This is Water | David Foster Wallace
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There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?”
And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
Taking inspiration from the continued interest in the speech excepts over the last few weeks, today I am pulling from David Foster Wallace’s This is Water.
David Foster Wallace was born in 1962 in Ithaca, New York, to a philosophy professor and English teacher, though he was raised in Illinois (and was actually a regionally ranked tennis player there). He became a professional writer and teacher, known for his satirical and sometimes darkly humorous review of American consumption-based culture.
His first novel, The Broom of the System, was written while an undergraduate at Amherst College. Arguably his most famous novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996. In addition to writing, Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College.
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