This is Water

Nonfiction | Essay / Speech | Adult | Published in 2009

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The Importance of Mindfulness

The speech starts with a parable highlighting the absurdity of anthropomorphic fish not knowing what water is. The story is meant to underscore humanity’s frenetic, ruminative, and inherently self-centered perceptions. The most obvious aspects of reality are constantly overlooked. Wallace suggests that this mode of being is natural: “It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute center of” (3). The realness of other people’s thoughts and feelings comes into question because the self is urgent, omnipresent, and demanding. He contends that the mind’s default settings are not conducive to happiness, saying, “a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded” (3). The mind, which relies on certainties to construct meaning, is its own worst enemy.

Wallace serves up his own struggles with mindfulness as an example:

my 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 in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me. As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotized by the constant monologue inside your own head (4).

Whether or not the audience experiences cognition to this extreme, every person can relate to overthinking’s harmful effects. Alan Watts, a 20th-century writer and Zen Buddhism teacher, deems this “chatter in the skull” and explains that someone “who thinks all the time has nothing to think about except thoughts. So, he loses touch with reality, and lives in a world of illusions” (Watts, Alan. “Art of Meditation.” The Library of Consciousness). This is the world Wallace refers to in his anecdote about shopping; it is about viewing other people as obstacles and feeling personally slighted by their existences. This is known as solipsism, the idea that only one’s mind can be sure to exist and therefore other minds and the external world may not be real. Solipsism is egocentric and dangerous; it marks other people’s feelings, hopes, and dreams as mere extensions of the self.

In contrast, Wallace preaches compassion toward others. He posits that, perhaps, “everyone else […] is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do” (7). Mindfulness raises awareness about thinking’s content and context. As Wallace explains in his speech, there are unhealthy ways to think, and society won’t stop anyone from operating that way. Only the thinker can exert control over their unconscious tendencies.

The Purpose of Liberal Arts Education

Wallace mentions liberal arts education eight times in his short speech. In his Salon interview with Laura Miller, he described himself as “obscenely well-educated,” citing his academic prowess, economic privilege, and whiteness as unique to an American type of sadness. This pathos stems from an inability to establish meaningful belief systems in a society that rewards material pursuits. A liberal arts curriculum combats shallowness of being by teaching students to question their judgments—that is, the value of a degree in the humanities. The liberal arts teach students to think critically while challenging their intrinsic biases and raising awareness of cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental differences.

Wallace turns the liberal arts premise on its head when relaying his religious man versus atheist man parable. He states, “Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad” (2). Tolerance takes primacy, but “we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates come from” (2). People behave “as if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice” (2). He later criticizes the liberal arts gaze in the shopping scenario, saying, “I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are” (7). Even when the content of critical thought is aimed at a higher moral value, it is couched in arrogance and certainty.

Wallace does recognize and display earnest reverence for the liberal arts education throughout “This Is Water.” But, using himself as an example, he identifies the dangers of falling into the trap of sureness that academia lays. Just because a person is educated does not mean they self-investigate; they may be haughty and conceited, or they may value their perspective above all others. Maybe academic accomplishment can breed complacence or hubris; maybe the critical awareness cultivated by education does not go far enough; maybe one’s attention is too focused, too over-intellectualized, and thus loses sight of itself. Wallace’s speech is a warning that liberal arts students will still face innumerable complications and pitfalls after graduating.

Perspectivism as a Modus Operandi

Perspectivism, as advocated by Friedrich Nietzsche, asserts that there are no universal truths. Every viewpoint is inextricably tied to history, biography, and presupposition. To judge an interpretation as better than another is to say whether it works for a specific person at a given time and for particular reasons. In his book Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche comments on the nature of knowledge. He asserts that humanity has “contrived to retain our ignorance in order to enjoy an almost inconceivable freedom, thoughtlessness, imprudence, heartiness, and gaiety—in order to enjoy life,” then concludes that only on this “foundation of ignorance could knowledge rear itself” (Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Beyond Good and Evil. Translated by Helen Zimmern, Project Gutenberg, 1886, ch. 2).

Any opinion, consciously or unconsciously held, disregards some facts for others—embraces selected truths while discarding contradictions as falsehoods. Perspectivism shines a light on judgment’s flaws. This is the theory Wallace draws from when he says, “If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is […] you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities […] But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options” (7-8).

Nietzsche’s perspectivism exposes itself to the same criticism it holds for all points of view. Its genesis lies in the individual and the idiosyncratic. Belief is a type of faith, and as Wallace asserts,

The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it […] You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship. […] in the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships (8).

Wallace clearly communicates what it is to be a perspectivist. He maintains that “[t]he whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness” (8). Certainties are comfortable, they are unchanging, and they offer a safe haven for those who do not want to explore themselves or the world. Importantly, perspectivism does not deem all interpretations of truth to be of equal value; some views are more useful than others. Wallace says, “You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish” (9), and Nietzsche would agree with him. But choosing the easy path results in “the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing (9). This message comes from a person who intimately knew that path and struggled with it—anyone would be wise to heed his words.