Sunday Pages: "This Is Water"

A commencement speech by David Foster Wallace

Dear Reader,

This week, my son graduated from high school. This is our second kid with a diploma, but the first graduation ceremony we’ve attended, our oldest having skipped the festivities last year. Commencement, they call this celebration of completion—as in, “Today is the commencement of the rest of your life.”

We packed into the basketball court at the college—thunderstorms moved us indoors—and applauded as 190 kids wearing burgundy robes and big smiles strode across the stage to collect their coveted diplomas.

I don’t like that graduation is essentially one last high school popularity contest, as some kids get bigger rounds of applause than others (heck, some kids got airhorns, even inside!). But I love everything else about the ceremony: “Pomp and Circumstance,” administrators in Hogwarts cosplay, tassels changing sides, mortarboards in the air. There is enough down time that one’s mind drifts. I found myself reflecting on my own high school experience, and the passage of time, and, yes, the parental accomplishment of sending off two kids to college. Three or four times I was overcome with a sudden jolt of emotion so powerful, it was all I could do to stop myself from weeping uncontrollably.

The speeches—by the salutatorian, the valedictorian, and two teachers the class chose to give the commencement addresses—were quite good. The advice is almost always the same: follow your heart, be good to other people, don’t forget where you came from, get back up when you fall down (this last, a piece of wisdom so timeless that our elderly president followed it the next night). One of the speakers quoted Einstein: “Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.”

In Steve Jobs’ famous commencement speech at Stanford in 2005, he tells a story about how one chance occurrence informed how he approached the aesthetics of Apple computers—and, thus, made him so successful. He had dropped out of college, was couch-surfing, living on money made by recycling bottles. He recalled:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But 10 years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backward 10 years later.

I think about that a lot. Not calligraphy, but how, as a high school senior, from a Catholic family in an affluent North Jersey suburb where Tucker Carlson had briefly lived, and as a straight white guy graduating just when diversity was becoming a priority in admissions offices and HR departments, I could have easily wound up a different kind of person. Almost everyone I knew outside of school was a Republican. My uncle and my paternal grandfather were both antitax libertarian types. In a debate exercise in history class 1988, I happily argued in favor of George Bush, mercilessly mocking Michael Dukakis.

When it came time to apply to college in the fall of 1990, I saw on almost every application a preference for students who were not white, who were not men: who were not like me. How easy it would have been to have taken that noble attempt by colleges and universities to make student bodies more diverse as a personal attack! But I didn’t. Somehow, I was able to understand the bigger picture.

And it’s hard, especially as a young person, to subsume your own self-interest for a greater good. I understand, but do not sympathize with, the sense of grievance harbored by middle-aged white men, who look around at today’s culture and feel acutely a sense of loss.

Also—and this is more astonishing to me in retrospect—I knew at age 18 that if I went to a “liberal” college, I would recoil from…well, basically the 1991 equivalent of the sort of stuff the Project 2025 types object to now. If I opted for Oberlin or Wesleyan or Bard, I’d wind up even more conservative than I already was. And I knew, intuitively, somehow, that I did not want that, that that was not who I wanted to be. Part of the reason I went to Georgetown, a more buttoned-up school run by Jesuits, is because I understood that being around more conservative students would knock me back in the other direction. And so it did.

My girlfriend at the time, who I loved dearly, was the child of college administrators. She was much more comfortable in the liberal (a word that in high school I used with scorn) campus milieu. When she went to school—at Stanford, the same place Jobs would give his speech ten years after we graduated—she engaged with the prevailing ideas about feminism, and began to see me, and my old-timey views on love and marriage, as the very embodiment of the patriarchy. And she was not wrong!

It is not pleasant to be put through the wringer like that, but I realized, as she communicated what she had learned, that most of my views of the world were assumptions, inherited from my family and friends without much thought. We broke up, of course, and when we did, in my wallowing, I scrapped everything I thought I knew, and rebuilt my ideological self from scratch. I asked myself: What did I really think? What was my own opinion, and what was just an assumption that meant nothing to me? My entire belief system needed to be re-examined.

What I concluded—somewhat begrudgingly, and too late to repair the relationship—was that she had been right about almost everything. Outside of my family, there is no single human who had greater influence on me than she did, and I am forever grateful for this education. And if her family had not moved to town sophomore year, just as if Jobs had not taken the calligraphy class at Reed College, I would be a different person today.

Indeed, there is some alternate reality version of myself who is a staunch Republican—a Greg Olear who is writing columns extolling Trump’s debate performance, and making appearances on Ben Shapiro, and prattling on about red pills (and almost certainly has more money in the bank). That I did not become that person is a minor miracle, and required a self-awareness I did not realize I possessed, as well as no small amount of dumb luck. Understand: this isn’t me bragging that I made the right choices. This is me being pleasantly astonished that I did.

(“And most important,” Jobs said, “have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.”)

And that brings us to one of the best commencement speeches on record: David Foster Wallace’s address to the graduates of Kenyon College, also in 2005—three years before he took his own life. Wallace is best known for writing Infinite Jest, an extremely long book about tennis and weed, two things that interest me not in the slightest. In his speech, called “This Is Water,” which I encourage you to read in full, he deconstructs the commencement speech form, and in so doing, gets to the heart of what the purpose of higher education really is.

“The point here,” he says, “is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. 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.”

Reading that over yesterday is what called to mind my own high school experience, struggling with various ideas about politics and gender roles and so on, and how, to learn anything, we have to turn off what he calls our “default mode,” in which we think always of ourselves as the center of the universe.

Wallace speaks of going to a crowded supermarket after work, and how hellish that can be, and how his natural “default” response is to loathe everyone he sees, because those people are obstacles in his path. “But,” he says,

if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.

Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.

This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.

Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: 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–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.

They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.

And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. 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.

That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.

This is also, I submit, the difference between MAGA and the rest of us. MAGA are incapable of turning off the default setting. They are automatically certain. They worship Trump, and Trumpism—which is to say, grievance and cruelty and white nationalism and bullying—and they abide by the First Commandment, which they have required to be displayed in schools in Louisiana: You shall have no other gods before me. They refuse to examine their assumptions (which, come to think, is likely one of the reasons for their contempt of science). And that is what makes them impossible to contend with.

The value of education, Wallace says, “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…”

In 2005, there were not yet smartphones, social media apps, virtual lives lived online. It is harder now than ever to—to use a cliché Wallace would abhor but also use—live in the moment. And that makes doing so that much more important.

“No one wants to die,” Jobs said. “Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new.”

One day Trump will die, just as Jobs died, just as Wallace died. The country will evolve and learn from this MAGA madness. Whether it takes a few months, a few years, or the rest of our lifetimes, we will move forward.

Commencement starts now.

---

ICYMI

Slate senior editor and LADY JUSTICE author Dahlia Lithwick was our guest on The Five 8: