From a commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005 to a viral video eight years later, David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" has become a widely-shared and talked about piece of writing. Now the thought-provoking essay lives on in another form.
Illustrator Jessica Hagy has created a flowchart based on the late writer's inspiring text and published it on her Medium blog Soaking in Wonder. The image is as fluid a flowchart as they come with a blue squiggly line connecting seemingly disparate line graphs. The graphs feature positive correlations between actions mentioned in Foster Wallace's essay that would help lead someone to achieving a compassionate life. These include an increase in "attention paid" with "changes made" and "hope felt" with "beauty seen." However, as Hagy shows, doing more of just one of these can lead to getting more of the rest.
The passage directly quoted from Foster Wallace at the center of the flowchart comes near the end of "This is Water," where Foster Wallace discusses the benefits of being more conscious in your day-to-day life. In the section, Foster Wallace discusses how changing how you perceive simple, everyday annoyances, such as a woman screaming at her child in the checkout line, can possibly alter your entire outlook on life. "The only thing that's capital-T True is that you get to decide how you're going to try to see it. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn't," Foster Wallace wrote.
If you have some time to kill, and since you're on the Internet, you probably have loads of it. Head on over to Hagy's blog Indexed where you'll find plenty of neat charts that look like just simple pencil drawings, but that will actually make you think and possibly let out a chuckle or two. Highlights include her Venn diagram of humanity, her line graph on stripper names and a chart on the reality show trifecta.
(h/t Co.Design)
