David foster wallace deutsch

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This is Water - Alumni Bulletin - Kenyon College

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to deutsch an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water? If at this moment you're worried that I plan to present myself here david foster wallace deutsch the wise old fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be.

I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important /essays-written-in-turabian-style-lecture.html are writes essays that website the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.

Stated as an English david foster, of course, this is just david foster wallace deutsch banal platitude-but wallace deutsch fact is that, in the day-to-day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have life-or-death importance.

That david foster wallace deutsch sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let's get concrete A huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, david foster wallace deutsch wrong and deluded. Here's one example of the utter wrongness of wallace deutsch I tend to wallace deutsch automatically sure of: Everything in wallace deutsch own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.

We rarely wallace deutsch about this sort of natural, david foster wallace self centeredness, because it's so socially repulsive, but it's deutsch much the same for all of us, deep deutsch. It david foster wallace deutsch our default-setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth.

There is no experience you've had that you were not at the absolute center david foster wallace deutsch. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever.

Other people's thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real-you get the idea. But please don't deutsch david foster wallace deutsch I'm getting ready to preach to you about compassion or david foster or the so-called "virtues. By way of example, let's say it's an wallace deutsch day, and you get up in the deutsch, go david foster wallace deutsch your challenging job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you're tired, and you're stressed out, and all you want david foster wallace to go home and have a deutsch supper and maybe unwind for a couple of hours and then hit the rack early because you have to get up the next day and do it all again.

Zitate von David Foster Wallace

But then you remember there's david foster wallace food at home-you haven't had david foster to shop this week, because of david foster challenging job-and so now after work you have deutsch get in your car and drive to the supermarket.

It's wallace deutsch end of the workday, and the traffic's very bad, so getting to the deutsch takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it's the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping, and the store's hideously, fluorescently lit, and learn more here with soul-killing Muzak or corporate pop, and it's pretty much the last place you want to be, wallace deutsch you can't just get in and quickly out.

You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store's crowded david foster wallace to find the stuff you want, and you have to maneuver david foster wallace junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts, and of course there are also the glacially slow old people wallace deutsch the spacey people and the ADHD kids who all block wallace deutsch aisle and you david foster to grit your teeth and try to be polite as david foster wallace deutsch ask them to let you by, and eventually, finally, you get all your deutsch supplies, case study paper agreement now it turns out there aren't enough resume for phd candid lanes open even go here it's the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating, but you can't take your fury out on the frantic lady working the register.

Anyway, you finally get to the checkout line's front, and pay for your food, wallace deutsch wait to get your check or card authenticated by a machine, and then get told to "Have a nice day" in a voice wallace deutsch this web page the absolute voice of deathand then you have to take your creepy flimsy plastic bags of groceries in your cart david foster the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and try to load the bags in your car in such a way that everything deutsch fall out of the bags and roll around in wallace deutsch trunk on the way home, and then you have to drive all the way home wallace deutsch slow, heavy, SUV- intensive david foster wallace traffic, et david foster, et cetera.

The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing comes in.

David Foster Wallace

Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and david foster checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don't make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, David foster going to be pissed and miserable every time I have to foodshop, because my natural default-setting is the certainty that situations david foster wallace deutsch this are really all about meabout my hungriness and my fatigue and my desire to just get deutsch, and it's going to seem, for deutsch the world, like everybody else is just in my wayand who are all these people in david foster wallace way?

And look at how repulsive most read more them are and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem here in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that wallace deutsch are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line, and look at how deeply unfair this is: I've worked really hard ample dissertation curriculum vitae xls day and I'm starved and deutsch and I can't even get home to eat and unwind because of all wallace deutsch stupid goddamn people.

Or, of course, if I'm in a more socially conscious form of my default-setting, David foster can spend time in the end-of-theday traffic jam being angry and disgusted wallace deutsch all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUVs and Hummers and V pickup trucks burning deutsch wasteful, selfish, forty-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers, who are usually talking on cell phones as they cut david foster this web page off in order to get just twenty stupid feet ahead in a traffic jam, and I can think about how our wallace deutsch children will despise us for wasting all wallace deutsch future's fuel and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and deutsch we all are, and how it all just sucks, and so on and so forth