[originaltext]Moderator: Good morning everyone, welcome to our seminar. Fir

Moderator:
    Good morning everyone, welcome to our seminar. First we will enjoy a speech from Ms. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who writes insightful books on the US Presidency, telling each president’s personal story against the backdrop of history. As a historian with multiple best-sellers, she will today share with us what we can learn from American presidents. Let’s welcome Ms. Goodwin.
Doris Kearns Goodwin:
    Thank you. So, indeed, I have spent my life looking into the lives of presidents who are no longer alive. Waking up with Abraham Lincoln in the morning, thinking of Franklin Roosevelt when I went to bed at night. But when I try and think about what I’ve learned about the meaning in life, my mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that I took when I was a graduate student at Harvard with the great psychologist Erik Erikson.
    He taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play. And that to pursue one realm but ignore the other, is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age. Whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication, is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement, but with peacefulness.
    As for that first sphere of work, I think what Abraham Lincoln’s life suggests is that fierce ambition is a good thing. He had a huge ambition. But it wasn’t simply for office or power or celebrity or fame—what it was for was to accomplish something worthy enough in life so that he could make the world a little better place for his having lived in it. So fueled by that ambition, he surprised the nation with an upset victory for the presidency over three far more experienced, far more educated, far more celebrated rivals.
    So as for that second sphere, not of work, but of love include family, friends and colleagues. The Lyndon Johnson that I saw in the last years of his life, when I helped him on his autobiography, was a man who had spent so many years in the pursuit of work, power and individual success, that he had absolutely no mental or emotional resources left to get him through the days once the presidency was gone. Despite all that power, all that wealth, he was alone when he finally died.
    So as for that third sphere of play, which he never had learned to enjoy, I’ve learned over the years that even this sphere requires a commitment of time and energy so that a hobby, a sport, a love of music, or art, or literature, or any form of recreation can provide true pleasure, relaxation and refreshment.
16. What is the topic of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s talk?
17. What do the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve according to Erik Erikson?
18. What was Abraham Lincoln’s life ambition?
19. What does the sphere of play require?