This Is Water by David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown. Philosophy/Essays. Hardcover. $14.99. Click the image above to purchase David Foster Wallace's wonderful essay.
Let me start with a tale of cafe foibles.
One merry evening in May I wandered into my favorite cafe in Phoenixville. I wanted to get a cup of coffee, talk with my friend the owner, and be on my way with the diminutive little book I carried with me.
After a brief session of catching up with town gossip, the subject of David Foster Wallace's recently published "final work" was broached by the cafe's owner. Coincidence of all coincidences: that was exactly the small book I carried with me, which upon my arrival home I was going to read and review for the local paper.
The cafe's owner had discussed the book with one of the employees and they had both been excited to take a look at it. Neither had read Wallace before but the most certainly Zen title seemed too intriguing to pass up.
After I published my tepid , introductory review I came back in and asked if they had read the book. No, they had not. Yes, they had read my review. The employee wished I had talked more about the ontological concepts of the book. The ontological concepts of the book he, no bitterness here, had not read.
Now I love talking to these fellows. They're intelligent folk and rare birds to boot. The irony of the above situation should not in any way color their character in any negative light but rather to emphasize the grandeur of Wallace's essay.
Using wry meta-Aphorisms (what else would Wallace use?) David Foster Wallace delivered his only public address to the graduating class of Kenyon College in 2005. Titled This Is Water, it is anything but Zen.
The framework for this essay is a justification of the liberal arts degree. Wallace, in his wonderfully oblique way, does not climb down from the podium to slap faces and proclaim the BA student the most well-girded learner in the world. Instead Wallace calls attention to the cliched notion that a liberal arts degree is designed to teach "how to think" and in its stead places the often overlooked notion of "when to think."
The book is a soothing and tragic (Wallace of course committed suicide in September of 2008) assessment of how thinking arms human frailty to resist the repetitive droning of Western life.
It is essentially a novelist's guide to thinking as therapy. If that makes any sense.
Using clever phrasing, wry humor, sardonic philosophy and a self-deprecating eye for absurdity, Wallace weaves a fable-like address that affirms life and arms the reader with the not-so-subtle reminder that it is one thing to have gained knowledge and another to know how and when to use it.
He's not talking moral quandaries of "to abort or not to abort" caliber. David Foster Wallace reminds us, in stunning clarity, that you can (and should) take a moment to think about what is happening while standing in a wretched line at a supermarket.
Like I said: This is a novelist's guide to life.
And most certainly one for the season. Required reading for any of you poor souls who have yet to plumb the malls for gifts and goods.
Woe need not be yours.
Oh, and on the notion of "when" to think. Applicable to books too, incidentally. Think about them after you've read them.
Insert smiley face emoticon here.
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2 comments:
First things first: I have not read the book ... yet.
That being said, I am responding to the part of your post where you write about "affirming life" in juxtaposition with "committing suicide." Was this irony intentional?! I shall read the book if only to discover why anyone would want to follow such morosophy.
My man... "First things first: I have not read the book...yet."
Yet you will proclaim it morosophy. A term not used enough by the way.
I know you're better than that kind of excuse making. Still, you wanted to play cards so...
Let's start with suicide, shall we? Wallace killed himself. It's true. It is wretched to even attempt to comprehend and yet we know it was so. He lived in sufficient enough mental anguish to chose nothingness over existence (I am honoring his metaphysical beliefs, as their outcomes were the ones on which he based his decision to kill himself).
So does the fact that he killed himself discredit what he said about life or the living of life?
Perhaps some frame of reference is needed. He gave the talk two years before he ended his life.
Are we the same person two years later? More succinctly: Do we hold the same beliefs over time or do they change? And more apropos: Is it possible to lose or gain faith? Would that not involve an ontological change of monumental and fundamental order occurring over a period of time (even if in the time span of a blink)?
So is it not possible that this book was written by someone who at the time was very capable of giving good advice to young people on the subject of when to think?
Is it not also possible that two years later this person while in the midst of biochemical depression no longer could heed let alone understand his own previous thinking?
The irony involved in this comment and response sincerely bothers me. This is exactly what Wallace was writing about. Wallace would have said that humanity would be found in not reacting to the suicide but to think about the immense suffering that must occur to make someone who was formerly vibrant want to take their own life. That is the point of the humanities, and also the point of the book.
"How to apply your degree in the humanities to life in general" would have been a more revealing title.
The suicide, not to sound gallant about it, is moot. The question of why is not. To ask the questions involved in why requires thinking.
Condemnation does not. That's just towing the prescribed line.
Let's use something more aligned to spiritual laws (just to play the Angel's advocate here): Does the profligate rake, after transforming their lives through faith and belief in their salvation, not wonder about the strangeness of their former life? Of course they would. The recovering drug addict must be amazed by their former mental state, otherwise they would not be recovering.
I think back two years and wonder why I did certain things. Even mundane things. It is amazing to think about.
It is with vertiginous causality in mind that I find no semblance of hypocrisy in Wallace's writing. He changed for the worse. I have never been diagnosed with clinical depression, nor have I shown symptoms of the disease, so it is with sincere horror that I apprehend the concept of such unbearable pain.
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