A speech by the late David Foster Wallace | Books | The Guardian. (20th Sept 2008)

David Foster Wallace, who died 12th Sept 2008, was the most brilliant American writer of his generation. In a speech, published in the Guardian (later book title:  ‚This is Water‘) for the first time, he reflects on the difficulties of daily life and ‚making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head‘

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, 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?“

If you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise old fish explaining what water is, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The immediate point of the fish story is that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about. 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 life-or-death importance. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete …