新年伊始，分享一篇值得细细品读的文章，出自 David Foster Wallace（1962 年 2 月 21 日－2008 年 9 月 12 日，美国作家、大学教授）。本文选自他于 2005 年在肯尼恩学院（Kenyon College）发表的毕业典礼演讲。
我们之中有许多人在生活中感到挣扎，是因为被困在一种“默认设置”之中——在这种状态下，我们不自觉地把自己视为宇宙的绝对中心。在这篇余音绕梁的精彩演讲中，David Foster Wallace 为我们提供了另一种看待世界的方式。
Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. 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?”
This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. 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. I am not the wise old fish. 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. 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.
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. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, becausethe really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualize stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out.That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
You get the idea.
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.
But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line.Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.
It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
“This is water.”
“This is water.”
It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
I wish you way more than luck.以下是中文翻译版本：
这就是水（This Is Water）
——2005 年毕业典礼演讲首先，向在座的毕业生表示祝贺与感谢。
我想先讲一个小故事。
有两条年轻的小鱼，在水里并排游着。
它们迎面遇到了一条年长的鱼。
老鱼点点头，说：“早啊，孩子们。
水怎么样？”两条小鱼继续往前游了一会儿。
终于，其中一条看了看另一条，说：“水？
水是什么？”这个故事真正想说的，
其实只有一件事：那些最显而易见、也最重要的现实，
往往恰恰是最难被看见、
也最难被谈论的。如果把这句话当成一句英语句子来看，
它听起来确实像一句
再普通不过的陈词滥调。但问题在于——
在成年生活日复一日的“战壕”里，
这些陈词滥调，
真的可能关乎一个人
是活着，
还是只是还没死。我想，在这样一个
干燥而美好的早晨，
把这个想法交给你们。像今天这样的毕业典礼演讲，
通常都要完成一个“规定动作”：
解释你们所接受的博雅教育
究竟有什么意义。也就是说——
为什么你们即将拿到的这个学位，
不只是带来物质回报，
而是具有真实的人类价值。于是，我们就会不可避免地
遇到毕业典礼中
最常见、也最让人翻白眼的一句话：“博雅教育的意义，
不在于灌输知识，
而在于教你如何思考。”如果你跟我当年一样，
你大概早就听腻了这句话。
而且，说实话，
它听起来确实有点侮辱人。毕竟，
你能被这样一所好大学录取，
本身不就说明
你已经会思考了吗？但我想提出的是：
这句老掉牙的博雅教育陈词，
其实一点都不侮辱人。因为它真正指向的，
根本不是你“有没有思考能力”。而是：
在你拥有完全自由的前提下，
你选择把注意力放在哪里。真正重要的“思考教育”，
并不是“会不会想问题”。而是：
你在任何时刻，
选择“想什么”。如果你觉得：
“我当然可以选择思考什么”，
这件事明显到
不值得花时间讨论，那我只想请你——
再想一想那两条鱼，
再想一想“水”。并且，
请你暂时把
对“显而易见之物是否值得认真对待”的怀疑，
先放在一边。因为，
正是那些
你最不觉得需要花心思去想的东西，
往往在悄悄塑造着
你是谁，
以及你将如何度过你的人生。在你们即将离开校园、进入真实世界之前，
我想再讲一个小故事。假设你在阿拉斯加的一家酒吧里。
那是一个冬夜，外面很冷，
里面很热。你和几个朋友坐在吧台边，
正在喝酒、聊天。这时，酒吧门被推开了，
走进来一个人。
他穿着厚厚的外套，
看起来刚从暴风雪中进来。他走到吧台前，
点了一杯啤酒。然后，
他开始说话。这个人开始向酒吧里的每一个人解释：
他为什么不相信上帝。他说得很大声，
也很自信。
而且，他听起来，
一点都不觉得自己在冒犯谁。他说他受过教育，
他说他很理性，
他说他已经认真思考过这些问题。于是，
他得出结论：
相信上帝，
是幼稚的。这个故事的重点，
并不在于这个人对不对。重点在于：
他是如此确信。他确信到——
根本没有意识到，
他此刻正在一个
对他所确信之事
有着完全不同信念的地方。我们大多数人的问题，
并不在于我们有没有信念。而在于：
我们对自己的信念，
确信得太轻松了。我们会不自觉地把
自己的经验、
自己的背景、
自己的判断，
当成一种
“显而易见的现实”。而一旦你把某种理解
当成了“显而易见”，
它就很容易变成
一种看不见的傲慢。这种傲慢并不是
张扬的、恶意的、
或咄咄逼人的。恰恰相反，
它往往是
安静的、
自动的、
毫无自觉的。你甚至不需要刻意觉得
“我比别人更好”。你只需要
默认：
我所看到的世界，
就是世界本身。我们每一个人，
在出生时，
都被安装了一套
默认设置。这套设置，
会不断向我们证明一件事：我是世界的中心。
我的感受，
是最真实的；
我的需要，
是最迫切的；
我的视角，
自然地成为
一切判断的起点。这不是道德问题，
也不是人格缺陷。这是
系统出厂设置。现在，让我们回到
最真实、也最难处理的地方。不是哲学，
不是价值观，
而是——
日常生活。假设这是一个
再普通不过的工作日。你下班很晚，
很累，
饿着肚子。你只想做一件事：
去超市，
随便买点东西，
回家。但事情并不会这么顺利。
超市里很拥挤，
灯光刺眼，
音乐难听，
队伍排得很长。你前面那个人
动作慢得不可思议，
收银员看起来
完全不在状态。你的脑子开始自动运转。
你的内心独白，
正在悄悄登场。“他们怎么这么慢？”
“为什么偏偏是今天？”
“我已经够累了，
为什么还要受这个？”在这个时刻，
世界仿佛分成了两部分：我，
和
那些挡在我和回家之间的人。而真正困难、
也真正自由的地方在于：在那个极其微小的瞬间，
你是否还有能力
选择另一种看法。也许，
那个人刚刚结束
一整天的体力劳动。也许，
那个不耐烦的司机
正在赶去医院。也许，
这些都不是真的。但重点从来不在于
哪一种解释“更正确”。重点在于：
你是否意识到——
你正在“解释”。现在，我想谈一件
可能让人不太舒服的事。那就是——
崇拜。在成年世界里，
没有所谓
“不崇拜任何东西”。每一个人，
都会把某种东西
当成终极重要之物。如果你崇拜金钱与物质，
你永远不会觉得
“够了”。如果你崇拜外貌与魅力，
你会一直活在
不安之中。如果你崇拜权力，
你会永远害怕
失去控制。如果你崇拜聪明与优越感，
你终将发现
自己其实
并不如想象中聪明。这些崇拜对象
并不邪恶。恰恰相反，
它们非常合理。但它们都有一个
共同点：它们会慢慢吃掉你。
真正稀缺的，
并不是成功、
幸福、
或自由。而是——
持续地、清醒地
选择把注意力
放在哪里。这种选择，
不会自动发生。它需要
一次又一次地
被练习。在堵车时，
在超市里，
在疲惫的夜晚，
在你最不想练习的时候。这就是
那两条鱼
一直生活其中的东西。这就是
你每天泡在其中，
却最容易忽略的现实。这就是水。