高级英语阅读1-4ppt

The “day to day life” we get stuck in
“day-to-day life” : early rising; traffic to work; eight-to-ten hour work days; stopping for groceries for dinner; bad store lighting, long register lines; a slow driving home; going to bed “our default setting has us standing in the centre of the universe and that our own feeling and needs should dictate the surrounding priorities.”
The purpose of liberal arts education
Learning how to think “…learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” “根叔” 当你春风得意、一帆风顺之时，请你选择低下头，看看脚下 的大地，一步一个脚印。 当你灰心丧气、迷茫彷徨之时，请你选择仰望星空，天空对 你和他人一样宽广。 … 当你想有新的获得，你可能需要同时选择舍弃。不懂得舍弃， 就难以有真正的获得。 对于别人的过错，请你选择理解与宽容；对于别人的给予， 请你选择记忆；而你对别人的帮助，请选择遗忘。
Distrust of the authority:


the people who believe in the conspiracy theories and those who promote them. When we looked into the writings and videos of those claiming that the 9/11 attacks were a government conspiracy, virtually all of them seemed to be intentionally manipulative and distorting the evidence. So it seems that there are people who are actively trying to get people to become more distrusting of government-provided information.
Why they are hardest to see or talk about?
“There is no experience you’ve had that you were not at the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is right there in front of you, or behind you, to the left or right of you, on your TV, or your monitor, or whatever. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.” But Wallace says there is hope by…
READING 1
This is Water
David Foster Wallace
Review

This is water, subtitled Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life, is a publication of the address David Foster Wallace delivered to students at Kenyon College, Ohio, in 2005. It is the first of Wallace’s posthumous works – he hanged himself in September, aged 46.
Perhaps… may catch you sliding into a morass of
misanthropic assumptions about people getting in your way:

“If I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to food shop, because my natural default setting is that situations like this are really all about me…and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way…”
But the simple and obvious is all around us and to keep telling yourself…
Homework (After-reading materials）

Group 6: 1) Oral Presentation of Reading 2 (20min) 2) Reviews of Reading 3 Group 7: 1) Oral Presentation of Reading 3 (20min) 2) Reviews of Reading 2 Other Groups: 1) Reviews of Reading 2 2) Reviews of Reading 3
Two Young Fish
David Foster Wallace opens his speech by means of a parable-ish story. But it sets the theme of the whole speech: “…the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are the hardest to see and talk about.”
Perhaps your assumptions are wrong…

Consider empathetically why someone else pushes into the queue in front of you, what is going on in their life that causes them to take an extreme step,
A choice for you

to reset that default switch; or

to keep the alternative: “ The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing”


READING 2
Moon Landing Faked!! – Why People Believe in Conspiracy Theories
by Sander van der Linden
Is it really proper to attribute the way of conspiracy thinking to the psychopathological nature?
Perhaps…
Compassion/reflection for mutual understanding relies on not seeing yourself as the central actor in the human drama.
Seeing things through others’ situations, or Resetting the default switch
His writing styles:
Hale Waihona Puke Baidu
One of the distinctions of his writing is its resistance to compression. His sentences are flowing and convoluted. Wallace rebelled against conciseness: he ran from glibness or sound bite. His writing challenges readers to go with him for the long haul, enter the full complexity of his processes, and finally enjoy the rewards. It is irreducible.
Bertrand Russell knew this in 1929. He said,
“If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way.”
“Why get mad sitting in traffic when you realize everybody else is unhappy. Why yell at the driver that cut you off and is weaving in and out of traffic. Maybe his kid is sick and he’s trying to get home. The long line at the supermarket may be filled with people who have tougher lives than you and me. Some of these people may be harboring horrific childhood memories and it’s all they can do to keep from jumping off a building.”

That's more analysis and interpretation than the sort of paranoid approach implied by "conspiracy theorist." Assuming that the US lies about its reasons for invading a country is just prudent.