Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. 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?” 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. “Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. Here are the links to the original audio followed by the entire speech. Wallace hits on our need to manage rather than remove our core hard-wired human instincts. What emerges is a portrait of a man sinking rapidly into a pit of despair as he comes face to face with his own darkest nightmares of personal failure.David Foster Wallace‘s 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College, is a timeless trove of wisdom - right up there with Hunter Thompson on finding your purpose and living a meaningful life. The speech was made into a thin book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. In telling Crowhurst's sad story, Osmond and Rothwell intercut narration from Crowhurst's journals, archival film, and interviews with the sailor's family, friends, and colleagues. Foreseeing disaster, Crowhurst decided to end his life by drowning himself. He didn't count, however, on Tetley's boat capsizing - which led to Crowhurst's own victory. When Robin Knox-Johnston won the overall competition, Crowhurst and Nigel Tetley went head-to-head to win 5,000 pounds for the fastest voyage Crowhurst recognized that a victory would yield scrutiny of his logbooks and unveil his deceptions to the world he thus intended to preserve his reputation by coming in second. Indeed, two weeks after Crowhurst sailed out of Devon, the boat began to leak substantially recognizing that a trip into the Southern Ocean could spell disaster, a desperate Crowhurst radioed home with indications of phony distances and falsified his logbook he then made an illegal pit stop in Argentina to repair the boat, and joined up with the rest of the competitors on the opposite side of Cape Horn, in the Atlantic. But the voyage was doomed from the start: Crowhurst failed to finish building the craft prior to his October 31st departure, but set sail just the same, and thus sealed his own grim fate. Relinquishing the voyage, or failing to complete it, would thus have instantly rendered Crowhurst homeless and driven his family into Chapter 11. In financing the boat via a deal with English entrepreneur Stanley Best, Crowhurst used his house as collateral. In autumn 1968, Britisher Donald Crowhurst, the proprietor of a down-and-out manufacturing business for marine electrical components, avowed to enter the first Golden Globe sailing competition - a nonstop, one-man circumnavigational race against eight other competitors. Co-directors Louise Osmond and Jerry Rothwell's historical documentary Deep Water chronicles one of the most infamous nautical tragedies of the past several decades.
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