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"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?”

The quote is from David Foster Wallace 2005 commencement speech to the graduating class at Kenyon College. You can see the  Speech Video or you can read the full transcription

If nothing else, Wallace speech is timeless, telling us 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"

In 2015, Time Magazine called Wallace speech the Greatest Commencement Speech of All Time and highlighted 5 Takeaways. 

David Wallace (1962 - 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace's 1996 novel "Infinite Jest " was cited by Time magazine as one of the 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. His posthumous novel, "The Pale King" (2011), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012. The Los Angeles Times's David Ulin called Wallace "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last twenty years". Wallace grew up in Illinois and attended Amherst College. He taught English at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College. After struggling with depression for many years, he died by suicide in 2008, at age 46.

Voltaire - (1694-1778)  François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire. was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his attacks on the established Catholic Church, and his advocacy of freedom of religion, freedom of speech, and separation of church and state. He was one of the greatest of all French writers.

Stendhal,  (1783 – 1842), Marie-Henri Beyle known by his nom de plume Stendhal, was a 19th-century French writer. He is highly regarded for the acute analysis of his characters' psychology and considered one of the early and foremost practitioners of realism. Among his novels novels are Le Rouge et le Noir (The Red and the Black, 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme (The Charterhouse of Parma, 1839) A self-proclaimed egotist, he coined the same characteristic in his characters' "Beylism". 

Jorge Luis Borges'  (August 24, 1899–June 14, 1986) in “Borges and I” — his classic parable of selfhood, exploring the divide between private person and public persona that each of us must live with and live into. It appears in Labyrinths (public library) — a collection of Borges’s stories, essays, parables, and other writings, originally published in 1962  More at The Marginalian ➜ 

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"In The Story of Ferdinand (public library), a gentle-souled young misfit bull sits out the perpetual head-butting by which his peers hone their bull-skills, choosing instead to smell the flowers under his favorite cork tree in solitude. His mother, at first worried about his bullness, recognizes her son’s difference and trusts that he would find his way" And so he does..... Read more

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"In December of 1914, a series of grassroots, unofficial ceasefires took hold of the Western Front in the heat of WWI. On Christmas, soldiers from an estimated 100,000 British and German troops began to exchange seasonal greetings and sing songs across the trenches",........ Continue Reading

"A pleasingly disorienting foray into the fundamental perplexity of life".

From Rumi to Blake to Nick Cave, by way of trees, hummingbirds, grief, and music. In this sixteenth year of The Marginalian, which draws primarily on the timeless wonders and wisdoms of the past, here are sixteen books of the immediate present that left on me a mark on par with those immortals — Read more

“The world where the owl is endlessly hungry and endlessly on the hunt is the world in which I live too. There is only one world.” Read more

Image credit: The royal natural history (1893) Authors: Lydekker, Richard,- Smithsonian Libraries

“Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends… Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute, out of reach, beyond our control.”