This is Water - David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace’s essay, “This is Water” explores the significant relationship between education and one’s ability to be sympathetic, conscious and adjusted in their everyday lives. This general thesis statement is supported and further developed throughout the essay as he describes the “day-to-day trenches of adult existence” that a couple of university students, to whom the essay is addressed to, will face as they enter new alternate realities. Foster suggests that us individuals, are naturally quite self centered as we consider ourselves to be the “center of the universe” and of the utmost importance in our everyday lives. In our everyday lives, we tend to ignore the people around us and fail to consider, understand, and empathize what they might be experiencing. To support this, Wallace implies that this is imply our “default setting”, allowing us to be “deeply and literally self-centered”. Although this “default setting” seems to be inevitable and is considered to be “well adjusted”, we do have the option to deviate from this setting and become conscious of our surroundings.

A very relevant example that David Foster Wallace uses to support his thesis, is an in depth description of one’s everyday life, as an adult of course. Wallace describes the supermarket, more specifically the line up to check out, and the annoying experience that we each go through as we await to leave the store after a long, tiring day at the office. This "stupid and infuriating" brings us back to our default setting. Now, being aware of this allows us to acknowledge the choices that we can make in that moment of anger; we can either view the world as self centered human being, susceptible by our emotions in the moment, or we can go on to be empathetic and open-minded. An interesting connection that Wallace makes to our "default setting", is one linked to religion and forms of worship. Similar to forms of worship in religion, we gradually slip into our default settings, getting more and more selective about what we see and we measure the value of things without ever really being fully aware that that's what were doing. This brings us to our enquiry question, "How can literature develop empathy and emotional intelligence?".

"How can literature develop empathy and emotional intelligence?".

"This is Water" and it's significant contents brings up many relatable links to this question. The essay itself brings up the question on how we, as individuals living amongst many other individuals, can find ways to be more empathetic. As Literature does, we become more open to being able to possibly relate or find empathy in the works of others. When learning how to empathize with others, we are developing our ability to open our minds to others who might be experiencing the world with a completely different vision than our own. In conclusion, a conscious decision must be made when pushing ourselves to look beyond our own little "bubble" and empathize with those around us.