Mention Books To This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Original Title:	This is Water
ISBN:	0316068225 (ISBN13: 9780316068222)
Edition Language:	English

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life Hardcover | Pages: 138 pages

Commentary Toward Books This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

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. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. 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 reading.

Define Containing Books This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Title	:	This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Author	:	David Foster Wallace
Book Format	:	Hardcover
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 138 pages
Published	:	April 14th 2009 by Little, Brown and Company (first published 2009)
Categories	:	Nonfiction. Philosophy. Writing. Essays. Psychology. Self Help. Literature. American. Education

Rating Containing Books This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

Ratings: 4.51 From 21024 Users | 1786 Reviews

Piece Containing Books This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life

This may come as a surprise to people who know me, but I never read this before it came out in book format. I knew it existed, but like most of the occasional and short pieces by DFW I held off on reading them. At the time his writing came out so infrequently, that I always wanted to have things of his to read at some point in the future, when I would really want something new of his. Of course that has changed to their being nothing new to release, except for unpublished things that might see

"I know that this stuff probably doesnt sound fun or breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech's central stuff should sound. What it is, so far as I can see, is the truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical bullshit pared away." (124-125)[I'll add more to this review tomorrow; it's late and I very much need to sleep.]

If you want something to make you think about the every day life, here. read.

This is Water. Water - Now I love that metaphor. I end up addressing many things and their traits and their progresses and their declines through this unbound source of immense satiation. But how does this fit into a speech delivered to students, facing a future thats unknown and by that very virtue, intimidating?Ah well, the thoughts weaved into this beautiful message says it all. For a text that I ended up highlighting half of, I would like to take this particular insight with me, forever.

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?"What DFW wanted to get across with this little story was that the most obvious realities are often the hardest ones to talk about. To David Foster Wallace, this difficuilt, but most obvious reality

so. it gets five stars because of how terribly sad i still am. i read this online, of course, years and years ago, but i reread it in book form, just to see if anything had been added. it hasn't. just the fact of his death on the flap. i'd really rather have added material than that fact, wouldn't you? and i also would have liked this to have been delivered at my graduation (i mean, i had quincy jones, i can't complain too much, but still... despite all the good advice in this book, i am a

My basic problem with This is Water is how it's contributed to the Cult of DFW, who (don't get me wrong for a second) was a terrific writer who deserves a place in any sort of canon you can imagine. I'd still put him as my favorite writer and still put Infinite Jest as my favorite book if I was pressed, but the more I learn about him as a person, the more I realize he was in many ways a dick, and the more I realize his dickish tendencies contributed to what's so good about his fiction. That is