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This is water
First published 2009 · 137 pages
A short, sharp shock of empathy that reframes the crushing boredom of daily adult life into an opportunity for profound connection.
What it feels like
Reading this feels like a late-night conversation with a brilliant, slightly weary friend who desperately wants you to be okay. It is a remarkably brisk read, originally delivered as a speech, but its emotional weight lingers long after the final page. The prose is accessible yet razor-sharp, stripping away the hollow platitudes of typical life advice to look directly at the exhausting reality of grocery store lines and traffic jams. Instead of toxic positivity, it offers a sobering but deeply comforting brand of radical empathy. It will delight readers who are tired of being told to just be happy, offering instead a grounded, urgent plea to simply pay attention to the world and choose how to think about it.
- Mood
- contemplative
- sobering
- grounded
- quietly uplifting
- Tone
- earnest
- wry
- conversational
- urgent
- compassionate
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- the default setting of selfishness · mindfulness in the mundane · choosing how to think · radical empathy · the reality of adult life
- The writing
- Conversational yet razor-sharp, blending casual colloquialisms with exact, philosophical inquiry.
- The arc
- Moves from a wry acknowledgment of adult drudgery to a profound, compassionate plea for conscious awareness.
- Who it's for
- Readers feeling stuck in the exhausting repetition of daily life who crave a grounded, unsentimental approach to finding meaning.
Content notes
- mental health struggles
- suicide (thematic context)
About the book
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.
Description from Open Library.
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