May 21, 2005
Written and Delivered by David Foster Wallace
(If any body feels like perspiring [cough], I'd adviseyou to go ahead, because I'm sure going to. In fact I'm gonna [mumbles whilepulling up his gown and taking out a handkerchief from his pocket].) Greetings ["parents"?]and congratulations to Kenyon's graduating class of 2005. There are these twoyoung fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming theother way, who nods at them and says "Morning, boys. How's thewater?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually oneof them looks over at the other and goes "What the hell is water?"
This is a standard requirement of US commencementspeeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story["thing"] turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventionsof the genre, but if you're worried that I plan to present myself here as thewise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be.I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the mostobvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see andtalk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude,but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banalplatitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to youon this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main requirement of speeches like thisis that I'm supposed to talk about your liberal arts education's meaning, totry to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human valueinstead of just a material payoff. So let's talk about the single mostpervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal artseducation is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is aboutquote teaching you how to think. If you're like me as a student, you've neverliked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that youneeded anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admittedto a college
this good seems like proof that you already know howto think. But I'm going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns outnot to be insulting at all, because the really significant education
in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place likethis isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice ofwhat to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to thinkabout seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think aboutfish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your skepticism about thevalue of the totally obvious.
Here's another didactic little story. There are thesetwo guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of theguys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existenceof God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. Andthe atheist says: "Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for notbelieving in God. It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole Godand prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in thatterrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and itwas fifty below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and criedout 'Oh, God, if there is a God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna dieif you don't help me.'" And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks atthe atheist all puzzled. "Well then you must believe now," he says,"After all, here you are, alive." The atheist just rolls his eyes."No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering byand showed me the way back to camp."
It's easy to run this story through kind of a standardliberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally differentthings to two different people, given those people's two different belieftemplates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal artsanalysis do we want to claim that one guy's interpretation is true and theother guy's is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talkingabout just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning,where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person's most basicorientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehowjust hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from theculture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually amatter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there's the whole matter ofarrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of thepossibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer forhelp. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certainof their own interpretations, too. They're probably even more repulsive thanatheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists' problem is exactlythe same as the story's unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness thatamounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn't even know he's lockedup.
The point here is that I think this is one part ofwhat teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a littleless arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and mycertainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to beautomatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I havelearned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness ofsomething I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediateexperience
supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centerof the universe; the realist, most vivid and important person in existence. Werarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centeredness because it'sso socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of us. It is ourdefault
setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Thinkabout it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolutecenter of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behindYOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Otherpeople's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but yourown are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry that I'm getting ready to lectureyou about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. Thisis not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my choosing to do the work ofsomehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default settingwhich is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpreteverything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their naturaldefault setting this way are often described as being "well-adjusted",which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obviousquestion is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involvesactual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably themost dangerous thing about an academic education --least in my own case --is thatit enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argumentinside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right infront of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremelydifficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by theconstant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twentyyears after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that theliberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for amuch deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning howto exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being consciousand aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how youconstruct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind ofchoice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché aboutquote the mind be
ing an excellent servant but a terrible master.
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on thesurface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bitcoincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shootthemselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is thatmost of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshitvalue of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep fromgoing through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead,unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of beinguniquely,
completely, imperially alone day in and day out. Thatmay sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let's get concrete. The plainfact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what "day inday out" really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adultAmerican life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involvesboredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here willknow all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example, let's say it's an average adultday, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar,college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the endof the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go homeand have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sackearly because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again.But then you remember there's no food at home. You haven't had time to shopthis week because of your challenging job, and so now after work
you have to get in your car and drive to thesupermarket. It's the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: verybad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when youfinally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the timeof day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping.And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporatepop and it's pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just getin and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store'sconfusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junkycart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, etcetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually youget all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-outlanes open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line isincredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take yourfrustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked ata job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of anyof us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line'sfront, and you pay for your food, and you get told to "Have a niceday" in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to takeyour creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazywheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded,bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home throughslow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn'tyet been part of you graduates' actual life routine, day after week after monthafter year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying,seemingly meaninglessroutines besides. But that is not the point. The point isthat petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing isgonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout linesgive me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how tothink and what to pay attention to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable everytime I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty thatsituations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MYfatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it's going to seem for all theworld like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in myway? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-likeand dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoyingand rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle ofthe line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially consciousliberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-daytraffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV's andHummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, forty-gallontanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religiousbumperstickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles,driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] (this is an example ofhow NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by theugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about howour children's children will despise us for wasting all the future's fuel, andprobably screwing up the climate, and
how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting weall are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on thefreeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy andautomatic that it doesn't have to be a choice. It is my natural defaultsetting. It's the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating,crowded parts of adult life when I'm operating on the automatic, unconsciousbelief that I am the center of the world, and that my immediate needs andfeelings are what should determine the world's priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totallydifferent ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, allthese vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it's not impossible that some ofthese people in SUV's have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and nowfind driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to geta huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummerthat just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child ishurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he's trying to get this kid to thehospital, and he's in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actuallyI who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider thelikelihood that everyone else in the supermarket's checkout line is just asbored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably haveharder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don't think that I'm giving you moraladvice, or that I'm saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyoneexpects you to just automatically do it. Because it's hard. It takes will andeffort, and if you are like me, some days you won't be able to do it, or youjust flat out won't want to.
But most days, if you're aware enough to give yourselfa choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed,over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybeshe's not usually like this. Maybe she's been up three straight nights holdingthe hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady isthe lowwage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped yourspouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small actof bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it's
also not impossible. It just depends what you what toconsider. If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and youare operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won'tconsider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you reallylearn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It willactually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-helltype situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same forcethat made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deepdown.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. Theonly thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're gonna tryto see it. This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning howto be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what
doesn't. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here's something else that's weird but true:in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing asatheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. Theonly choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybechoosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship -- be it JC orAllah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or someinviolable set of ethical principles -- is that pretty much anything else youworship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if
they are where you tap real meaning in life, then youwill never have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worshipyour body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And whentime and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieveyou. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It's been codified as myths,proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. Thewhole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak andafraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your ownfear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feelingstupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidiousthing about these forms of worship is not that they're evil or sinful, it'sthat they're unconscious. They are default settings.
They're the kind of worship you just gradually slipinto, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and howyou measure value without ever being fully aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage youfrom operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world ofmen and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger andfrustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessedthese forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort andpersonal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms,alone at the center of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommendit. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind thatis most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outsideworld of wanting and chieving and [unintelligible --sounds like"displayal"]. The really important kind of freedom involves attentionand awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other peopleand to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, andunderstanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the defaultsetting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, someinfinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn't sound fun andbreezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed tosound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a wholelot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think ofit whatever you wish. But please don't just dismiss it as just some finger-waggingDr. Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion ordogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, whichhas almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simpleawareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sightall around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
"This is water."
"This is water."
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay consciousand alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grandcliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime.And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.