Word Painting

jeanyay:

I got this tattoo in Ireland last week, it’s from a commencement speech given by David Foster Wallace at Kenyon College. 

“The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline and being able truly to care about other people and being able to sacrifice for them. Over and over, in myriad, heavy little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race. The constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing…

The capital T Truth is about life before death. It is 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, this is water. This is water.”