It's the Water, Stupid

This is the season for graduation at most high schools, colleges and universities in this country. By and large, the commencement addresses on these occasions are fairly similar, forward-looking, optimistic, and some counsel. I am familiar with exceptions, for example, Ann Patchett’s address to the seniors of Sarah Lawrence.

It has been published as What Now? Her remarks are charming, wise, and funny, just like most everything Patchett has written. In it she suggests that your life is always going to be a work in progress and in finding a balance between “going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.”

At the same time she advises graduates to, “Make up some plans and change them. Identify your heart's truest desire and don't change that for anything.” That’s pretty good advance for anyone, at any age.

But it is the remarks of David Foster Wallace that, in my view, remains the classic, all-time-commencement address of the ages. It was delivered to the graduates of Kenyon College in May of 2005 and was recently published as This Is Water.

Wallace begins with a parable: Two young fish happen to meet an older fish that says to them “How’s the water?” The two young fish swim on a bit until one says to the other “What the hell’s the water?”

Wallace writes: “The point of the story is that the most important, obvious realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”

To the graduating students he says that the significant education they have received isn’t “really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” This means: “…being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

He says that in his experience the most dangerous consequence of an academic education is the tendency to “over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right of front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.” It’s the water parable again.

Much of the talk is a warning to the students about what adult life is really like. “Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.”

Wallace then proceeds to unpack what that means. You get up, you go to work, you are there eight or ten hours, you are tired and exhausted and now you are stuck in traffic on the drive home, and then you have supper if you are lucky enough to have someone prepare it, otherwise you stop at the market and try to find something to eat and wait a while longer in the check out line, and get back on the freeway, where the traffic is as bad as it was when you got off, and then you try to unwind a bit after your lean cuisine, whereupon you hit the sack early because you have to get up early again the next day and go through it all again.

“Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates actual life routine, day after week after month after year….The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.”

For Wallace being educated is being able to recognize the importance of attention and awareness and discipline and he adds “being able to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty unsexy ways every day.” These are not our default settings. They have to be learned and the learning isn’t easy and it is readily forgotten in the midst of all the distractions that usually take control of our lives.

Wallace concludes that his remarks (“stuff”) aren't your normal inspirational, optimistic, commencement speech. He reminds the students again that the real value of their education has little 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, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: This is water.”

Even if his remarks are far from cheerful, they are pretty inspirational in my book. Even more, they are true. A transcript of his address can be read here.

Grab Your Dream

Each year the Times publishes snippets of some of the most interesting commencement speeches of the year. Earlier I wrote about the provocative commencement remarks of David Foster Wallace and Ann Patchett, both later published in their entirety as slim volumes.

It seems that this year most orators spoke about the bleak economic conditions that would greet graduates outside the campus. President Obama told Notre Dame graduates that they needed to “find a path back to prosperity.” Even Bud Selig, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, acknowledged “We are living in the most difficult economic environment since the Great Depression.” None of this was the sort of message one normally expects to hear in a commencement address.

The actress Laura Linney had a more traditional message for the graduates of The Julliard School. “Remember that no matter which art you practice, there is no more valuable skill than the ability to listen carefully. Especially when you listen to the music, or listen to the text, listen!”

So too did Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, who spoke to the graduates of the University of Michigan. “I had one of those dreams when I was 23. I suddenly woke up, I was just thinking, What if we download the whole Web and just keep the links? And I grabbed a pen and started writing. Sometimes it is important to wake up and stop dreaming….When a really great dream shows up, grab it.”

The historian David McCullough spoke about the importance of teachers to the graduates of the University of Oklahoma. “There is no such thing as a self-made man or woman…We are all, as were those in whose footsteps we follow, shaped by the influence and examples of countless others—parents, grandparents, friends, rivals. And by those who wrote the music that moves us to our souls, those whose performance on state or on the playing field took our breaths away, those who wrote the great charters which are the bedrock of our system of self-government. And so many who, to our benefit struggled and suffered through times of trouble and grave uncertainty. And by teachers…I want to stress as emphatically as I can the immeasurable importance of teachers.”

To the graduates of the School of Journalism at UC, Berkeley, Barbara Ehrenreich said, “You are going to be trying to carve out a career in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. You are, furthermore, going to be trying to do so within what appears to be a dying industry…Welcome to the American working class.”

I welcomed the timely remarks of Richard Haass, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, to the graduates of Oberlin College: “Dissent will be, and should be, part of your lives. This country was born of dissent (the Revolutionary War), defined by it (the Civil War) and changed profoundly by it. The labor, suffrage and civil rights movements as well as the anti-Vietnam protests all come to mind. Dissent is as America as cherry pie.”

Finally, there was even a speaker who put in a word for literature. It was the playwright John Patrick Shanley who delivered the commencement address at the College of Mount St. Vincent. “…when you leave here today, you may go through a period of unemployment. My suggestion is this: Enjoy the unemployment. Have a second cup of coffee. Go to the park. Read Walt Whitman. Walt Whitman loved being unemployed. I don’t believe he ever did a day’s work in his life. As you may know, he was a poet. If a lot of time goes by and you continue to be unemployed, you may want to consider announcing to all appropriate parties that you have become a poet.”

What Now?

What Now? is the title of the commencement address (and newly published book) that Ann Patchett delivered recently at Sarah Lawrence. It is charming, wise, and funny, just like everything else Patchett has written.

Patchett herself is charming, wise, and funny. Some writers write they way they are, others write the way they would like to be, and then there's the rest of us who are not quite sure who we are or how to write.

I recently heard Patchett speak at Powell’s in Portland on a book tour she was doing for the paperback edition of her recent novel, Run. She ambled in with a coffee mug in hand, wearing casual slacks and sneakers, completely oblivious to the huge crowd that had gathered to hear her but with that knowing grin that lights up her face and everyone else around her.

I believe What Now? (I sometimes refer to as Now What?) can be enjoyed and appreciated by a person at any stage in their life. The following passages in this slim volume should make that clear.


Writing is good for many things, but curing loneliness isn't one of them.

…people need to talk, and often a willingness to sit and listen is the greatest kindness one person can offer to another.

…the activity I'm most likely to be engaged in is staring.

Nothing at all is very much out of fashion these days, as are stillness, silence, and studied consideration.

Catholic school and college and graduate school had prepared me both for how to be part of a group and how to be the group's leader, but none of them had taught me the most important thing: how to be alone.

What now is always going to be a work in progress. What now was never what you think it's going to be and that's what every writer has to learn.

I learned the most from sticking with my dream even when all signs told me it was time to let go.

The secret is finding the balance between going out to get what you want and being open to the thing that actually winds up coming your way.

…at every point in our development we are still striving to grow.

Make up some plans and change them. Identify your heart's truest desire and don't change that for anything.

…the kind of fire that comes from the perfect balance of intelligence and compassion.