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This is Water. By David Foster Wallace. 144 pages. Little, Brown and Company. $15.
This Is Water
by David Foster Wallace
The late novelist's only commencement address was unforgettable.
It’s that time of year when celebrities and politicians make their way to college campuses and give wide-eyed graduates inspirational speeches before they make their way into the real world. Well, David Foster Wallace really told the Kenyon College class of 2005 what to expect in the only commencement speech he would ever give. “There happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.” He then launched into a mind-numbing description of commuting home from work, tired and hungry, only to find no food in the fridge and all the “stupid and infuriating” series of events that follow. Things start to look up by the end of the speech though. “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
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