This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life by David Foster Wallace - ★★★★

It's amazing how one like David Foster Wallace can be so thoughtful in such a small book or graduation speech as it is. Wallace talks about the importance of not just being able to think but being able to decide what we think about. He tells a story about going to the grocery store. And on one hand, you could be all upset about it on another hand, you could be globally upset about it. And on the other hand, you could just kind of have he doesn't say it but he means that he means you can have compassion for everyone they're the woman with the crying child has other problems. The poor attendant working the check stand is in a terrible job. Everyone else there just wants to get their groceries and go home just like he does. That compassion allows him to see that we're all on the same team. And we're all here experiencing this thing. So loved his description of that you've only experienced things from your own point of view. And it's true if you think about your entire life, his point of view, your brain looking out your eyes, and your body. And he talks about how much more important your thoughts seem than everyone else's thoughts. For example, I'm hungry versus he's hungry. I'm hungry is immediate. He's hungry. That's his problem, right? It's just a beautiful short speech. beautifully formatted by the David Foster Wallace literary trust. Small, only a small amount of words. On each page, kind of a paragraph per page. style really gives you time to think about what he's saying. Or as I read it, of course, like a comic book, flipbook, I rapidly flipped page to page to page and it was more a matter of my arm moving so many times to keep his words going. I've listened to this speech before I've watched the video. It's always powerful and magnificent to spend some time with David Foster Wallace.

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