This Is Water and Religious Self-Deception Kevin Timpe in The
This is Water and Religious Self-Deception Kevin Timpe OF WATER AND ESKIMOS In the spring of 2005, David Foster Wallace offered the commencement speech at Kenyon College, which was soon widely reproduced across the internet.1 It contains a forceful warning against intellectual arrogance and about the need to “exercise control over how and what you think” (53, emphasis original). Wallace began his speech with the following 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?” This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre[,] … but if you‟re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don‟t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point 1 After his death in 2008, this speech was published as This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life (New York: Little, Brown, and Company, 2009). All subsequent references to “This is Water” will be made parenthetically and will refer to this printing. of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.
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