About the author:
David Foster Wallace was one of the most influential and innovative American writers. His famous talk delivered to the graduating class of 2005 at Kenyon college in Ohio, US has been listed as the topmost commencement speech in history by Time Magazine. Unfortunately, this fame didn’t reach him while he was alive. After struggling through years of depression, alcoholism and drug addiction, he committed suicide at a relatively young age of 46. Four years after his death, this book was published as an exact replica of the mentioned speech. Little did he know that the message delivered in a small room will reach billions of people later.
How this book is arranged?
Extremely quick read, the whole book is just one chapter.
My Rating:
4/5
Summary:
The book starts with a short story: 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. 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?’
Context of this fish story is that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. He further argues that the real value of education is in paying attention to the right things and reminding ourselves over and over again by saying: “This is water! This is water!” There are further 3 keys lessons that can be learnt from this book:
- Don’t live by default: Most of us operate in our default setting considering ourselves at the center of universe. The world as we experience it is there in front of ME or behind ME, to the left or right of ME.. and so on. I don’t care to know about other people’s thoughts and feelings because my own needs seem to be so immediate, urgent & real. We rarely talk about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s socially repulsive. It is pretty much the same for all of us. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way and be compassionate towards others are often described as being “well-adjusted”.
- Truth with a capital T: The true essence of life is about being aware at every moment and paying attention to the obvious things around us. He further claims that the real value of education has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness. The only Truth in life is that you get to decide how you’re going to see the world around you and consciously decide what has meaning & what doesn’t.
- You get to decide what to worship: In the ultimate scheme of things, your life has no meaning but you can give it one. Worshipping money, power or physical beauty is pointless because you will never have enough of any of them. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, month after month without ever being fully aware of what you have been doing. Therefore, it is important to take notice of what you have been worshipping.
My Favourite quotes:
- Since everything start from thinking about the right things, it is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms nearly always shoot themselves in the head.
- A huge percentage of the stuff that we tend to be automatically certain of is totally wrong and deluded.
- Arrogance and blind certainty are like such complete imprisonments that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
- The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
- Learning “how to think” really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think.
- You have to choose what you pay attention to and choose how you construct meaning from experience.