David Foster Wallace's Speech

   I really wish that I would've experienced this speech first hand. There was not a dull moment where I was bored or his thoughts seemed monotone. He kept me wondering about what point he would make next. For one, I was shocked but enveloped in his theme of discovering ourselves through our education, not through our acquired knowledge but through changing our "default setting" the one that makes us see everything as happening only to US. I think he makes a great point with the anecdote about the two men in a bar. I would've thought that the atheist man after being saved by Eskimos would've believed in G_d and perhaps wondered if G_d sent the Eskimos to save him, however this was not the case. This made me realize again how everyone is different and while perhaps my "default settings" would cause me to believe this, it might not apply to everyone. When Wallace describes the routine-like day involving the traffic and tedious super market experience, I was captured because although I'm still an undergrad student I've been in that position at times. I laughed a couple times throughout his speech as I realized how he got every last detail on that routine down perfectly. I liked how he began his speech with the story about the big fish talking to the little fish about water and he also ends his speech with that same message "this is water". I guess my interpretation of that is just that this "water" is life, and sometimes we "swim" around life unaware of our surroundings and the meaning of events in our life slip us by because we are so accustomed to over analyzing things that we forget there is such a thing as simplicity.