I first read David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech to Kenyon College shortly after the author’s death and shortly before attempting to read Infinite Jest for the second time. It may have been the Kenyon speech that inspired me to take on the novel again; it’s one of those pieces of public speaking which seems to transcend the form (about which there is something inherently hokey) and become something genuinely meaningful and really memorable (see also Randy Pausch’s ‘Last Lecture’).

Wallace’s speech chimed for me with a Buddhist idea I had been carrying around for some time and finding it very difficult to practice: that cognitively separating sections of our day, or activities in our lives, into “stuff I enjoy” and “stuff I find tedious” makes it harder to approach any experience without preconceived notions of how we’re going to react to it. The idea, which Wallace seems to be touching on, is that by labelling the hours between eg 9am and 5pm ‘Work’ and setting it firmly in the “stuff I find tedious and do because I have to” column, is to resign yourself to a very rigid and limiting way of perceiving the world and your life.

I can’t recommend Wallace’s speech enough, and after reading it see if you don’t find yourself, like me, repeating “this is water” under your breath at least a couple of times per week.