This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, by David Foster Wallace

This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life, by David Foster Wallace Find this book in our catalog

Author David Foster Wallace recently passed away tragically in 2008, but his commencement speech to the graduating students of Kenyon College in 2005 preserves something of his integrity and ideals and offers much to us, who were not there to hear his message ourselves. Wallace defines in just a few words the utter importance of a liberal arts education, explaining that such an education bestows upon a student not so much the capacity to think, as the ability to choose what to think about. The difference is keen and of the utmost importance. If we, wrapped up in our everyday world, choose to step outside of our own lives and consider others around us, if we in our day-to-day lives choose to experience not so much our own egocentricity as the possibility of another’s self, we just might understand the essence of compassion. He argues for the importance of freedom, but freedom of a special kind, one we may not have considered before – the freedom to be aware of, to pay attention to, and truly to care about those around us, especially those whom we do not know, the everyday, anonymous human beings, who pass us by without our ever really noticing them, much less caring about them. What makes all the difference is truly seeing them and in this way feeling compassion for them. Wallace’s message is clear and succinct. We are fortunate to have it preserved for us to carry with us from this day on.

Submitted by D. L. S.

John Hope Franklin, historian of the African-American Experience

John Hope Franklin, the historian whose work focused on the African-American experience and the effect of slavery, died March 25. He was 94.

His classic work, published in 1947 and reissued several times including 2000, one of many influential titles he wrote, was From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African-Americans. Find this book in our catalog.

His autobiography was Mirror to America. Find this book in our catalog.

The New York Times wrote this of Dr. Franklin: "During a career of scholarship, teaching and advocacy that spanned more than 70 years, Dr. Franklin was deeply involved in the painful debates that helped reshape America's racial identity, working with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., W. E. B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall and other major civil rights figures of the 20th century."