The Review Writing of《This is Water》

The author, David Foster Wallace, was considered by many to be one of the finest writers of his generation. He only gave one speech in public in all his life, in which he talked about his view of life. The speech happened in a commencement of Kenyon College in 2005. Now, the widely distributed video has been into a thin book, which name is “this is water”.

According to Wallace's view, the water was on behalf of the most obviously, the most important reality, but it was difficult to see or talk about; and “the same experience for different people may mean something completely different”, because everyone had a different “default settings” and a different way from the experience in the construction of meaning. Therefore, the ideal of liberal education was to make people out of this self center, learning to “how to think” and “thinking” control. Wallace then cut to the usual humor and plain philosophy from the contemporary urban life, pointing out the importance of maintaining vigilance and consciousness. At the same time, we should be free to choose the way of looking at things.

At the beginning of the speech, Wallace talked a story about the fish, and it is pointed out that “the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the hardest to see and talk about”. In our daily life, we tend to think that we are the absolute center of the natural, just

like our default-setting. But most, we tend to automatically determine the thing, in fact, is completely wrong, even be fooled. Therefore in front of fact, we should learn to choose and think deeply. Then Wallace cited an example of the story of shopping in the supermarket. Just as our natural default-setting, we may think that traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines are pissed and miserable experience. When we think like this, we are operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that we are the center of the world, so that we feel the most boring and the most frustrating part in the adult world. However, if we changed our method of thinking, we may feel the difference of the things and make other choices. But doing like this is hard, needs will and mental effort. If we want to feel a meaningful and sacred experience instead of a crowed, loud, slow situation, the only thing we should do is to decide what to worship. We have the right to decided what to worship, but there are different kinds of freedom. The real freedom includes attention, and awareness, and displaying. In order to achieve this freedom, we should keep reminding ourselves “This is water” constantly. But it is hard to maintain awareness and activity in the adult world; we should keep study from now on. 在日常生活中，我们经常凭借对别人的第一印象而对他下定论，但是长时间了解之后我们会发现他并不是正如一句名言所说，生活中不是缺少美，而是缺少发现美的眼睛。我们应该善于发现隐藏在事物

表层下面的东西，那将为我们打开另一个世界， As a famous saying said, life is not a lack of beauty, but the lack of eyes to find beauty. We should be good at discovering hidden in the things below the surfaceof things, it will open another world,

 

第二篇：This is water

A Review of This is Water

It is a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. During the speech ,Foster Wallace gives a series of examples which we usually meet , then he evaluates them and conclues some meaningful ,philosophic opinions .

Firstly ,Foster Wallace draws into the word ‘self-centredness by the fish story ,he tells us that everybody has self-centredness,it is our defaut-setting ,hard-wired into our board at birth .We always put our awareness in the center of the univers ,the realest and important person ,but the reality maybe be not what we think about .

Then Foster Wallace enumerates another story, in the story ,we can have different attitudes toward the same thing ,it all depends on how we think .The thing is that there are different ways to think about these kinds of situations.for example ,one people gets up in the morning and work hard for nine or ten hours ,he is very tired and stressed out ,when he drives car to the supermarket ,everything he sufferred is dull ,stupid and infuriating .However if you think in other ways ,the same thing will be obviously different ,you will fell everything is fine.The reason causing the different results is that our automatic ,unconscious belief of we are the centre of situations. Foster Wallace advise us to think this way although it is hard ,he told us that we need learn how to think ,how to pay attention .It will be within our power to experence a crowded loud slow consumer-hell-type situation . The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it.

Lastly ,Foster Wallace introduces into what is the real freedom. he thinks the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over.