David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech to be Published

The address, to students passing out from of Kenyon College in Ohio, was given in May 2005, three years before the author hanged himself at his home this September, aged 46. It saw Wallace taking on the challenges of daily life, attempting to answer what the real-life value of education is, and looking at how we think about the world. It will be published as a small hardback, This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered On a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life, running to some 150 pages, by Little, Brown US next April.

The publisher described the speech as a "pointedly observant examination of daily life", which it said was written with Wallace's "one-of-a-kind blend of casual humour, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy [which] offers advice that renews us with every reading". "[It] was Wallace's only philosophical public address," added Marlena Bittner, associate director of publicity at Little, Brown, and Wallace's former publicist.

The title, This is Water, is taken from the speech, in which Wallace told the anecdote of two young fish who meet an older fish, who asks them "how's the water?" They swim on, and eventually one of them asks the other, "what the hell is water?"

"If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, 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 realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about," Wallace told the graduates. "The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: 'This is water, this is water.'"