This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College

Wallace thought the way to fight all this was to focus your individual attention—through a sort of iron willpower. “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” Wallace told Kenyon College graduates in his famous commencement address. “It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what

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The second was a point from David Foster Wallace’s iconic This Is Water speech: Whatever you worship will eventually eat you alive. “If you worship money and things…then you will never feel you have enough,” he writes. “Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will di

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Kierkegaard once summarized the question that these graduates are really asking: “What I really need to be clear about is what am I to do, not about what I must know …. It is a question of finding a truth that is truth for me, of finding the idea for which I am willing to live and die. … It is for this my soul thirsts, as the deserts of Africa thir

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David Foster Wallace, in his popular “This Is Water” commencement address at Kenyon College in Ohio in 2005, said, “Learning how to think really 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 wil

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A pair of images that help clarify things here are those of the kayak and the superyacht. To be human, according to this analogy, is to occupy a little one-person kayak, borne along on the river of time towards your inevitable yet unpredictable death. It’s a thrilling situation, but also an intensely vulnerable one: you’re at the mercy of the curre

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