On David Foster Wallace's Talk, 'Like Water'

August 16, 2024

Many of you will have read or listened to David Foster Wallace’s (DFW) celebrated commencement address at Kenyon College. I believe this speech is correctly viewed as the best defence of the liberal arts in our time. And it poses us with a challenge that has no obvious solution.

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DFW begins with a parable:

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?”

DFW’s point is that things that are fundamental but pervasive—like water for a fish—are almost impossible to see. Water determines everything about the life of a fish, but the fish is clueless.

So, what is “like water” for us? DFW argues that just as fish are unacquainted with water, we can’t see that ‘adult’ life is often tawdry and impoverished. He asks us to imagine that we are shopping for dinner at the end of a workday.

[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.

The point is not that you and I are misanthropes, although many of us are. Instead, like the fish unaware that he lives in water, we can’t see that we routinely treat others as if they were mindless and shallow.

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So, how do we learn that we, like our neighbours, live in water? That others suffer like we do? DFW argues that a liberal arts education can give you the ability to control what you value.

[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.

Each of us is intimately familiar with how we suffer. What we are blind to—what is “like water” for the fish—is the suffering of others.

DFW believes that the liberal arts allow us to reflect on our values and what we worship. We can discern what matters and question our self-centred views. We can learn to see 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.

DFW is correct. We need better values; the liberal arts may help us cultivate them. We must learn to love our neighbours as ourselves.

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Except: how does a fish learn that he lives in water? The trouble isn’t that humans are selfish and ungenerous, although we are. The problem is that we cannot sense wetness. There is no hill to stand on from which we can see the ocean.

[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.

What we need is a different kind of knowing. We must find a way to see things as other sentient beings see them, where we are not at the centre.

We must somehow see the world the way God sees it: from all possible points of view and points in time. We must become graced with access to the sentience of all creation: how your spouse experiences your love, how the trees experience the sun on their leaves, and how fish experience the taste, warmth, and vibration of water.

I have no idea how this can happen or what it would be like. It will require a transformed creation in which all sentient beings share God’s vision, on earth as it is in heaven.