I have read/watched/listened to this speech so many times. When I find myself falling into a “I am the center of the universe, everyone else is stupid.” frame of mind, I repeat to myself: “This is water. This is water.” I remind myself to be aware; to be “conscious…enough to choose what [I] pay attention to and to choose how [I] construct meaning from experience.” ” To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded.” I think about how I want to live my life and what I choose to give meaning to and try to remember that 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.” All of these things, and more, are encapsulated in these three words that I whisper: “This is water. This is water.”
This speech also contains the best, most lucid argument I have ever heard for believing in God: “…in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.” (This part is not in the excerpted video version, but you can read it in the full transcript.) I am still not fully convinced, but if anything is going to tip the scales, I think this is it, because it’s true that we all believe in something and I would rather consciously choose what I believe in and not fall into belief through habit and routine.
I recently read a biography of David Foster Wallace. Of course I knew how it was going to end. Yet somehow I was still shocked when the inescapable end arrived. And I was unspeakably sad. I have purposely not read all his works so that I can save some for later, so that there can be a bit more DFW in my future.