James McBride was born in 1957 to an African-American father and a Polish Jewish immigrant mother. McBride's biological father, Andrew Dennis McBride, died of lung cancer while his mother, Ruth McBride, was pregnant with James. Therefore James regarded his stepfather, Hunter Jordan, as "Daddy." James's mother eventually had twelve children, eight from her first marriage and four from her second. James grew up in New York City and Delaware.…
Inside the story of “Follow the Water” Georgie has a dream to be able to live on the marvelous planet of Mars, but when she finally reaches Mars she has to face reality. As a child Georgie had always imagined Mars being “a comfortable life with beautiful domed cities that have amazing views of the landscape.” Sadly when she got there with her space crew she was disappointed on so many levels. Unlike her dream, Mars had dust blowing everywhere, terrible temperature, no water to use, dangerous sand storms, and a small dome she calls home. In this story the author is trying to tell you that she would rather be back on Earth then Mars, and dream that was on cloud 9 just dropped down to the ground.…
What the Water’s Revealed, an essay by Jim Wallis, argues that the silent story of poverty in America was brought to light in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He also covers issues such as the war in Iraq and government spending that came under fire as a result of the storm. These were all issues that were slowly brewing prior to Katrina, but came to a head once people started looking for answers. Jim Wallis follows the classic principals of argumentation in his article. The subject covered in the article, is controversial and shocking for many Americans. He uses ethos, pathos, and logos to develop authority in the article and connect with readers.…
In his speech This is Water David Foster Wallace during a commencement ceremony begins discussing the purpose of education, not only to become intellectually educated but to learn how to think. He introduces a metaphor of two fishes that after being asked how the water was, they wondered what water is, being water all the actual and commonly dismissed reality that surrounds us. Thus, it has led us to create a natural default setting that has caused individuals to become centralized in their individual/personal needs only, and that our needs are sometimes put over more relevant matters to fulfill our necessities first. He states that knowing how to think is to be capable to decide what things we pay attention to and what we learn from experience.…
In his speech “This is water” David F. Wallace (2005) states the advantage of being open-minded and describes the effectiveness of proper way of thinking. At the beginning the speaker claims that throughout life people may not be able to notice and discuss what is really important in life by illustrating the example of fish talk about the water. He argues that even though people have the ability to analyze, nevertheless they may not be able to realize how exactly to do it, and this is what liberal arts education tries to teach.…
In “This Is water” David Foster Wallace teaches us to be more compassionate rather than be self-center. Firstly, he mentions how education can help us to change our natural response by giving us the awareness about how to think and not what to think. Secondly, the choice of what to think about this idea consider that most of us are close-minded, unaware of how imprisoned we are to our own perception that continually shaping us which make us the center of our own universal. Furthermore, choosing on how to see and reason things can be the truth about the world around us rather than thinking the world revolves around us only. Finally, choosing on what to believe can either free or cage us when we set our mind towards it.…
Wallace, David Foster. "This is Water." Kenyon college commencement speech. May 21, 2005. Wallace's speech gives a look at reality. The way an American adult's life is. The way how everything is routine, how if not "well adjusted," you will be self centered and in default setting. He describes the daily routine of an American adult, and how he goes to a supermarket, packed with more people. He gets frustrated and annoyed by all of these people; how they are just wasting his time. He then starts thinking how all of these people are going through the same thing he is going through; they have rough days just as he does. If someone was to think outside the box and actually focus on the beauty of this world, they will not be bored, annoyed, frustrated,…
Wallace, Davis Foster." This is Water", Kenyon College Commencement Speech, 2005. The basic information that has been taken out of this speech is, what it really means to think, and learning how to exercise some control on what you think. It is easy to live off our set default rather than look differently at life. Setting a new dedication on how to see life and how you construct meaning from experience. At the beginning, Wallace suggests that as hard we try, we cannot escape from the truths we hold as humans. Throughout the text, it creating a sense of emotion when referring of birth to death, because humans, experience any set of emotion at any state of mind. No matter, the occasion, the place a human will always be alone, every journey is…
It seems funny because the obvious truth between the unaware relationship of the living and our own views of the world cannot be dismissed. We tend to create our own set of beliefs also practice and demand from others. At the end, Foster Wallace points out that there is no required default setting or personal sets of beliefs we must adhere to, only making choice to think the way we want to think and become whom we want to become. However, we have to pay for what we worship. He comes up with two kinds of worship: the worship of money, power or self-tiny-skull-sized Kingdom and the worship of awareness, discipline and being able to care about other people. For Foster Wallace, the worship of external subject itself and imprison our own thoughts can never free our happiness from endless…
Wallace started his speech with a short story about an older fish asking a couple of younger fish about the water. The younger fish swam a little and could not figure out what the older fish meant. Wallace then clarified by saying, “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” (199). This explanation leads to the main idea, which is the fact that a change in thinking that only your time is important or that people need to get out of your way, can save citizens from being so unhappy with everyone around them and their daily routine at their eight to five job. “Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to automatically be sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe” (201).…
Awareness comes across the population of humanity in many insightful fashions. This of other desirable traits has one of the greatest impacts on your life, whether you are aware of it or not. Throughout the readings of This is Water and The Three Questions, it was appointed that awareness is a quality of life that is acquired with time. I believe that having this trait has a world of difference if you find a way to merge it into your life; the result could end up being the difference between life or death. The way “awareness” is expressed in these pieces of writing, varies greatly, but can easily relate to each other under discrete circumstances.…
In The Color of Water by James McBride, we are taught through the eyes of a black man and his white mother that color shouldn’t matter. Although Ruth McBride Jordan had grown up as a Jew and had a father who disliked Jews very much, she was never prejudice against them and learned that she fit into the black world better than the white world. When she married a black man, she accepted Christ into her life and told her children, “God is the color of water.” She taught her kids that color didn’t matter, because God loves all races.…
David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water” is a commencement speech to a group of graduating college seniors, telling them the harsh truth about life as an adult American. He utilizes this piece to ponder the problem of how and why we as humans view the world in the way we do, regarding our specific viewpoints and respective realities. He thinks upon this problem by analyzing the human psyche’s “default-setting” of being self-absorbed, and how by “learning how to think”, this cycle can be broken, using a commonplace example of a long day of work followed by a trip to the grocery store to showcase how all of us focus upon ourselves and our own intentions (3, 2). He ends up concluding that to live a common American life is “unimaginably hard”, and how we perceive this life and the world around us is what will grant us “awareness of what is real and essential” as we live it (8).…
David Wallace’s notion on the way to view different situations is not the way you usually approach a situation. There are many times that we have a negative view on the situation we are placed in, but in Wallace’s “This is Water”, he presents his audience, the friends, family and Kenyon University graduates of the class of 2005, with a different way to view a situation. Wallace informs his audience how self-centered human kind is and poses an alternative for this self-centered idea. Wallace starts his speech off with a small story of three fish. “Two younger fish are 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?’” (Wallace. 1) This example that Wallace gives is an example of how we are a selfish group of humans. The two young fish were so focused on their self’s that they were to distracted to see what was…
Quote 1, "Come on," I say. "I'm taking us somewhere we can cool off. Cooler than the movie theater, cooler than the mall, we're going to East Bay Water World." He was asking them to join him on the parks where they can peacefully cool down their bodies by swim and watch other people with short clothes and be safe on the…