Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience.

“No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.” “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes.

Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. 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. This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. 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?” 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. “Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. Here are the links to the original audio followed by the entire speech.

Wallace hits on our need to manage rather than remove our core hard-wired human instincts. David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, is a timeless trove of wisdom - right up there with Hunter Thompson on finding your purpose and living a meaningful life. The speech was made into a thin book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life.

Setting defaults on fishbowl