Editor's Note: This is Water

by Brian K. Mahoney, September 25, 2008

In 2005, the author David Foster Wallace (best, and most infamously, known for his 1,079-page novel, Infinite Jest) gave the commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. The speech, is a classic of its type, hewing close to the well-worn conventions of the genre. Wallace opens with a parable. He goes on to state banal platitudes and justify them by saying that clichés are vitally important to navigating adult life—wait for it—because they are true. Wallace coyly avers that he is not there (at a podium, in a cap and gown himself) to give advice or lecture about virtues, but then slips in an ethical framework for the graduates to judge themselves against. He points out that life is about the choices we make. He explains what he believes the real value of a college education to be. And when Wallace ends his speech, he does so by informing the class that graduation is not an end, but a beginning—that their real education now commences.

Since Wallace killed himself last month, at the age of 46 (he had battled depression all his adult life), the Kenyon speech has been making the rounds, excerpted in obituaries and appreciations. The Wall Street Journal even devoted a full page to printing it in near-entirety. One of the reasons for the popularity of the speech, of course, is morbid curiosity. It makes passing reference to suicide, and we are hardwired to look there for the why. Why would an influential writer—prodigiously gifted, revered by his peers, staking out new territory in 21st-century American letters, the man whom Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times described as able to “do practically anything if he puts his mind to it”—want to kill himself? The speech doesn’t say.