This is water

About the book

This is Water is the text of a commencement address David Foster Wallace gave at Kenyon College, published later as a book. Its subject is the conduct of life, framed through humanistic education and ethics. The address treats a liberal arts education as practice in choosing what to notice and how to interpret the ordinary scenes of adult life, with facts a secondary matter.

Wallace builds the talk around the daily grind: traffic, checkout lines, crowded stores, the sense that other people are in the way. From these plain examples he draws a case for deliberate attention, for recognizing that one's default perspective is a perspective and not the whole truth. The book keeps the spoken cadence of an address, with short illustrative scenes and a direct address to the graduating audience.

The volume is brief, closer to a pamphlet than a treatise. It carries the speech's structure and tone without adding a scholarly apparatus, so it reads as a compact argument about awareness rather than a systematic philosophy.

How to read it

Read it in one sitting, then return to the passages about the supermarket and the traffic jam. The examples do the argumentative work, and their ordinariness is the point. Watch how Wallace moves from a mundane irritation to a claim about freedom and choice.

The prose is conversational and repetitive by design, since it was written to be heard. Some readers find the second-person address bracing; others find the repetition heavy on the page. Treat the address as a talk transcribed, and its rhythms make more sense aloud.

Who it suits

Readers who want a short, plain-spoken piece on attention, habit and everyday irritation will find a useful prompt here. Graduates, teachers and anyone who liked Wallace's essays but wants something far shorter will get the clearest version of his thinking about awareness. It suits readers who prefer concrete scenes to abstract argument.

Reading considerations

This is a commencement address, not a full philosophical work, and it does not develop a sustained theory or answer objections at length. The book edition presents the speech as delivered; later editions and translations may vary in presentation, so check which printing you have. Readers seeking Wallace's fiction or his longer essays should look elsewhere.