Never the biggest fan of public appearances — especially those which emphasized his importance—David Foster Wallace nonetheless accepted an invitation to deliver the 2005 commencement speech for Kenyon College. Much of Wallace’s work circles uneasily around the knowledge that simple, homespun cliches are actually meaningful and important once you scrape away the smug label of “common sense” obscuring what’s actually being said. “How do trite things get to be trite?” recovering addict Don Gately wonders in Infinite Jest. “Why is the truth usually not just un- but anti- interesting?” It’s a problem Wallace reiterated in an interview with Salon while promoting the book: “All the things that my parents said to me, like ‘It’s really important not to lie.’ OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I really don’t feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you[...] I’m in pain, I’m nervous, I’m lonely and I can’t figure out why. Then I realize, ‘Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie.’ The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting [...] can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can’t, that seems to me to be important.”

Given that commencement speeches are the ultimate form of cliche—barring a fiery political activist showing up to speak on behalf of a specific cause, there’s only so much generic advice that can be given to the graduate—Wallace’s Kenyon speech is pretty magnificent, proving his point within the most restrictive format he could choose. This is both emotionally stirring and impeccably written. “This Is Water” is a brief story about fish (it’s in Infinite Jest too) that’s actually about the difficulty of consciously engaging with the banal texture of everyday life, and why that’s essential. Empathy itself can be a wan cliche, but cliches have meaning that can only be accessed through hard labor and conscious thought. (There’s something oddly Buddhist about Wallace’s occasional emphasis on transcendence through boredom, something that will probably become clearer when The Pale King—with its IRS backdrop—is published next year.) Another point is how important it is to consciously choose what to think about; to illustrate his point about “the mind being a terrible master,” Wallace explains the thoughts of those who kill themselves and how they got there.

The quote was dragged out in virtually every early-response eulogy following Wallace’s suicide. I mention that only because the book release of This Is Water seems in itself a semi-cynical rapid-response release of a text freely available on the internet. There’s nothing inherently wrong with taking a commencement speech and turning it into an obvious graduation present (small, compact, readable in 10 minutes), a transition that seems natural enough; still, it’s hard not to be skeptical of any volume which puts every sentence on its own page. This is counterintuitive for a lot of reasons (the entirety of pg. 111: “and so on”), but the biggest is that Wallace’s work is known (overknown, really) for the collision of long sentence upon sentence. The point wasn’t that the sentences were showy, but that sentence after sentence, you could see a thought process forming; the goal, on some level, was to depict nothing less than the frequently disconnected and rambling ways the mind articulates itself. Sometimes it’s torrents of neurotic variations on the same fear; sometimes, disconnected threads bump up against each other repeatedly, showing how hard it is to focus in an environment full of distractions. (There are many more reasons for his style; those are just some suggestions.) Wallace toned his trademark down for the commencement speech, which is pretty straightforward, syntactically and vocab-wise, but it’s still a series of thoughts. Placing every sentence on its own page elevates each of them to the status of 137 twinkling aphorisms of brilliance. Which is obviously nonsense.

The biggest problem is how this style undermines the sheer casualness of Wallace’s prose: there is no reason to separate “That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. So let’s get concrete” onto two different pages: it gives each of them a disproportionate weight they don’t ask for. I would suggest that the transcript linked to above is way superior: not just because the paragraphs make sense, but it gives you a better feel for Wallace’s responsiveness and casual wit. At one point, Wallace is hypothesizing a day of rage: “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.” There’s applause, and Wallace ad-libs “this is an example of how NOT to think, though” before continuing.

It’s a perfectly legitimate choice to clean all this stuff out of the final printed version; still, there’s so many bad ideas made in the presentation of this (let me say it again: brilliant, heartbreaking) speech that it’s hard not to think this book is  more a rushed publishing necessity than a thoughtful addition to a canon that will be expanding for years. There’s plenty of uncollected DFW floating around the internet in various forms, and someday when it’s easier to focus, it will no doubt be collected. It would have been nice if this speech, too, had waited unti then.