Monday, October 15, 2012

Response to Wallace's article


After reading the commencement speech that David Foster Wallace gave, I believe this is one of the best speeches I have ever read or listened. I love the way his opening story. It sounds like a normal story with “banal platitude”, but this is a good lesson for “young fish”.  Followed by stories that he tells, a very intelligent idea has been mentioned, “learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what to think.” How to think is not the most important thing we have to learn, but what to think is. Everyone in the world has his or her own way of thinking, so no one could say what is the perfect way of thinking for everyone. People should focus on what to think. A student better thinks about how to learn more things in an efficient way, instead of thinking about to make more money. Once a people find a right thing to think about, he or she is not far away from finding the right method of thinking.  He uses the shopping at the supermarket story to tell us the way of thinking. People can’t judge one thing based on what they saw, but should be based on truth.  I totally agree with him, we should see things in many points of view, not only from the positive side, but also the negative side. 

The only thing that I don’t like about this speech is that speaker does not mention how to control our thoughts. Even though he mentions that the good education could help people to find what to think, but he fails to present any suggestions to those people who does not have such good education like graduate from Kenyon College. Overall, I enjoy reading this article. 

No comments:

Post a Comment