This is Water
David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College is my favorite piece of oration. In college I printed it out once or twice, even going so far as to tape it above my desk; but then I moved rooms and, really, who can keep track of a piece of paper? So now every time I want to re-read the speech (every couple months, on average) I find my way back to the same transcription page at marginalia.org. Spare and static, unfussy and largely unedited, that page is one of the few corners of the Web that has come to feel like home.
In 2006, when I was tasked with writing a commencement speech of my own, I tried to read widely in the genre, but kept coming back to DFW. I reread his speech so much that I’m afraid what I came up with was a pretty direct rip-off, albeit more jokey and less smart. DFW’s is not the best-written university speech in history (Emerson’s might be). It is not the funniest (Conan’s might be), nor the most poignant/inspirational (I’m sure there are any number of paraplegic mountain climbers vying for that distinction). DFW’s speech starts not with a bang but with a whimper and, frankly, it doesn’t really get going until the middle. Still, DFW accomplishes in that speech what he so often struggled to do in his longer works: he says one true thing, simply and fully, and then gets the hell off the stage.
When I read that the speech would be published posthumously, I wasn’t sure how to react. On the one hand, it’s always a happy occasion when one of your favorite pieces of writing gains new recognition. On the other hand, turning a ten-minute speech into a book seemed a sycophantic (not to mention opportunistic) response to DFW’s death. It all felt like The Last Lecture – a bit too packaged, too ready for prime time. And it is far from clear that this is what DFW would have wanted. He was manifestly not trying to write a crowd-pleaser. Like Adlai Stevenson’s campaign-losing infomercials or Obama’s First Inaugural Address, DFW’s speech stubbornly deprives its audience of the rhetorical red meat they want and, instead, tells them what they Need to Hear. The Wall Street Journal version does not record audience reactions to the speech (nor, likely, will the book version). But the trusty Marginalia transcript includes a fantastically revealing moment wherein we find that the crowd at Kenyon was only moved to spontaneous applause once while listening to the speech — and that applause was exactly the wrong reaction to what DFW was saying at that particular moment, and that he chided them for it.
Last week I read D. T. Max’s wonderful, heartbreaking piece on DFW, and learned that Little, Brown is also planning to publish DFW’s unfinished novel. “The novel,” Max writes, “continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness.” Here, again, I didn’t know what to think. As a DFW fan with a bit of a “preoccupation with mindfulness” myself, I can’t wait to read the book. But I am worried that it won’t work. I suspect it will be one of those books that absolutely transports about 15% of its readers, and leaves the rest cold. I hope I am wrong, or, if not, that I am among the minority. In any case, DFW certainly cut his work out for himself. To find transcendence in the numbing tedium of I.R.S. work might well prove an impossible task, even if that is precisely the point.
But no matter. What’s more important is that the major writer of our generation was interested in mindfulness at all. DFW could have frittered away his monstrous talents on mere belletrism or intellectual onanism. Many famous writers have. Lucky for us, he concerned himself with How to Live.
A big question underlying the Kenyon speech, and much of Wallace’s prose, is: what can writing do? One could tackle that question abstractly, globally, with reference to the ontology of fictional worlds or the broad sweep of civilizations. But for someone like DFW — whose prodigious math and logic chops rivaled his verbal virtuosity; whose seminal nonfiction and technical writing arguably surpassed his mammoth achievements in fiction; who strove to live well, and fully, despite a crippling (and ultimately fatal) case of depression — I suspect the question was deeply personal.
