"This is water, this is water."

http://publicnoises.blogspot.com/2009/05/david-foster-wallace-kenyon.html

by pavs • 15 years ago

41 29 15 years ago

publicnoises.blogspot.com

jdietrich3• 15 years ago

Protip: Don't take advice on how to live your life from a man who killed himself aged 46.

edash2• 15 years ago

DFW's depression was clinical and a lifelong battle.

Your statement is akin to saying "Don't take advice from a man who died of cancer at 46."

pekinb• 15 years ago

Really? There are valuable lessons in this speech. How does DFW's suicide affect his messages?

jacksonkernion4• 15 years ago

That's not fair. Judge the speech on its content. The man died because his meds stopped working.

garret• 15 years ago

Ad hominem.

tptacek4• 15 years ago

This is the dumbest thing I've read on HN in a long time. It's dumb on so many levels (the nature of thought, the actual meaning and intent of the essay, how depression works, and the circumstances of Wallace's death) that it actually functions as a kind of marvel of dumbness.

If it wasn't concurrently and needlessly mean, I'd thank you for writing it. Instead, I'm just going to remember how dumb you appeared to be.

Cushman3• 15 years ago

I hate to defend the douchebag, but I'm afraid there is a germ of truth there.

DFW is perfect towards the end, when he talks about acceptance and awareness— the thesis ("This is water") is spot on. But the way he approaches it, as a question of choosing what to think, is fundamentally, tragically wrong.

To Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy folks call that focusing on cognition rather than experience. It's the classic fallacy of beginning meditators, who believe the secret lies in choosing what to think, or in fact choosing not to think at all. It makes rational sense as a way to approach suffering; "Thinking this way is causing me to suffer. I must change my thinking so that the suffering stops."

In fact, the fundamental tenet of mindfulness is that this is impossible. Not even the most enlightened guru on this planet can not think of an elephant. You cannot choose what to think, cannot choose what to feel, cannot choose not to suffer.

Actually, that is not completely true. You can, through training over a period of time, teach yourself to feel nothing at all. We have a special word to describe these people: depressed.

The "trick" to both Buddhist mindfulness and MBCT, and the cure for depression if such a thing exists, lies in accepting that we are as powerless over our thoughts and emotions as we are over our circumstances. My mind, the "master" DFW talks about, is part of the water. If I am angry that an SUV cut me off, I must experience anger. If I'm disgusted by the fat woman in front of me in the supermarket, I must experience disgust. When I am joyful, I must experience joy, and when I suffer, I must experience suffering. There is no other option but death or madness— the quiet madness that pervades most peoples' lives as they suffer day in and day out in their frantic quest to avoid suffering.

Experience. Awareness. Acceptance. Never thought— you can't be mindful by thinking about mindfulness, it's an oxymoron. You have to just feel it.

There's something indescribably heartbreaking in hearing him come so close to finding the cure, to miss it only by a hair, knowing what happens next.

[Full disclosure: My mother is a psychiatrist who dabbles in MBCT. It cured her depression, and mine.]

jdietrich3• 15 years ago

Much of what DFW believed about the world, about himself, about the nature of reality, ran counter to his own mental wellbeing and ultimately his own survival. Of the psychotherapies with proven efficacy, all seek to inculcate a mode of thinking in stark contrast to Wallace's.

In this piece and others, Wallace encourages a mindset that appears to me to actively induce alienation in the pursuit of deeper truth. I believe that to be deeply maladaptive. A large proportion of his words in this piece are spent describing that his instinctive reaction to the world around him is one of disgust and disdain.

Rather than seeking to transmute those feelings into more neutral or positive ones, he seeks to elevate himself above what he sees as his natural perspective. Rather than sit in his car and enjoy the coolness of his A/C or the feeling of the wheel against his skin or the patterns the sunlight makes on his dash, he abstracts, he retreats into his mind and an imagined world of possibilities. He describes engaging with other people, but it's inside his head, it's intellectualised and profoundly distant. Rather than seeing the person in the SUV in front as merely another human and seeking to accept them unconditionally, he seeks a fictionalised narrative that renders them palatable to him.

He may have had some sort of underlying chemical or structural problem that caused his depression, but we have no real evidence for that, we have no real evidence that such things exist. What we do know is that patterns of cognition that he advocated run contrary to the basic tenets of the treatment for depression with the best evidence base - CBT and it's variants.

Foster favoured a world view that was 'true' over one that made him happy. He saw happiness and contentment as essentially irrelevant compared to the pursuit of truth. I believe that to be his ultimate error.

edash2• 15 years ago

I highly recommend the audio version of This is Water.

You get to hear his intonation and his interaction with the crowd...I found it much more moving than the transcription.

lobo_tuerto• 15 years ago

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5THXa_H_N8

Groxx• 15 years ago

plus: http://www.youtube-mp3.org (just found this)

lubutu• 15 years ago

Thank you for posting this. I'd not heard of David Foster Wallace, but having read this and watched an interview, I've ordered a copy of Infinite Jest. Sounds like he was a brilliant man. Thanks.

jacksonkernion4• 15 years ago

I'm a huge DFW fan. If I may make one recommendtion, do not start with Infinite Jest. It's a wonderful book, but it's not exactly a breezy read. It's totally doable, and it's not obscure, like, say, Joyce's Ulysses. But it is a long slog.

Instead, I recommend reading some if his short pieces first. It'll allow you to better appreciate Infinite Jest, and the short pieces are a little more immediately gratifying. My personal favorites are 'Good Old Neon' from gis short story collection, Oblivion, and 'A Supposedely Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again' from an essay collection of the same name.

jacksonkernion4• 15 years ago

Also, check out this great interview with Charlie Rose:

http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/5639

tptacek4• 15 years ago

Or, don't be afraid of IJ, but set your expectations properly; as a coherent narrative, it's only going to start coming together in the final third of the book. Until then, read it as a series of intimate essays written from a parallel dimension.

Don't skip the footnotes. They aren't intended to be optional.

euroclydon2• 15 years ago

DFW's short stories are great. But I found one huge hole in Infinite Jest: It was completely lacking hope. I'll take a long slog of a read any day if I'm not just going to walk away depressed. Gulag Archipelago was worth the read because Solzhenitsyn kept reminding the reader there was hope in humanity. DFW, well, not so much.

hv23• 15 years ago

One of my favorite pieces by him-- http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20fede...

DanielBMarkham• 15 years ago

This is the best essay I've read all week. Thank you so much for sharing it. His point about the great truths in life sounding like banal platitudes was dead on. It's the type of thing that's easy to say, but hard to convey. He did a great job of it. For instance, his point about seeming to be the center of the universe reminded me of Johnny Cash's great re-make song "Hurt" where he says "You are still out there. I am still right here." Totally banal and simplistic, but also very true and difficult to grasp. [video link] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SmVAWKfJ4Go

ldd-• 15 years ago

I've read this piece tons of times and whenever it finds me (as now), I never pass up an opportunity to read it again.

I can't tell you how many people I've sent this to, or shared the sentiment with, over the years.

mathattack• 15 years ago

I wish I had something profound to say other than, "Thanks for posting."

"This is water, this is water."

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