THE GRAD SPEECH WITH 'CAPITAL-T TRUTH'
KENYON COLLEGE, MAY 21, 2005 — Two hours before graduation, two seniors find David Foster Wallace in the English office. The room is strewn with papers and paper cups holding the author’s tobacco spittle. Wallace, blonde hair spilling from his white bandana, asks which student had invited him here.
Meredith Farmer, a fan since high school, confesses.
“Well fuck you,” Wallace says with a smile. “I’m not old enough for this!” Then he jokes with the students before excusing himself. He has to cut another five minutes from his speech.
Graduation speeches come and go, mostly forgotten. Speakers in 2005 included Steve Jobs, Arnold Palmer, and a rising politician named Barack Obama. But twenty years after David Foster Wallace spoke to 400 graduates at a small college in Ohio, “This is Water” has spread around the world.
“Greetings parents, and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. 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?’”
When Meredith Farmer suggested inviting Wallace, he was known for humorous, footnoted essays and his enormous post-modern novel Infinite Jest. But only one other student on Farmer’s committee had heard of him.
The committee leaned towards Hillary Clinton or John Glenn. Then Farmer circulated Wallace’s quotes on education. He was teaching at a liberal arts college in California, she said. He’d be perfect.
Wallace balked at the invitation. He was too young, too nervous before crowds. He did not commit until a few months before what he was still calling, on graduation morning, “the big scary ceremony.”
Dripping sweat, wiping his forehead, Wallace continued.
“This is a standard requirement of U.S. commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. . . So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about ’teaching you how to think’.”
Wallace urged students “to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism.” The real value of education, he “submitted,” was not learning how to think but “the choice of what to think about. . . Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
In the twenty years since his own graduation, Wallace had battled depression and addiction. Now 43, recently married, he seemed a survivor of the Info Age. No one knows how many graduates had heard of him, but they listened.
“I had never seen people on the edges of their seats at a commencement address," Meredith Farmer recalled.
Then Wallace turned to “the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education. . . 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. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what ‘day in day out’ really means.”
Getting concrete, Wallace sketched an everyday nightmare. Rush hour traffic. A stop at a grocery store “hideously lit and infused with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop.” Packed aisles. Long checkout lines.
Now came the choice. The “default mode” was resentment, condescension — “the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the center of the world.” But what if. . .
What if you consider “the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.” And what if you “choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. . .” What if, what if.
“Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider.”
Freedom, Wallace went on, is freedom to choose empathy over ego. And truth, “capital-T truth. . . is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water. This is water.’”
After a standing ovation, Wallace and the graduates returned to the “day in, day out.” For Wallace, that meant struggling to finish a novel and battling his demons.
But “This is Water” seeped into the culture. Wallace had not given anyone a copy, but a student recorded the speech. By summer, a full transcription was circulating on Facebook and e-mail. And when Wallace lost his battle and took his own life in 2008, the speech was reprinted everywhere from the Wall Street Journal to Oprah’s ‘O.’
Today, “This is Water” is all over Youtube, with millions of hits. The speech has been translated into several languages. The book version makes a great gift for graduates but everyone should listen.
“The address was obviously the work of a wise and very kind man,” the New York Times noted. “At the edges, though, there was something else — the faint but unmistakable sense that Wallace had passed through considerable darkness, some of which still clung to him, but here he was, today, having beaten it, having made it through.”
Let the last words be DFW’s. That choice? That capital-T truth? “It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really is the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.”
