What's lit's critical analysis and response to DFW's famous 'This is Water' commencement speech at Kenyon College?
[Full text found here: http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf]
This speech, in my view, sums up DFW's zeitgeist in one compact twenty minute session. You see the mind at work, the despair, and the hope peeking out through the cracks. It's a shame the despair triumphed in the end, but so it goes.
It's basically just mindfulness. Pretty old hat advice IMO.
>>7865538
Sure, the rule taken from this speech can be condensed to mindfulness. As a whole though, I see 'This is Water' as a microcosm of DFW.
>>7865553
could be expanded into mindfulness... haven't actually read much DFW desu senpai
It's like the Hallmark fucking greeting card version of DFW. I like some of his stuff but this speech is the dumbest, tritest, bullshit he ever did. I hope he got paid well.
>>7865538
Anon is right! old, basic content in new words for a new generation... Not that mindblowing in my opinion
>>7865574
>>7865575
Does the possibility that some philosophical message might be a platitude take away from the benefits of spreading it to a wide audience? I understand where you're coming from in that it's not particularly groundbreaking, but DFW is hyper-aware of this, see the first few sentences of the speech.
Further, the blend of what I'll call the 'Grocery Hell,' coupled with the triumphant conclusion is pure DFW.
"The really important kind of
freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able
truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in
myriad petty, unsexy ways every day...The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to
do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness;
awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all
around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and
over: 'This is water.'"
It's a balancing of the despair of our reality with the ideal of how we should live. The banal frustration and egocentric misery contrasted against the hope that we can transcend our limitations and 'be here now,' to quote Richard Alpert.
So yeah, I think there's both artistic value and spiritual value to this speech, even if it's well-trodden ground.
Current Kenyonite reporting.
I first heard this speech delivered as a eulogy at my great-aunt's funeral. At the time, I thought it was pretty enlightening, definitely not his strongest work though.
How fucking delusional and self obsessed was this asshole? He's saying the benefit of a liberal arts education is the ability to empathize? What a dick. Everybody isn't a self centered asshole like you, man.
Nice try, Dave.
I like it, and have listened to it twice.
It's not a masterpiece or anything, but I think it manages to put the message forward pretty well and in a way that can connect with people. Like when he's talking about the scenarios in the grocery store or traffic. Those are very easily relatable and allows people to put themselves in that position, or possibly look back on the examples when they are in those positions, and view how they think about those situation and possibly better themselves. So, bretty good.
I don't know why you would want to read it when you can listen to the actual speech on youtube.
>a 22 minute impromptu speech about how he had thought, given the design of the bottle, that the drink the college had given him to consume during his speech might have been some sort of energy drink, and but so in fact it was just water
Jesus Christ, DFW.
It's not anywhere as good as the parts in IJ I know he was thinking about when he wrote it
>>7865515
That's a fish, not water.
Why not just read the bible? I would capital T truant out of that speech.
>>7867681
>Why not just read the bible?
But, you could say that about a lot of things.
>>7867681
This guy. If all you got out of DFW's speech was a morality lesson, you didn't listen properly.
no discernable talent
>>7865515
>This speech, in my view, sums up DFW's zeitgeist
>zeitgeist
l m a o
>most [...] suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
Was DFW dead when he gave this speech?
Terribly bane and salad.
He's talking about ideology, isn't he?
>>7867299
>http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005.pdf
I'm listening to it now... God his voice is unenjoyable to listen to.
>>7869677
Wonder what he was like in class
>>7865610
I thought it was pretty transparent that he was just intellectualizing his own problems.
>And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit 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.
Just how small-minded can you possibly get? How deeply in the grip of despair do you have to be to reduce the value of the entire Western canon (or whatever they teach in liberal arts schools) to not feeling depressed by a depressing society?
>>7865515
The further DFW got away from his po-pomo roots -- which he despised but neurotically indulged anyway -- the worse his writing in general got. This Is Water is the nadir of his career. It really has very little to do with the rest of his oeuvre, besides Pale King. Working on that book, trying to find something New to say after IJ, got him into this mindfulness hokum which is only microcosmic w/r/t DFW in that it is so much smaller than him generally.
