Dreams of DFW (DFW Memorial Part VI)

I dreamed of David Foster Wallace a few nights ago. He looked just like his photos, the ones where he has long hair and no bandana. He was smiling, and I was standing next to my spouse, and David was asking me how I was doing, and what was going on in my life. I started to cry. I was trying to tell him that I knew he had been sad and that I hoped he was OK now. In my dream, he had tried to kill himself but failed ...
He smiled and said, "I'm doing fine. I'm not sad anymore. But tell me about you. ..."
And that was it.
I know why I dreamed the dream. That day, I had finally got a look at the new, posthumous book of his.
It's a copy of a commencement speech he gave at Kenyon College, an essay I dearly love. It didn't have a title when he gave it. Now it's called, "This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life." Of course, the speech wasn't really long enough for a proper book. So the publisher decided to print one sentence per page, creating a book that comes in at 144 pages.
In theory, this could be a good idea, forcing the reader to slow down and savor the language.
But I thought it made the speech seem disjointed. Kind of like someone reading aloud at too slow a pace.
On a more positive note, I love the cover. It's white with a little tiny goldfish at the bottom.

The goldfish is part of the opening anecdote:

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?"
... If you're worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don't be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.

The parable of the fish also figured prominently into his novel Infinite Jest, which is a personally totemic novel for me.
I will end up buying the book, even though you can read the essay for yourself on the Internet here. Some people might say it's dumb to buy a book of an essay that you can read on the Internet, but this doesn't account for the phenomenon of text-as-beloved-object. I love the permanence and tangibility and symbolism of words written on bound paper. Not the same as the computer, not to me.