Page 14 - ProvidenceChristianCollege_Magazine_Spring2018

Dr. Corbin pictured with his wife Catherine, and children Eliza and Jack.
tHis is Living Water, continued froM Previous Page
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corrective, check. Perhaps all that is needed is a salute to all of you for your accomplishments and a call to arms as you move forward in life. Well, I’m not going to make it that easy because you and I know that it isn’t that easy.
There is still the elephant in the room . . . us. In other words, why can’t we get this thing right?
Perhaps the most celebrated recent commencement address, David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College speech titled “This is Water,” takes up this question poignantly. Wallace begins his speech by telling a “parable-ish story.”
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?”
Wallace relates that because if we don’t think about water [“day in-day out” existence] the right way if at all, we end up self-centered, close-minded, bored, annoyed with others and unaware of what is real and essential: “capital-T Truth is about life before death.”
Closing his address with the words “this is water,” “this is water,” he wishes the young graduates “way more than luck.”
Tragically, Wallace would take his own life two years later.