Vivian Tu

15 September 2017

English 1A

Dr. Morgan

CRL #1

Going into the commencement speech This is Water, David Foster Wallace emphasizes

awareness, and how having that allows us, as people who will eventually live our days in and

out, to take a moment and consider what and how we think. Ultimately, awareness allows oneself

to simply live a life that is not held down by the chains of "day in and day out". Wallace also

asks us to give meaning to even the simplest of things because that in itself is a task that we are

gifted by our education.

Throughout his speech, Wallace brings up the idea of unconsciously thinking that one

would think of themselves as the center of the universe. After all, we live this world through

what we see, accomplish and learn. Because we see ourselves in that way, giving ourselves the

chance to see the world in another perspective is hard and Wallace understands. This justifies the

idea that there is much more that we can live for besides living for ourselves.

He also points out that throughout college we tend to constantly analyze different abstract

texts, which as a result, causes us to simply not think about ourselves in a different context from

college. I grasped the idea of rhetoric as Wallace spoke. Rhetoric is so much more powerful than

what it seems. We do not know what other people have been through and I personally thought

back to today when we shared our own life with our peer mentor group. We think about what is

beneficial or horrible for ourselves, but there is much more to what seems beyond the surface
and what we see. Wallace asks us to see that for ourselves because it is what we decide to live

our life like.

Wallace, David Foster. This is Water. Kenyon College, 2005.