Following an encounter with a student at the beginning of fall term, the writer reflects that today's student generation is a singular one: its members want to study, travel, make friends, make more friends, read everything (superfast), take in all the movies, listen to every hot band, keep up with everyone they've ever known. They live to multiply possibilities; they are enemies of closure. This hunger for life has a number of consequences, making this student generation appealing, highly promising, but also vulnerable. By being everywhere now, as invited by current technology, says Edmundson, they are not anywhere in particular. For today's students, life is elsewhere: they live in the future and not the present; never stopping, skating fast over the surfaces of life and covering all the extended space they can. But sometimes, planned or not, life requires one to slow down or stop, and, unequipped with the internal resources to recognize that matters are out of joint, today's students frequently crash. Drawing from a background of Wordsworth , Byron and Socrates, among others, the writer advocates his sense that the professor's primary responsibility is to offer students an opportunity to slow down, to suggest new ways of seeing and saying things, ways which for some students may be truer for them than those they grew up with. There is no better place for that than a college classroom where, together, concludes Edmundson, teachers and students can slow down and live deliberately, if only for a while.