Book Review: This is Water by David Foster Wallace

There are only a few books that I intentionally have purchased with plans of reading them again. This Is Water is one of them. Originally a keynote from David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College (listen to the audio at this link) and put into a short book format with a sentence per page. The audio or video version is excellent as well and adds an element of humor that you may not pick up in the written version. The book does such a good job of bridging the gap between the idealism of the young launching into the world and the realities of the mundanities of adulthood and choosing how to think about them.

There is a lot of wisdom and truth and humor throughout the book but these are some key quotes that stood out to me.

“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.”

“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 probably 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.”

“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 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.”

“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…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things…then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty… and you will always feel ugly and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you…worship power you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power of 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.”

(From a content warning perspective, he does reference suicide and given how his life ended, perhaps the speech should be taken as foreshadowing and with a grain of salt.) 

There are countless graduation speeches and some are profound, inspirational, instructive, funny or otherwise entertaining. On the whole, this slice of the graduation speech pie rates up at the top and can help shape a person’s thinking in meaningful and helpful ways if taken to heart. Best of all it can be read in 15-20 minutes at most. I recommend this book to anyone but especially those on the cusp of launching into adulthood or starting probably any endeavor that you’ve not attempted before.

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In pursuit of His best,

Andrew