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A review by sl_ut
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace
5.0
Here's the deal. I read this casually when I was maybe 15ish and somehow managed to not even respect it one bit. I saw that this speech was published in book form and decided to revisit it as I couldn't even recall what it was about.
Seeing as it is a speech i read the whole "Book" in my bed in the barn in about 15 minutes
And then I kinda cried a little.
I'm not really sure why, maybe cause I wish I could go back in time and hit 15 year old me upside of the head and yelled at her for not keeping this around. Maybe cause it was funny and so spot on. Or maybe because I remembered about Wallace's death and then I had to mourn this fact way too late.
Probably all of the above
This Paragraph:
“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 or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
Or this one:
“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit 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.”
David Foster Wallace. You got me.
Seeing as it is a speech i read the whole "Book" in my bed in the barn in about 15 minutes
And then I kinda cried a little.
I'm not really sure why, maybe cause I wish I could go back in time and hit 15 year old me upside of the head and yelled at her for not keeping this around. Maybe cause it was funny and so spot on. Or maybe because I remembered about Wallace's death and then I had to mourn this fact way too late.
Probably all of the above
This Paragraph:
“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 or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”
Or this one:
“And I submit that this is what the real, no-shit 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.”
David Foster Wallace. You got me.