This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
Where to buy This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life books online?
- ISBN13: 9780316068222
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement take up agreed in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace’s electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.
Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.
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This book contains 1 sentence per page. 139 pages, and 139 sentences. It is a gorgeous speech, but do not buy this unless you are one of persons people who likes DFW so much that you must have every word he’s ever published, posthumously or otherwise.
The entirety of this speech can be read here:
[..]
I wish there was more.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
One sentence per page = one star rating. In the future, publishers should try increasing the number of sentences on each page if they want to earn a better review. What a ridiculous “book”.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
DFW’s Kenyon take up comes in at about 3800 words, the whole thing a simple Google away. How they stretched so few words over 144 pages gives intermission and really discredits the whole thought of a “book.” As much as I like his work, this would make a excellent pamphlet, but not a $14.99 hardcover. I’d bet that DFW would reflect this was a blatant rip-off.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
Don’t waste your money on this awesome speech — it’s free on the web. Wallace would have wanted you to give the money to charity anyway, as a replacement for of throwing it at the bottom line publisher.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
This speech is a generous gift delivered by a deeply troubled and pained person of unusual intelligence. And while this is an take up to graduates, it seems to me that he speaks, in a way, to try to convince himself too. He says,
“…there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the fantastic outside world of winning and achieving and showing. The really vital kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about additional people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in heap petty small unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being taught how to reflect.”
He’s talking about being, and the freedom to like. And to like is to rebel against periods of depression and miserable listlessness and repetition and pain and ridiculousness, to care about others and to sacrifice. It’s a Sisyphean being. I subscribe to that. The struggle itself is enough to fill a man’s heart. I reflect Camus said that.
Reader’s Rating: 4 / 5