25 June 2013

This is Water

Every now and then, when the "commencement-speechs-season!" is open, I like to watch one or another. So far, Steve Jobs at Standford in 2005 was my favorite one. Well, that was until last sunday, when a special friend of mine recommended me "This is Water" speech, from David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College, 2005.

I can't put on words how much this touched me. (My friend didn't recommended me this for nothing...) As, for the first time in life, I've been through a long period of changes...
I've no intent to add my opinion whatsoever to this speech, except a personal one that is I really don't get why the public laugh so much while he was speaking. It's not a conventional commencent speech at all and the content can be letal.
Also, this was hard to hear as David commited suicide 3 years later:

(...) This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.

There's a moment when you start to become a little unconfortable and start to shiver and you can't stop.

"This is Water" by David Foster Wallace 

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?"


P.S. I think it comes along with this.

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