David Foster Wallace, the commencement speaker at Kenyon College in 2005, uses the parable of the wise old fish encountering two younger fish and asking them: “How’s the water?”. After swimming farther along, one of the younger fish says to the other: “What the hell is water?”. Wallace explains: “The point of the fish story is that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” (Wallace). Those who have not listened to his speech might want to invest the time. (An audio recording is available here; a transcript is available here; listening takes twenty-three minutes, and reading takes fewer).
Since it is a commencement address at Kenyon, Wallace talks about the purpose of a liberal arts education, dispelling the “most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre” that the purpose of a liberal arts education is teaching one how to think. Rather, he posits, the purpose is to teach one what to think. He describes to the graduates the mundane existence of quotidian, adult life and how one needs to choose what to think. Worth stating for emphasis is the tautology that choice is a deliberate act, and choosing what to think “means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” (Wallace).
His speech is not “fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound” and concludes by defining what Wallace calls the “capital-T Truth”: “It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over: ‘This is water.’” (Wallace).
Wallace’s address and fish parable remind one of Charles Baudelaire’s description of the flâneur: “The crowd is his element as the air is that of the birds and water of the fishes.” (Baudelaire,“The Painter of Modern Life” 9). A flâneur is an ardent observer of ordinary life around him and a philosopher of experience. The term is often used pejoratively to refer to a loafer, an idler, or someone wealthy enough to do nothing. However, being a flâneur is the antithesis of doing nothing; it is seeking and discovering the water. The flâneur is hyper-aware and leading an active and contemplative life:
For the perfect flâneur, for the passionate spectator, it is an immense joy to set up house in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of the movement, in the midst of the fugitive and the infinite. To be away from home and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to be at the centre of the world, and get to remain hidden from the world– such are a few of the slightest pleasures of those independent, passionate, impartial natures which the tongue can but clumsily define. (Baudelaire, “The Painter of Modern Life” 9).
Baudelaire’s flâneur’s wandering the Parisian streets as recorded in Paris Spleen and The Flowers of Evil further reminds one of Jack Kerouac’s wandering– on a nationwide scale– in On the Road. Kerouac’s autobiographical novel adeptly describes contemporary, ordinary, American life in detail for 400 pages. Sal Paradise, Kerouac’s alter ego in the novel, is focused on proximate detail, but he is restless, always wanting to be in another city or on another coast, always wanting to be travelling. Two passages offer an apt comparison. The first is from Baudelaire:
This life is a hospital where every patient is seized with a longing to change beds. One would like to suffer in front of the stove, another thinks they’d improve next to the window. (Baudelaire, “Anywhere out of the World” 99).
The second is from Kerouac:
…because he has no place he can stay in without getting tired of it and because there’s nowhere to go but everywhere, and keep rolling under the stars… (Kerouac 130).
They both describe the same restless, phenomenological state in motion, seeking meaning from experience. This way of life is contemplative, but it requires active participation and travel– and it requires being alive in the moment, as Wallace says: “The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.”
“At last my soul explodes! ‘Anywhere! Just so it is out of this world!’” (Baudelaire, “Anywhere out of the World” 100).
I. Librarian
Works Cited:
Baudelaire, Charles. The Flowers of Evil, translated by James McGowan, Oxford University Press, 1993.
Baudelaire, Charles. “The Painter of Modern Life.” The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated and edited by Jonathan Mayne, Phaidon Publishers, Inc., 1965, Internet Archive, archive.org/details/painterofmodernl0000char.
Baudelaire, Charles. “Anywhere out of the World.” Paris Spleen, translated by Louis Varèse, New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1970.
Kerouac, Jack. On the Road: The Original Scroll. Penguin Books, 2008.
Wallace, David Foster. “This Is Water.” Commencement address, Kenyon College, 21 May 2005.
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