DFW Commencement Response

Because I've been conditioned by high school to write as though I'm talking to mongoloidal toddlers who haven't read any sort of commonly cited text (regardless of the fact that it's likely everyone who will read this has read the commencement speech I'm responding to) I'm going to include two passages to help any reader understand my responses that come later on in this piece. (I'm also not doing this to break the word count, I promise. I think I have around 300-400 excluding this and the quotes lifted from the text.)

From: David Foster Wallace's 2005 Kenyon Commencement speech.

'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?”'

I reference this as 'The Fish Story."

"...So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your
frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily
tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college."

I refer to this as his 'proverbial supermarket.'

Reading this commencement speech was refreshing to me because of its deviation from the usually trivial diatribes I'm used to in these sort of things. The speaker is harsh, realistic, almost cynical. But he does all of this in a way that is a breath of fresh air. While he's talking about being aware, he doesn't some to a specific judgement or suggested practice. He even bluntly states that his more critical views on gas-guzzling hummer drivers is not the correct way to think. It's almost as if he's having a legitimate conversation with himself, not just some (to steal his terminology) didactic, stage-born soliloquy.

And, while he's talking about suicide, and the menial everyday tasks of living, there seems to be some hope in his words. While he's talking about the hopelessness in fatalism, the hopelessness of narcissism, and the hopelessness of whatever else we subscribe to, to keep our minds occupied, even after he's talking about adults desecrating the contents of their sculls with a .38, he brings it back to his story in the beginning (which, he seemed to discredit initially, but was merely trying to convey that he wasn't under the impression that he was some sort of water-borne guru.)

In his final words on this piece, in revisiting the Fish Story, he reminds the listener to constantly remind themselves to be aware. To me, this piece is saying that one shouldn't forget what they like to do. All of the examples given are almost dehumanizing, and I believe this is his intent. He wants the listener to consider how vacant people become when exposed to the daily grind, and to avoid this fate themselves. Personally, I would like to think that if I ever become so banal as the people he speaks of in his proverbial supermarket, I will close my bank account, sell my shit, and go somewhere. Become some ex-pat enjoying life without money (or with it, if I've done 'well' a la amerika) in somewhere that doesn't make me feel that I have no other option than to be a vapid, repressed revenant.