Good afternoon, class. Hope you are well.
Last week we read from Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Minister's Black Veil," a dark, symbolic piece on the terrors of guilt and sin set in colonial America, Puritan New England. You were to read, summarize, and respond to Stephen King's short story "Suffer the Little Children," another dark drama about a school teacher whose mind is prey to images and ideas that may or may not have any basis in outward reality, but who acts upon them in a most extreme and horrific manner. The workings of the unconscious mind and a haunting sense of evil are themes central to each of these stories.
In today's scheduled film, we follow the true story of a young man alienated from family and society who seeks to find himself, to heal himself, too, in the truths that wild nature and "freedom" provide him. He opts for a simple life on the road, and so leaves his comfortable life behind and sets out for the West, a place of vast landscapes and seemingly endless opportunities for adventure. The title of the film is Into the Wild (2007), directed by Sean Penn.
As a companion piece, you will take home and read Henry David Thoreau's "Where I Lived and What I Lived For," a chapter from Walden, a book inspired by an experiment he made in living simply and wisely, which involved retiring to a small cabin he himself built by Walden pond in Massachesetts, "where he would front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
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