David Foster Wallace, American Novelist, Storyteller, And Inspiration

Each year, thousands of hopeful graduates count down the seconds until they receive their diplomas. Ubiquitous and customary, graduation commencement speeches are the last rhetorical stop on the road to adulthood. Delivered to the 2005 graduating class of Kenyon College in May of that year, renowned American writer and professor of English and creative writing, David Foster Wallace, is responsible for what has been called the greatest commencement speech of all time: “This is Water.” It has been featured in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 and in a book of the same name in 2009.

David Foster Wallace, Circa 1993

Wallace argues that compassion, empathy, and awareness for ourselves and others–the very backbone and purpose of a liberal arts education–must inform our responses to daily life. Only those qualities can counter our instinctive responses to life’s countless and often routinized irritations. These daily frustrations can sully our perceptions and actions and rob us of the compassion needed to be just and kind with others. Without them, we will default to our own natural narcissism and selfish tendencies. These tendencies hinder our ability to choose how we perceive others, interpret life, and act. The true freedom of education, Wallace asserts, is the ability to be well-adjusted, conscious, sympathetic, and compassionate.

The ability to choose compassion results in people who are “well-adjusted.” Well-adjusted people are not born or created by accident, but rather created through conscious choice and action. Regularly exercising control over how and what you think has a real effect on the way you act, not only toward yourself, but others. The inability to make this kind of choice as an adult, Wallace contends, will be to our own individual and collective detriment.

While his words were meant as a bit of parting food for thought for recent college graduates, they undoubtedly have value for everyone who reads them. Enlightening and instructive, his words remain as timeless as they are universally important.