Most inspiring commencement speech ever? David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College: “This is water”

Every year, thousands of college graduates celebrate having completed their “four years prostrate to the higher mind” at commencement ceremonies where universities bring in influential people to speak. Some of these speakers can give yawners, others can give cringeworthy addresses. But if the audience is lucky, they will be treated to a speech that they will remember for the rest of their days.

One such exceptional speech was given to the graduating class of Keyon College at their commencement ceremony on May 21, 2005, by the highly influential American writer David Foster Wallace. The speech, which explored living a compassionate and aware life, was later published as a book in 2009 after his unfortunate death at his own hands the year before.

‘This is water’

The acclaimed author, who was considered “one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years,” began his address with “a standard requirement of US commencement speeches,” sharing a story.

“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?’”

“The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about,” he explained. Wallace went on to discuss how we all have the freedom to think what we want, but that we should manage our “default setting”, our core hard-wired human instincts, self-centeredness, and arrogance.

“I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” Wallace said. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’”

He cautioned about people’s “blind certainty,” which he said is “a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.” He told the graduates that the real value of their liberal arts education is gaining the knowledge of “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.”

“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,” Wallace posited. “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.”

“We have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water. This is water.”

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