall out of the bags and roll around in the trunk on the way home, and

then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-

intensive rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the

work of choosing comes in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles

and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a

conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I'm

going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because

my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations like this are

really all about me, about my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire

to just get home, and it's going to seem, for all the world, like everybody

else is just in my way, and who are all these people in my way? And look

at how repulsive most of them are and how stupid and cow-like and

dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how

annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in

the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked

really hard all day and I'm starved and tired and I can't even get home to

eat and unwind because of all these stupid goddamn people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my

default-setting, I can spend time in the end-of-theday traffic jam being

angry and disgusted at all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and

Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks burning their wasteful, selfish,

forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or

religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most

disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate

and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they

cut people off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic

jam, and I can think about how our children's children will despise us for

wasting all the future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and

how spoiled and stupid and disgusting we all are, and how it all just

sucks, and so on and so forth…

Look, if I choose to think this way, fine, lots of us do-except that

thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic it doesn't have to be

a choice. Thinking this way is my natural default-setting. It's the

automatic, unconscious way that I experience the boring, frustrating,

crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic,

unconscious belief that I am the center of the world and that my

immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's

priorities. The thing is that there are obviously different ways to think

about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and

idling in my way: It's not impossible that some of these people in SUVs

have been in horrible auto accidents in the past and now find driving so

traumatic that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge,

heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive; or that the Hummer

that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is

hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to rush to the hospital,

and he's in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am-it is actually I

who am in his way. And so on.

Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm

saying you're “supposed to” think this way, or that anyone expects you

to just automatically do it, because it's hard, it takes will and mental

effort, and if you're like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or you

just flat-out won't want to. But most days, if you're aware enough to give

yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat,

dead-eyed, over-made-lady who just screamed at her little child in the

checkout line-maybe she's not usually like this; maybe she's been up

three straight nights holding the hand of her husband who's dying of

bone cancer, or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the Motor

Vehicles Department who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a

nightmarish red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic

kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible-it

just depends on what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure

that you know what reality is and who and what is really important-if

you want to operate on your default-setting-then you, like me, will not

consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've

really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know

you have other options. It will actually be within your power to

experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer hell-type situation 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. Not that that

mystical stuff's necessarily true: The only thing that's capital-T True is

that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to

consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't. You get to

decide what to worship…

Because here's something else that's true. In the day-to-day trenches of

adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such

thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get

is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of

God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh

or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some

infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you

worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things-if they are

where you tap real meaning in life-then you will never have enough.

Never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your own body and

beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time

and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally

plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff already-it's been codified

as myths, proverbs, clichés, bromides, epigrams, parables: the skeleton

of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily

consciousness. Worship power-you will feel weak and afraid, and you

will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship

your intellect, being seen as smart-you will end up feeling stupid, a

fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.

Look, the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they're

evil or sinful; it is that they are unconscious. They are default-settings.

They're the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day,

getting more and more selective about what you see and how you

measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're

doing. And the world will not discourage you from operating on your

default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums

along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and

craving and the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed

these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort

and personal freedom. The freedom to be lords of our own tiny

skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation. This kind of

freedom has much to recommend it. But of course 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. The alternative

is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”-the constant

gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly

inspirational. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth with a whole lot

of rhetorical bullshit pared away. Obviously, you can think of it

whatever you wish. But please don't dismiss it as some finger-wagging

Dr. Laura sermon. None of this is about morality, or religion, or dogma,

or big fancy questions of life after death. The capital-T Truth is about

life before death. It is about making it to thirty, or maybe fifty, without

wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple

awareness-awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain

sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and

over: “This is water, this is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult

world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns

out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it

commences: now.

I wish you way more than luck.