In the late spring of 2005, David Foster Wallace addressed the graduating class of Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio. Twenty years later, his talk remains one of the most widely shared and admired graduation speeches of all time, and the book version of the speech, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life, remains a staple of graduation displays at bookstores. But the speech is not simply something to pair with Dr. Seuss’s Oh, the Places You’ll Go! in the gift bag for the neighbor’s kid. It contains the kind of wisdom that benefits from close analysis and repeated reading.
Wallace urges the graduates to resist solipsism and to push beyond their “hard-wired default setting, which is to be deeply and literally self-centered.” But the speech is also a defense of the value of a liberal arts education. Since we are in the midst of an ongoing crisis in the liberal arts—characterized by both the declining number of liberal arts majors and the shuttering of small liberal arts colleges—alongside the new challenges that the pervasive use of artificial intelligence poses to higher education, I have found myself returning to Wallace’s work to try to make sense of our current moment.
David Foster Wallace is perhaps best known as the author of the encyclopedic novel Infinite Jest, a postmodern classic that deals with addiction, recovery, community, consumerism, tennis, entertainment, technology, the environment and politics (among other things). It is famously long and complex, and includes almost 100 pages of footnotes, but it is also very funny and surprisingly accessible; it appeared on Time’s 100 best novels of all time. But Infinite Jest is not Wallace’s only influential work. The novel he was working on when he died, The Pale King, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again was chosen by Slate as one of the 50 best nonfiction books of the past 25 years.
The limits of irony
Throughout his work, Wallace continually explores the limits of irony, the dangers of technology and what he called the “emotional poverty” of contemporary America. He told one interviewer: “In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies C.P.R. to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness.” In this particularly dark time, I find myself turning back to Wallace’s work, looking for these signs of light.
And these moments are not hard to find in “This Is Water.” One of Wallace’s main claims about a liberal arts education is that “the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like [Kenyon] isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about.” He goes on to say:
I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: How to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.
I spent a decade as a college humanities professor, and I taught this speech many, many times, mostly to adult learners—people with kids and full-time jobs, who went back to college to finish their degrees. This line always resonated with them. They did not need to be convinced that adult life can grind us down, that we slip into unthinking routines, and that this can be incredibly isolating. When Wallace describes the experience of needing to go shopping for food after a long day at the office, and the all-too-common frustrations of having to deal with the overly crowded aisles, the inefficient shoppers, the slow check-out lanes and how incredibly exasperating this all can be, my students would knowingly laugh and nod.
Wallace claims, though, that these types of moments are an opportunity to exercise the kind of choice he has been talking about: “The crowded aisles and long 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, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop.” For my students, Wallace’s claim that we can choose a different way to be was always really moving:
If you’ve really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars: compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things.
The fundamental hope on offer here—that our experience of reality can shift based solely on how we direct our attention—always hit home for my students, and it continues to resonate with me today.
Attention, awareness, discipline
Wallace claims, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline,” and he believed these three skills are things that can be taught in liberal arts classrooms. Knowing how to classify a particular piece of art, or which general led which particular military action, or how to scan a poem, may not matter all that much in the long term. But the kind of discipline and attention it takes to learn and master the facts and skills required in any given subject will have lasting significance in a person’s life.
Liberal arts faculty members are always being encouraged to sell their students on how employers are looking for these skills, but Wallace is not talking about employability or marketability; he’s talking about quality of life:
The real value of a real education…has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: “This is water.”
From testimonials by his students, and the teaching materials available in the Ransom Center at the University of Texas, and online, it is clear he did care about instilling these virtues in his students. By all reports, he was not an easy or lenient teacher; in one syllabus he stated the average grade in his intro class was between a B and B-. He was known to give his students weekly handouts with common—and not so common—grammar errors culled from previously submitted assignments. All of his syllabi make it clear that he was rigorous and demanding, and wanted his students to take the time to put in the work—to employ careful attention and discipline to each assignment.
And it sounds like it worked. As one creative writing student at Pomona noted:
Every week he returned our stories with tomes of comments, meticulously organized and footnoted.... At first I thought these letters spoke to an obsession with perfection. Later, I began to see that they only reflected the depth of Dave’s heart. To each story he gave the energy that he gave his own writing. His attention stemmed from the profound respect he held for his students.
It is clear that Wallace sincerely believed attention, awareness and discipline matter, and could be the difference between misery and seeing the world charged with the grandeur of God.
So how does artificial intelligence play into any of this? While it is widely acknowledged that higher education is in trouble, there are plenty of people who claim that A.I. is going to revitalize and save it. In The Chronicle of Higher Education, Scott Latham, a professor of strategy at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, gives us a picture of the A.I. university of the future, which he frames as a kind of educational utopia:
Picture this: Students will no longer sign up for courses; they will work with their A.I. agents to build personalized instruction. A student who requires a biology course as part of their major won’t take the standard three-credit course with a lecture and lab that meets for 14 weeks with the same professor. Instead, the student will ask their A.I. agent to construct a course that transcends the classroom, campus and time.
This, to me, sounds hellish and isolating—one definitive step toward what Wallace condemned as being “uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.” Latham claims that “human interaction is not as important to today’s students,” which might be true (although claiming it and proving it are not the same), but even if it is an accurate claim, students—just like the rest of us—are often bad at determining what actually matters. In any event, Latham’s vision for the A.I. university seems to have very little to do with countering solipsism or fostering attention, discipline and awareness.
The risks of A.I.
The risks involved with this kind of interaction are already evident; students who use A.I. to “help” write papers have no knowledge of the material they are supposedly writing about, and they are not developing any of the skills related to thinking or self-expression that are the true purpose of writing college-level essays. Every composition teacher I know is overwhelmed by the challenges posed by A.I. (and they are not alone); most are redesigning their assignments to include more in-class writing, and many are rethinking their entire pedagogical approach.
Wallace was very aware of what technology could do to us, and the threats inherent in any new medium. The central governing metaphor of Infinite Jest is a video that is so compelling people literally cannot stop watching it. He knows that people cannot control themselves through the force of their own will, and he was particularly aware of the allure and addictive nature of TV. In our own time the internet fills this same role. Perhaps soon, that same alluring and addictive force will be whatever sort of A.I. content gets specifically designed for us, to entertain us endlessly, to show us what we want to see and tell us what we want to hear.
Wallace explores these themes throughout his fiction, and the opening scene of Infinite Jest is one particularly striking example. In this scene (which is, somewhat confusingly, the last chronological moment in the book) one of the novel’s protagonists, the tennis-playing prodigy Hal, is at a college admissions interview, but something has happened to him, and although he is still able to think coherently, he cannot communicate with anyone. His attempts to write down his thoughts end up looking like “some sort of infant’s random stabs on a keyboard,” and when he tries to speak, he is described as making “subanimalistic noises and sounds.”
One of the people he’s trying to talk to says, “I believe I’ve seen a vision of hell.” In this moment, Hal is trapped inside his body, a consciousness that cannot express itself. And part of the magic of the book is that although no one can understand what he is saying, we can read what he is thinking—the book allows us a sort of magical portal into his consciousness.
The scene actually enacts one of the themes of “This Is Water”: By taking the time to read, to slow down and pay attention, we are able to form a sort of connection that bridges the isolation and division that is brought about by technology and addictive behavior.
Who is Dennis Gabor?
Interestingly enough, there is one seemingly incongruous line in the midst of this opening interior monologue in Infinite Jest that speaks even more directly to the dangers posed by A.I. Hal claims, “I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist.” The other people Hal mentions in this part of his monologue are well known figures—Kierkegaard, Camus, Hobbes, Rousseau, Hegel—but Gabor is hardly a household name. It is worth asking why he is mentioned so prominently at the start of the novel. Gabor is best known as the inventor of the hologram: a technology that creates an impressive surface, with no real substance or depth. If he is the Antichrist, in Hal’s fashioning, it would seem to be because he created something that allows us to mistake surface for substance—a technology that tricks us into thinking that an exterior implies an interior.
Infinite Jest pointed toward many of the nightmares that we are currently in the midst of, and this seemingly tossed-off comment about the creator of one kind of technology that we don’t think much about is another example of Wallace intuiting some of our current problems before they arrived. Because, in an uncanny connection, Gabor’s work inspired the work of another scientist, Norbert Wiener, who worked in cybernetics and self-reproducing machines. And Norbert Wiener is considered one of the fathers of artificial intelligence.
These days the world feels broken—in many ways is broken—so perhaps asking a machine to do our thinking for us seems reasonable. If we are not thinking for ourselves, we will not be as aware of all that is going wrong. But letting something else think for us also seems a surefire way to leave us in the state Wallace warns the Kenyon graduates about: “dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting.” If we surrender our thinking to our machines, we run the very real risk of ending up like Hal—with thoughts we cannot express, unable to connect with others. All of us, “uniquely, completely, imperially alone.”
Revisiting Wallace’s “This Is Water” address serves as a reminder that in order to avoid this fate, we need to reject the allure of the machines that would make it even easier for us to embrace the illusion that we are at the center of our little worlds. Instead, we should seek to cultivate our attention and awareness and discipline. We ought to look for ways to forge connections with others. And we need to continually take the time to remind ourselves of what is real and around us all the time, even if we don’t usually notice it: “This is water.”
