David foster wallace - This is water
Choice of what to think
He embodies great authenticity and wisdom. Here are some excerpts from his commencement speech, This Is Water, delivered to the graduates of Kenyon College.
This is water: 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?”
Choice of what to think: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people. You got to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master”
No such thing as atheism: Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.
Freedom: The really freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
