Steve: Good morning. This is Steve here at The Linguist, and I'm sitting with Keith, who is a high school teacher, and David, who is a tutor with The Linguist system. Now, Keith, you have prepared some assignments for high school students in the socials area, specifically in literature. Could you explain to us which items you have assigned and why you chose to assign these items to the students?
Keith: I have chosen a theme of "living in the moment." I have chosen the readings of "Country Life," All I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, and also a poem, "Road Less Traveled." Each of these look at how people can or have lived their lives, and what has resulted from living their lives in that way. Each of them are unique, each of them the theme is not obvious, you have to actually read into the text to find how "living in the moment" applies to each, but a well-worthy exercise, looking at each text closely. Steve: Now David, you have recorded these for our learners. What sort of impression did you get? How did these different articles strike you when you were recording them?
David: Henry David Thoreau actually fascinates me the most. Everyone seems to know his name, but I really don't know much about him or what sort of impact he had on American society at that time. He seemed to be a pacifist, something like that. I was just wondering, who was Henry David Thoreau?
Keith: Henry David Thoreau was an intellectual-obviously, trained in Harvard one would have to be, I would imagine-whose views on the world were coming out of a period of time in the United States, where the United States was becoming more of an influential and powerful country, bordering on massive industrialization and going away where living in the moment, the basics of people's existence up to that point, living day-by-day, making the most of what they had every day. People began to start living for the future, living for material goods, living for things which were outside of what was historically part of their society, and I think Thoreau was a reactionary to that movement, and his poetry, his thoughts were anchored in the basics of life: appreciating nature, appreciating daily life, appreciating simply being alive. And that's where living in the moment has come out of Thoreau's philosophy. Steve: But in some sense, don't we all face this contradiction? In a way, the material success of North American society, which we all enjoy, is the result of people who are willing to sacrifice their immediate enjoyment for future benefit, who would work hard today, whereas we often associate people who will want to enjoy themselves all the time or to drink or to spend all their money or to always have a good time as being people who aren't building for the future, and that even during Thoreau's time, what the Americans had been able to build there was as a result of their willingness to sacrifice their immediate pleasures, and isn't this willingness to sort of forgo immediate pleasure very much a part of the sort of American-Protestant ethic which was as strong in Thoreau's time as it is today, so that isn't there always, even as we discipline ourselves to forgo that immediate gratification of our pleasure, we kind of hanker back to some other model where we could just idle by a stream fishing, and so forth and so on. I mean, I wonder if those contradictions aren't always going to be there? I don't know, David, perhaps I could ask David for some comments on that. David: I'm not sure if I'd be the one to comment on that specifically, but I certainly agree with what you're saying. The practicality of his philosophy-I was just wondering if this is a philosophy that is something that you can actually live by, or is it something that you should just muse upon? Can you actually drop out of society?
Keith: In today's world, it's virtually impossible to do that. We saw a huge movement in that way during the late sixties and seventies-the hippie era was, without a doubt, perhaps the greatest dropout of modern society that we have ever seen. I think it's important to understand that Thoreau could afford to think and live in that way. The dates don't strike me immediately, but early 1900s, late 1800s, you could afford to find a safe, quiet place in which to do that, to live in the moment, to not be worried about generating wealth and making a living. It's virtually impossible in today's world. What is important is to understand that there is a part of life which is becoming more and more scarce, is people appreciating what they have at the time. I constantly look back to my travels through third world countries, seeing children playing in the street with nothing more than a stick and an old tire, running up and down the street all day long, laughing, giggling, having a great time. Those kids were living in the moment. They knew nothing of Game Boy, they knew nothing of Xbox, they knew nothing of the modern advantages of the North American world, yet they laugh just as loud, perhaps if not louder as kids today in my hometown. So there's an element that Thoreau and living in the moment and what he advocates, which cannot be dispensed of. It can't go out with-It can't be seen as, "Oh, that's just a luxury of the past and we need not concern ourselves with that, because we must, we must, we must gain more wealth, we must gain more things." Living in the moment is what keeps us grounded, is what-humans, that's what from which we came is living in the moment. We have no choice. We're probably genetically coded toward living in the moment, and if we throw that away, then we as a society, I think, are in big trouble.
