You Can’t Make Your Own Meaning

(This Is What Water Feels Like)

Salaam,

I read David Foster Wallace’s speech This is Water as a senior in high school. My English teacher must have had a dark sense of humor because after discussing the essay together, he handed us a printout from a New York newspaper. Two paragraphs down the article, we discover that Mr. Wallace, the author whose thoughts we’d been examining for the past 30 minutes, died by suicide a year prior.

When you know an author is deceased, like some writer from centuries past, the fact of his death matters very little when reading his work. But when you think someone is alive, only to find out they are dead, it colors your reading of their work. And Wallace had not died by some illness; he died from despair and ended his own life. What was even more puzzling for us—and I guess this was my teacher’s point—is Wallace’s essay didn't read like a suicide letter or anything approximating it. On the surface—and somewhat underneath the surface too—he gave no hints that he was troubled to the extent he was. Quite the contrary, his essay had directives to live with purpose and always give your fellow man the benefit of the doubt.

But the foundation of the essay had some problems. For one, the principles he espoused for living a good life weren’t based on anything it all. Wallace drew his conclusions not from any philosophy or world view; but from his own lived experience about how best to navigate the world and coexist with others. He lacked a standard, foundation, or higher power in which to seed these ideas. "This Is Water" was all the effort of a man trying to make the world meaningful all on his own.

Meaning-making is a very big task. One human mind can’t make it all make sense. We need help. Help from religion, from God, from collected wisdom and wisdom passed down.

I’m not passing judgment on Mr. Wallace. Unlike so many other people who are comfortable, or at least pretend to be comfortable with the idea that life is random and lacking inherent meaning, Wallace was honest with himself: life without meaning is painful, and trying to manufacture meaning on your own is a herculean task not appropriate for mere mortals. He felt that deep in his soul and lived as authentically as he could with the few tools he had. What he gifted us with his speech, "This Is Water," is a feat of compassion written like a true son of his times. However, in what he wasn’t able to achieve and articulate, we find a greater lesson: meaning is not simply something you manufacture, it’s something you tap into.

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