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    This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
    Unavailable
    This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
    Unavailable
    This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
    Audiobook25 minutes

    This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

    Published by Hachette Audio

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. This is the audio recording of David Foster Wallace delivering that very address. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.

    Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every listen.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateMay 1, 2010
    ISBN9781607885276
    Unavailable
    This Is Water: The Original David Foster Wallace Recording: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

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    Reviews for This Is Water

    4.5/5

    408 ratings17 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Wallace tells a couple of sort of hoary anecdotes in an uncomfortably self-reflexive style, reminds us that life is hard and boring and that we'll get by it better if we can extend other people the courtesy of not imagining we know their circumstances. But also:"It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down . . . . 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."
    • 4/5
      An essay stretched out for publication, but still a reminder of what we lost when he left.
    • 5/5
      I really needed this right now. Though, if I'm being honest, I doubt there will ever be a time in my life where I might pick this up and think differently.
    • 5/5
      David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" is a transcript of a speech the author gave to Kenyon College in 2005. You can probably find this speech online and hear the same information contained in this book for free, but I'm naturally a reader and enjoy reading the printed word. I get more out of the content when I read instead of listen.One of the things I liked best about this book is the way that the prose was broken up into brief segments on each page so that I could digest it piece by piece. The whole book can be read in about an hour, but the short passages on each page help with the pacing so that each line is taken in more thoughtfully.The main theme of the message is that we often miss seeing the things that are right in front of us, the things that are obvious. The author makes the point beautifully be starting off with a story and then he fills in the details. This is a short but excellent work.
    • 3/5
      I listened to this on Youtube while folding the laundry.

      Next, a volume of DFW's collected grocery lists...
    • 4/5
      SHORT little book- actually a commencement speech - with some thought provoking statements- such as we all live in our own here and now, but we need to be conscious of other people's here and nows- and not just float through life, but pay attention
    • 3/5
      A nice little speech that is undoubtedly more illuminating in what it says about DFW than it does about life. It all probably seemed rather banal before he sadly killed himself. In retrospect parts of it take on a deeper and darker meaning.Recommended only for those big fans of DFW. It's not amazing but it's extremely short and worth it if you're interested.
    • 1/5
      Not exactly the Divinity School Address ("In this refulgent summer, it has been a luxury to draw the breath of life"). Proves that even great writers can write drivel. Something in it about some fish and what to think about; but like most commencement speeches, you just want to get out of the gown and get drunk.
    • 5/5
      Good lesson about CHOOSING what you think, and changing your perspective. We have the choice on how we view the world around us.
    • 5/5
      The book to give a graduate, or anyone who is making a big life change, or anyone feeling very depressed. Sad, lovely, funny and true.
    • 2/5
      As another reviewer said: it's sad and ironic. A few pages from the end he says: "It is about making it to thirty, or maybe even fifty, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head."The speech by itself is very clearly and sharply written, but I think it's best to be honest and say its content is not very interesting. The claim is that a humanities education doesn't teach you how to think (that, as he says, is the inevitable cliché), but it teaches you what to think about, how to concentrate, how to find your own thoughts, how and when to choose to think, so that you are not overwhelmed by anxiety and solipsism. A more common academic version of that critique of the idea that the humanities teaches people how to think is that it helps people make up their own minds about such things as politics, society, identity, and values, so that people can think independently. Many versions of that kind of claim exist, from Jaroslav Pelikan to Theodor Adorno... but notice Wallace is saying something much simpler and more precarious: he is saying that a successful education in the humanities will let a person tune out the drone of self-serving animal anxiety that drives what he thinks of as ordinary contemporary life. (As in his writing, the examples of contemporary life are such things as shopping and driving home after work.) Even if he had not committed suicide, that would be a tremendously sad conclusion. Even if we only had "Infine Jest," that conclusion would make the utter ordinariness of the tennis camp even more poignant, because it would be even clearer -- if it needed to be -- that the limited experiences described in that book, as in his others, can be read as more-or-less desperate efforts to avoid a hole of pessimism and depression. And because he did commit suicide, this speech is really tremendously sad.(Why, I wonder, did the publisher decide not to tell us where he gave the speech? Was the university not prestigious enough to help sell copies? Or was it so prestigious that it might ask for royalties? Anyone know?)
    • 2/5
      Meh. He seems to always be getting to a point, but veers away. I find Wallace to be enormously overrated. He merely sounds profound, but he isn't.
    • 4/5
      Choose what you worship. It will consume you, and you have no oðer choice.
    • 5/5
      A wonderful, thoughtful book. The text comes from a speech delivered by David Foster Wallace when he was the commencement speaker at Kenyon College, and it is relevant, honest, and fresh. My one quibble would be that you used to be able to find the speech's text online for free; since the book has been published, I believe the online copies were removed due to copyright concerns. This is reasonable; however, the speech is so short, that in order to make it into a book, the publisher has put one sentence on each page, and I don't find that it translates well to this format. It's also remarkably expensive for its length. Still, a lovely book. Definitely worth a look.
    • 3/5
      Hard to rate, as it is a commencement speech...worth it for his several mentions of suicide. Creepy. Standard DFW fare.
    • 4/5
      It's difficult to see what's all around you...DFW has some nice similes and thought experiments to help. I'm glad this got printed, as a speech it would have been gone too fast.
    • 5/5
      Pithy little book about the "meaning" of life (= being mindful and getting outside of one's head) ... originally delivered as a commencement address. Author David Foster Wallace means, of course, that it is well-written and thought-provoking.