DFW’s famous commencement speech has been turned into a short film.
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If you have never read or listened to any of the late David Foster Wallace’s writing, this is a great place to start.
It’s only nine minutes long and it’s one of those things that I include in my (not written down) life manifesto.
“This is Water” is a brilliant speech about life after college, the tedium of adulthood, and how we are supposed to handle it even though we are all outrageously stressed and annoyed sometimes.
This speech changed my life and now it can change yours in beautiful short film form.
[Via: THIS IS WATER – By David Foster Wallace from The Glossary on Vimeo]
This just changed the course of my day and maybe even, just a little bit, the course of my life. Thank you so much for sharing this.
I absolutely loved this when I first heard it (and I still do). It’s freaking awesome and a great call for empathy. Of course, the other message I took away form it was that it’s kind of messed up our society’s daily tedium is also so impersonal. Daily routine and tedious grind is perhaps inevitable…but the lack of facilitating connection to others is all socio-cultural.
Oo also, the whole speech is awesome and totally worth a read: http://web.archive.org/web/20080213082423/http://www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html