This is water

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Das hier ist Wasser ( This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life ) is an essay by David Foster Wallace . It was published by Little, Brown and Company in 2009. Ulrich Blumenbach was responsible for the translation, which was published by KiWi Paperbacks in 2012 . The text of the essay is originally from a speech Wallace gave on May 21, 2005 to graduates of Kenyon College . Even before it was officially published, a transcript of the speech was circulating on the Internet. The essay was also published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2006 .

Topics of the essay include “the difficulty of empathy”, “the importance of being well adjusted” and “the essential loneliness of adult life” (“the essential lonesomeness of adult life ”). In addition, Wallace argues that the main purpose of higher education is the ability to make willful choices about the way one perceives other people and thereby act appropriately in everyday life. He sees the true freedom that is achieved through education in the ability to act in an adapted, conscious and understanding manner and thus to overcome the “default setting”.

In David Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Fun, there is a line that is related to the scope of this essay: "The fish that wants to know what water is."

Marketing firm The Glossary produced a nine-minute audio recording video of the speech and released it in May 2013. On May 21, 2013, the video was deleted from the video platforms YouTube and Vimeo due to a copyright claim by the David Foster Wallace Literary Trust. The video had more than 4 million views by the time it was deleted. There is also a full, 22-minute audio recording of the speech.

expenditure

  • This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life . Little, Brown and Company, New York 2009, ISBN 9780316068222
  • This is water / This is Water: thought provoking . KiWi-Paperbacks, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-462-04418-8
  • This Is Water (Special Edition): David Foster Wallace speaks to 2005 Kenyon College, Ohio graduates . Audiobook, tacheles !, Bochum 2013, ISBN 978-3-941168-94-7

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Tom Bissel: Great and Terrible Truths. The New York Times , April 24, 2009, accessed November 30, 2013 .
  2. ^ William McGuinness: David Foster Wallace's Brilliant 'This Is Water' Commencement Address Is Now a Great Short Film. The Huffington Post, August 5, 2013, accessed November 30, 2013 .
  3. ↑ David Foster Wallace: Endless Fun . Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 3rd edition 2013, ISBN 978-3-499-24957-0 , translated by Ulrich Blumenbach, page 1279.
  4. ↑ Eike Kühl: David Foster Wallace - “This is water”. Zeit Online Netzfilmblog , May 10, 2013, accessed November 30, 2013 .

Web links