Summary Of This Is Water By Annie Dillard

According to David Foster Wallace, default setting is when we believe ourselves to be the “absolute center of the universe, the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” In his “This is Water” speech, he continues to explain that we have a choice of what to think about and we “get to decide how we’re going to try to see it.” It would be not just looking at something small, but looking at something as a whole. While Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” doesn’t make reference to his idea of default setting, her essay still had plenty of points about the idea of seeing other things. In Annie Dillard’s “Seeing” she show multiples examples of not just looking at yourself, but rather at the smaller things that people would never really see unless they were to really try to look and see. In David Foster Wallace’s “This is Water”, he explains how we should not think that the world revolves around us and that we are the most important person that exist in the universe. Instead, he says how we should think about others before ourselves. An example he gives in his speech was going to the supermarket after work.

She explains that you don’t always have to see to really be able to see something. Dillard shows this by talking about darkness and her experience with it as she stayed at the creek late. During her time outside late, she reveals that although she was not able to see clearly, she was still able to describe clearly what she was hearing. “I couldn’t see whether that sere rustle I heard was a distant rattlesnake, slit-eyed, or a nearby sparrow kicking in the dry flood debris slung at the foot of a willow.” Even if she could not see, she could feel herself “spinning 836 miles an hour round the earth’s axis” and when she closed her eyes, she could still “see stars, deep stars giving way to deeper stars, deeper stars bowing to deepest stars at the crown of an infinite