author david foster wallace died last weekend, an apparent suicide. he was many, many people’s favorite living writer. his stories and essays and novels may be to your taste–his work provoked strong, definite reactions from readers, nearly without fail–but either way, he was an enormous intellectual force for good. i once found myself feeling very personally motivated while a Wallace essay about language and grammar.  at the commencement address he gave at Kenyon College in 2005, he opens with a little ditty. here’s how the transcript starts:  

  

(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 bulls**tty conventio ns 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. 

you can find the transcript of the whole thing here; on a couple of not-unrecent occasions when i’ve been pretty down on myself, i’ve pulled up this speech and popped it in my mouth like a lozenge, something to soothe my itchy perspective, and also like a bracing shot of absinthe, to snap my eyes open and remind me i’m awake. part of what’s remarkable about this speech is how (i, at least, think) it’s terrifically personally affecting, and at the same time it builds a broader case for the immense value of higher education.

this is from near the end:   

  

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.”