This is the commencement address he gave to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005.
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(If anybody feels
like perspiring [cough], I'd advise you to go ahead, because I'm sure going to.
In fact I'm gonna [mumbles while pulling 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 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?"
This is a standard
requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little
parable-ish stories. The story ["thing"] turns out to be one of the
better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you're worried that I
plan to present myself here as the wise, 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 most obvious, important realities are often
the ones that are hardest to see and talk 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, banal platitudes can have a life or death
importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
Of course the main
requirement of speeches like this is that I'm supposed to talk about your
liberal arts education's meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are
about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. 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". If
you're like me as a student, you've never liked hearing this, and you tend to
feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to
think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems
like proof that you already know how to think. But I'm going to posit to you
that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the
really significant education in thinking that we're supposed to get in a place
like this isn't really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice
of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think
about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I'd ask you to think about
fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the
value of the totally obvious.
Here's another
didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in
the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an
atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special
intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says:
"Look, it's not like I don't have actual reasons for not believing in God.
It's not like I haven't ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing.
Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and
I was totally lost and I couldn't see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I
tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out 'Oh, God, if there is a
God, I'm lost in this blizzard, and I'm gonna die if you don't help me.'" And
now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the 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 a
couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to
camp."
It's easy to run
this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same
experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given
those people's two different belief templates and two different ways of
constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity
of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one
guy's interpretation is true and the other guy's is false or bad. Which is fine,
except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates
and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if
a person's most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his
experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or
automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct
meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus,
there's the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally
certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had
anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious
people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They're
probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But
religious dogmatists' problem is exactly the same as the story's unbeliever:
blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total
that the prisoner doesn't even know he's locked up.
The point here is
that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really
supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little
critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage
of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out,
totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you
graduates will, too.
Here is just one
example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of:
everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the
absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person
in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness
because it's so socially repulsive. But it's pretty much the same for all of
us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about
it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre
of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to
the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people's
thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are
so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don't worry
that I'm getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or
all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It's a matter of my
choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural,
hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered
and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can
adjust their natural default 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 obvious question is how much of this work
of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This
question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic
education--least in my own case--is that it enables my tendency to
over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head,
instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me,
paying attention to what is going on inside me.
DAVID FOSTER
WALLACE in his own words As I'm sure you guys know by now, it is extremely
difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the
constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty
years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the
liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a
much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how
to exercise some control over how and what you think. It 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 will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about
"the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master".
This, like many
clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and
terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit
suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot
the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually
dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that
this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is
supposed to be about: 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. There happen to be whole,
large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement
speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The
parents and older folks here will know all too well what I'm talking about.
By way of example,
let's say it's an average adult day, 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 end of the day you're tired and somewhat stressed and all
you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and
then hit the sack early 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 shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work
you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It's the end of the
work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes
way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is
very crowded, because of course it's the time of 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 corporate pop and it's
pretty much the last place you want to be but you can't just get in and quickly
out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store's confusing aisles to
find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all
these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting
stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your
supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren't enough check-out lanes
open even though it's the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is
incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can't take your
frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at
a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any
of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you
finally get to the checkout line's front, and you pay for your food, and you
get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice that is the absolute voice
of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries
in your cart with the one crazy wheel 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 through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic,
et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has
done this, of course. But it hasn't yet been part of you graduates' actual life
routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be.
And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But
that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is
exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams
and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I
don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention
to, I'm gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my
natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really
all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get
home, and it's going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in
my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most
of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem
in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking
loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and
personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if
I'm in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can
spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge,
stupid, lane-blocking SUV's and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their
wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the
patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most
disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud
applause] (this is an example of how NOT to think, though) most disgustingly selfish
vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And
I can think about how our children's children will despise us for wasting all
the future's fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and
stupid and selfish and disgusting we all 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 the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except
thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn't have to be
a choice. It is my natural default setting. It's 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 centre of the world,
and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world's
priorities.
The thing is that,
of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of
situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way,
it's not impossible that some of these people in SUV's have been in horrible
auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their
therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel
safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being
driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him,
and he's trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he's in a bigger, more
legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to
force myself to 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.
Again, please
don't think that I'm giving you moral advice, or that I'm saying you are
supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do
it. Because it's hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some
days you won't be able to do it, or you just flat out won't want to.
But most days, if
you're aware enough to give yourself a 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. 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. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle
department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific,
infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness.
Of course, none of this is likely, but it's also not impossible. It just
depends what you want to consider. If you're automatically sure that you know
what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like
me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable.
But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are
other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded,
hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on
fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical
oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that
mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that's capital-T True is
that you get to decide how you're gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is
the freedom of a real education, of learning how to 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 as atheism. There is no such thing as not
worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And
the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type
thing to worship--be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess,
or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles--is that
pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money
and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never
have enough, never feel you have enough. It's the truth. Worship your body and
beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age
start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. 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. The whole trick
is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you
will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over
others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as
smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being
found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that
they're evil or sinful, it's that they're unconscious. They are default
settings.
They're the kind
of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more
selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully
aware that that's what you're doing.
And the so-called
real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings,
because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along
in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self.
Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded
extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be
lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation.
This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all
different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not
hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and
achieving.... The really important kind of freedom involves attention and
awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and
to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real
freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The
alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant
gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this
stuff probably doesn't sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a
commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is
the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You
are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don't just
dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is
really about morality or religion or dogma 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, 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."
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.
I wish you way
more than luck.
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