Quick Take
- Narration: David Foster Wallace reads his own commencement address, and the result is irreplaceable; his voice carries the weight and the irony in ways no actor could replicate.
- Themes: Conscious attention, the default setting of self-absorption, compassion as a daily practice
- Mood: Quietly urgent, intimate, tinged with retrospective sorrow
- Verdict: Twenty-four minutes that will stay with you longer than most novels you have ever finished.
I first encountered this speech years ago in one of those short video clips that used to circulate online, the kind with uplifting music underneath and animated fish swimming across the screen. I thought I understood it. Then I listened to the original Audible recording, Wallace's own voice, unadorned, and realized how much the visual packaging had been flattening something genuinely strange and uncomfortable. I was sitting in my car outside a grocery store when the twenty-four minutes ended and I just sat there for a while, not moving.
This Is Water is the only public talk David Foster Wallace ever gave on his views on life. It was delivered as a commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, three years before his death. Little, Brown released it as a book, and now it exists as this recording, which is simply Wallace reading his own words. That is the whole product. There is no narrator, no adaptation, no framing. It is twenty-four minutes of a man telling college graduates, with full intellectual honesty, how hard it actually is to be awake.
Our Take on This Is Water
The speech circles around a deceptively simple idea: that the most difficult and most important choice an adult can make is what to pay attention to, and how. Wallace is not offering inspiration in the conventional commencement sense. He is describing the exhausting, grinding default setting of the human mind, the one that places you at the center of every traffic jam, every grocery line, every dull interaction, and invites you to treat everyone around you as an obstacle. His alternative is not optimism. It is something more like sustained, effortful compassion, chosen over and over again, without any guarantee it will feel good.
Why Listen to This Is Water
The case for the audio format over the book is straightforward: this is a speech, and Wallace's cadence is part of the meaning. The dry humor lands differently when you hear him deliver it. The pauses mean something. One reviewer noted that the book's visual formatting, one sentence per page, was designed to enforce reflection, and argued the audio collapses those pauses. That is a legitimate point. But there is something the audio gives in return: Wallace's voice has a quality that is simultaneously casual and precise, the voice of someone who has thought about language so carefully that even his offhand remarks are exact. You sense the effort behind the ease. Another reviewer called it "almost like one long poem," and the audio honors that quality in its own way.
What to Watch For in This Is Water
The brevity is not a flaw, but it is worth naming plainly. At twenty-four minutes, this is one of the shortest audiobooks in any catalog. Some listeners will feel shortchanged. The low rating count reflects the small audience who has found it here rather than through the more widely circulated video versions or the printed book. What is worth knowing is that brevity is intrinsic to the form: a commencement speech is not a book, and Wallace did not expand it. What you are getting is exactly what was said, nothing padded, nothing added. The emotional weight of listening to this after knowing how Wallace's life ended is something listeners will each navigate in their own way. It does not make the speech a document of tragedy; it makes it something harder to categorize.
Who Should Listen to This Is Water
This recording is for anyone who has read Wallace and wants to hear him speak, and equally for anyone who has never read him and wants an entry point that is not Infinite Jest. It suits listeners in their twenties confronting the tedium of adult life, and listeners in their forties who have already been living it and want to name what they have been navigating. Skip it only if you are specifically looking for something long, or if you are convinced that philosophy dressed in everyday language is not for you. Everyone else: twenty-four minutes is not a commitment. Listen while you make dinner.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this really only 24 minutes long?
Yes. It is the original commencement address, unedited and unpadded. The length is intrinsic to the work. If you are looking for an extended audiobook experience, the printed book version offers a formatted meditation with visual spacing that changes the rhythm.
Does Wallace read it himself, or is there a separate narrator?
Wallace reads it himself. That is the central value of this particular recording. The speech was delivered live at Kenyon College in 2005, and this is that reading, not a studio performance by an actor.
Is prior familiarity with David Foster Wallace necessary to appreciate the speech?
No. The speech stands entirely on its own. Knowledge of his other work adds a retrospective layer of feeling, but Wallace designed the address for college graduates with no background in his fiction or essays.
Why is the rating count so low compared to the speech’s cultural prominence?
The speech circulated widely in video form and as a printed book. Many listeners encountered it through those channels rather than this Audible listing, which explains the small number of reviews here relative to how well-known the work actually is.
