新编英语教程6 课文原文

Unit One

TEXT I

Two Words to Avoid, Two to Remember

Arthur Gordon

1Nothing in life is more exciting and rewarding than the sudden flash of insight that leaves you a changed person – not only changed, but changed for the better. Such moments are rare, certainly, but they come to all of us. Sometimes from a book, a sermon, a line of poetry. Sometimes from a friend….

2 That wintry afternoon in Manhattan, waiting in the little French restaurant, I was feeling frustrated and depressed. Because of several miscalculations on my part, a project of considerable importance in my life had fallen through. Even the prospect of seeing a dear friend (the Old Man, as I privately and affectionately thought of him) failed to cheer me as it usually did. I sat there frowning at the checkered tablecloth, chewing the bitter cud of hindsight.

3He came across the street, finally, muffled in his ancient overcoat, shapeless felt hat pulled down over his bald head, looking more like an energetic gnome than an eminent psychiatrist. His offices were nearby; I knew he had just left his last patient of the day. He was close to 80, but he still carried a full case load, still acted as director of a large foundation, still loved to escape to the golf course whenever he could.

4By the time he came over and sat beside me, the waiter had brought his invariable bottle of ale. I had not seen him for several months, but he seemed as indestructible as ever. “Well, young man,” he said without preliminary, “what’s troubling you?”

5I had long since ceased to be surprised at his perceptiveness. So I proceeded to tell him, at some length, just what was bothering me. With a kind of melancholy pride, I tried to be very honest. I blamed no one else for my disappointment, only myself. I analyzed the whole thing, all the bad judgments, the false moves. I went on for perhaps 15 minutes, while the Old Man sipped his ale in silence.

6When I finished, he put down his glass. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back to my office.”

7“Your office? Did you forget something?”

8“No,” he said mildly. “I want your reaction to something. That’s all.”

9A chill rain was beginning to fall outside, but his office was warm and comfortable and familiar: book-lined walls, long leather couch, signed photograph of Sigmund Freud, tape recorder by the window. His secretary had gone home. We were alone.

10The Old Man took a tape from a flat cardboard box and fitted it onto the machine. “On this tape,” he said, “are three short recordings made by three persons who came to me for help. They are no t identified, of course. I want you to listen to the recordings and see if you can pick out the two-word phrase that is the common denominator in all three cases.” He smiled. “Don’t look so puzzled. I have my reasons.”

11What the owners of the voices on the tape had in common, it seemed to me, was unhappiness. The man who spoke first evidently had suffered some kind of business loss or failure; he berated himself for not having worked harder, for not having looked ahead. The woman who spoke next had never married because of a sense of obligation to her widowed mother; she recalled bitterly all the marital chances she had let go by. The third voice belonged to a mother whose teen-age son was in trouble with the police; she blamed herself endlessly.

12The Old Man switched off the machine and leaned back in his chair. “Six times in those recordings a phrase is used that’s full of subtle poison. Did you spot it? No? Well, perhaps that’s because you used it three times yourself down in the restaurant a little whil e ago.” He picked up the box that had held the tape and tossed it over to me. “There they are, right on the label. The two saddest words in any language.”

13I looked down. Printed neatly in red ink were the words: If only.

14“You’d be amazed,” said the Old Man, “if you knew how many thousands of times I’ve sat in this chair and listened to woeful sentences beginning with those two words. ‘If only,’ they say to me, ‘I had done it differently –or not done it at all. If only I hadn’t lost my temper, said the cruel thing, made that dishonest move, told that foolish lie. If only I had been wiser, or more unselfish, or more self-controlled.’

They go on and on until I stop them. Sometimes I make them listen to the recordings you just heard. ‘If only,’ I say to them, ‘you’d stop saying if only, we might begin to get somewhere!’”

15The Old Man stretched out his legs. “The trouble with ‘if only,’” he said, “is that it doesn’t change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way – backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can become a real roadblock, an excuse for not trying any more.

16“Now take your own case: your plans didn’t work out. Why? Because you made certain mistakes. Well, that’s all right: everyone makes m istakes. Mistakes are what we learn from. But when you were telling me about them, lamenting this, regretting that, you weren’t really learning from them.”

17“How do you know?” I said, a bit defensively.

18“Because,” said the Old Man, “you never got out of the past tense. Not once did you mention the future. And in a way-be honest, now! –you were enjoying it. There’s a perverse streak in all of us that makes us like to hash over old mistakes. After all, when you relate the story of some disaster or disappoi ntment that has happened to you, you’re still the chief character, still in the center of the stage.”

19I shook my head ruefully. “Well, what’s the remedy?”

20“Shift the focus,” said the Old Man promptly. “Change the key words and substitute a phrase that supplies lift instead of creating drag.”

21“Do you have such a phrase to recommend?”

22“Certainly. Strike out the words ‘if only’; substitute the phrase ‘next time.’”

23“Next time?”

24“That’s right. I’ve seen it work minor miracles right here in this room. As long as a patient keeps saying ‘if only’ to me, he’s in trouble. But when he looks me in the eye and says ‘next time,’ I know he’s on his way to overcoming his problem. It means he has decided to apply the lessons he has learned from his experience, ho wever grim or painful it may have been. It means he’s going to push aside the roadblock of regret, move forward, take action, resume living. Try it yourself. You’ll see.”

25My old friend stopped speaking. Outside, I could hear the rain whispering against the windowpane.

I tried sliding one phrase out of my mind and replacing it with the other. It was fanciful, of course, but I could hear the new words lock into place with an audible click….

26The Old Man stood up a bit stiffly. “Well, class dismissed. It ha s been good to see you, young man. Always is. Now, if you will help me find a taxi, I probably should be getting on home.”

27We came out of the building into the rainy night. I spotted a cruising cab and ran toward it, but another pedestrian was quicker.

28“My, my,” said the Old Man slyly. “If only we had come down ten seconds sooner, we’d have caught that cab, wouldn’t we?”

29I laughed and picked up the cue. “Next time I’ll run faster.”

30“That’s it,” cried the Old Man, pulling his absurd hat down around his ears. “That’s it exactly!”

31Another taxi slowed. I opened the door for him. He smiled and waved as it moved away. I never saw him again. A month later, he died of sudden heart attack, in full stride, so to speak.

32More than a year has passed since that rainy afternoon in Manhattan. But to this day, whenever I find myself thinking “if only”, I change it to “next time”. Then I wait for that almost-perceptible mental click. And when I hear it, I think of the Old Man.

33A small fragment of immortality, to be sure. But it’s the kind he would have wanted.

From: James I. Brown, pp. 146-148.

Unit Two

TEXT I

The Fine Art of Putting Things Off

Michael Demarest

1“Never put off till tomorrow,” exhorted Lord Chesterfield in 1749, “what you can do today.” That the elegant earl never got around to marrying his son’s mother and had a bad habit of keeping worthies

like Dr. Johnson cooling their heels for hours in an anteroom attests to the fact that even the most well-intentioned men have been postponers ever. Quintus Fabius Maximus, one of the great Roman generals, was dubbed “Cunctator” (Delayer) for putting off battle until the last possible vinum break. Moses pleaded a speech defect to rationalize his reluctance to deliver Jehovah’s edict to Pharaoh. Hamlet, of course, raised procrastination to an art form.

2The world is probably about evenly divided between delayers and do-it-nowers. There are those who prepare their income taxes in February, prepay mortgages and serve precisely planned dinners at an ungodly 6:30 . The other half dine happily on leftovers at 9 or 10, misplace bills and file for an extension of the income tax deadline. They seldom pay credit-card bills until the apocalyptic voice of Diners threatens doom from Denver. They postpone, as Faustian encounters, visits to barbershop, dentist or doctor.

3Yet for all the trouble procrastination may incur, delay can often inspire and revive a creative soul. Jean Kerr, author of many successful novels and plays, says that she reads every soup-can and jam-jar label in her kitchen before settling down to her typewriter. Many a writer focuses on almost anything but his task-for example, on the Coast and Geodetic Survey of Maine’s Frenchman Bay and Bar Harbor, stimulating his imagination with names like Googins Ledge, Blunts Pond, Hio Hill and Burnt Porcupine, Long Porcupine, Sheep Porcupine and Bald Porcupine islands.

4From Cunctator’s day until this century, the art of postponement had been virtually a monopoly of the military (“Hurry up and wait”), diplomacy and the law. In former times, a British proconsul faced with a native uprising could comfortably ruminate about the situation with Singapore Sling in hand. Blessedly, he had no nattering Telex to order in machine guns and fresh troops. general as late as World W ar II could agree with his enemy counterpart to take a sporting day off, loot the villagers’ chickens and wine and go back to battle a day later. Lawyers are among the world’s most addicted postponers. According to Frank Nathan, a nonpostponing Beverly Hil ls insurance salesman, “The number of attorneys who die without a will is amazing.”

5Even where there is no will, there is a way. There is a difference, of course, between chronic procrastination and purposeful postponement, particularly in the higher echelons of business. Corporate dynamics encourage the caution that breeds delay, says Richard Manderbach, Bank of America group vice president. He notes that speedy action can be embarrassing or extremely costly. The data explosion fortifies those seeking excuses for inaction – another report to be read, another authority to be consulted. “There is always,” says Manderbach, “a delicate edge between having enough information and too much.”

6His point is well taken. Bureaucratization, which flourished amid the growing burdens of government and the great complexity of society, was designed to smother policymakers in blankets of legalism, compromise and reappraisal –and thereby prevent hasty decisions from being made. The centralization of government that led to Watergate has spread to economic institutions and beyond, making procrastination a worldwide way of life. Many languages are studded with phrases that refer to putting things off –from the Spanish manana to the Arabic bukrafil mishmish(literally “tomorrow in apricots,” more loosely “leave it for the soft spring weather when the apricots are blooming”).

7Academe also takes high honors in procrastination. Bernard Sklar, a University of Southern California sociologist who churns out three to five pages of wri ting a day, admits that “many of my friends go through agonies when they face a blank page. There are all sorts of rationalizations: the pressure of teaching, responsibilities at home, checking out the latest book, looking up another footnote.”

8Psychologists maintain that the most assiduous procrastinators are women, though many psychologists are (at $50 —plus an hour) pretty good delayers themselves. Dr. Ralph Greenson, a professor of clinical psychiatry (and Marilyn Monroe’s onetime shrink), takes a fa irly gentle view of procrastination. “To many people,” he says, “doing something, confronting, is the moment of truth. All frightened people will then avoid the moment of truth entirely, or evade or postpone it until the last possible moment.” To Georgia S tate Psychologist Joen Fagan, however, procrastination may be a kind of subliminal way of sorting the important from the trivial. “When I drag my feet, there’s usually some

reason,” says Fagan. “I feel it, but I don’t yet know the real reason.”

9In fact, there is a long and honorable history of procrastination to suggest that many ideas and decisions may well improve if postponed. It is something of a truism that to put off making a decision is itself a decision. The parliamentary process is essentially a system of delay and deliberation. So, for that matter, is the creation of a great painting, or an entrée, or a book, or a building like Blenheim Palace, which took the Duck of Marlborough’s architects and laborers 15years to construct. In the process, the design can mellow and marinate. Indeed, hurry can be the assassin of elegance. As T. H. White, author of Swords in the Stone, once wrote, time “is not meant to be devoured in an hour or a day, but to be consumed delicately and gradually and without haste.” In other words, pace Lord Chesterfield, what you don’t necessarily have to do today, by all means put off until tomorrow.

From: G. Levin, 4th ed., pp. 429 - 434

Unit Three

TEXT I

Walls and Barriers

Eugene Raskin

1My father’s reaction to the bank buildi ng at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City was immediate and definite: “You won’t catch me putting my money in there!” he declared. “Not in that glass box!”

2Of course, my father is a gentleman of the old school, a member of the generation to whom a good deal of modern architecture is unnerving; but I suspect—I more than suspect, I am convinced—that his negative response was not so much to the architecture as to a violation of his concept of the nature of money.

3In his generation money was thought of as a tangible commodity—bullion, bank notes, coins—that could be hefted, carried, or stolen. Consequently, to attract the custom of a sensible man, a bank had to have heavy walls, barred windows, and bronze doors, to affirm the fact, however untrue, that money would be safe inside. If a building’s design made it appear impregnable, the institution was necessarily sound, and the meaning of the heavy wall as an architectural symbol dwelt in the prevailing attitude toward money, rather than in any aesthetic theory.

4But that attitude toward money has of course changed. Excepting pocket money, cash of any kind is now rarely used; money as a tangible commodity has largely been replaced by credit, a bookkeeping-banking matter. A deficit economy, accompanied by huge expansion, has led us to think of money as a product of the creative imagination. The banker no longer offers us a safe, he offers us a service—a service in which the most valuable elements are dash and a creative flair for the invention of large numbers. It is in no way surprising, in view of this change in attitude, that we are witnessing the disappearance of the heavy-walled bank. The Manufactures Trust, which my father distrusted so heartily, is a great cubical cage of glass whose brilliantly lighted interior challenges even the brightness of a sunny day, while the door to the vault, far from being secluded and guarded, is set out as a window display.

5Just as the older bank asserted its invulnerability, this bank by its architecture boasts of its imaginative powers. From this point of view it is hard to day where architecture ends and human assertion begins. In fact, there is no such division; the two are one and the same.

6It is in the understanding of architecture as a medium for the expression of human attitudes, prejudices, taboos, and ideals that the new architectural criticism departs from classical aesthetics. The latter relied upon pure proportion, composition, etc., as bases for artistic judgment. In the age of sociology and psychology, wal ls are not simply walls but physical symbols of the barriers in men’s minds.

7In a primitive society, for example, men pictured the world as large, fearsome, hostile, and beyond human control. Therefore they built heavy walls of huge boulders, behind which they could feel

themselves to be in a delimited space that was controllable and safe; these heavy walls expressed man’s fear of the outer world and his need to find protection, however illusory. It might be argued that the undeveloped technology of the period precluded the construction of more delicate walls. This is of course true. Still, it was not technology, but a fearful attitude toward the world, which made people want to build walls in the first place. The greater the fear, the heavier the wall, until in the tombs of ancient kings we find structures that are practically all wall, the fear of dissolution being the ultimate fear.

8And then there is the question of privacy – for it has become questionable. In some Mediterranean cultures it was not so much the world of nature that was feared, but the world of men. Men were dirty, prying, vile, and dangerous. One went about, if one could afford it, in guarded litters, women went about heavily veiled, if they went about at all. One’s house was surrounded by a wall, and the rooms faced not out, but in, toward a patio, expressing the prevalent conviction that the beauties and values of life were to be found by looking inward, and by engaging in the intimate activities of a personal as against a public life. The rich intricacies of the decorative arts of the period, as well as its contemplative philosophies, are as illustrative of this attitude as the walls themselves.

9We feel different today. For one thing, we place greater reliance upon the control of human hostility, not so much by physical barriers, as by the conventions of law and social practice —as well as the availability of motorized police. We do not cherish privacy as much as did our ancestors. We are proud to have our women seen and admired, and the same goes for our homes. We do not seek solitude; in fact, if we find ourselves alone for once, we flick a switch and invite the whole world in through the television screen. Small wonder, then, that the heavy surrounding wall is obsolete, and we build, instead, membranes of thin sheet metal or glass.

10The principal function of today’s wall is to separate possibly undesirable outside air from the controlled conditions of temperature and humidity which we have created inside, Glass may accomplish this function, though there are apparently a good many people who still have qualms about eating, sleeping, and dressing under conditions of high visibility; they demand walls that will at least give them a sense of adequate screening. But these shy ones are a vanishing breed. The Philip Johnson house in Connecticut, which is much admired and widely imitated, has glass walls all the way around, and the only real privacy is to be found in the bathroom, the toilette taboo being still unbroken, at least in Connecticut.

11To repeat, it is not our advanced technology, but our changing conceptions of ourselves in relation to the world that determine how we shall build our walls. The glass wall expresses man’s conviction that he can and does master nature and society. The “open plan” and the unobstructed view are consistent with his faith in the eventual solution of all problems through the expanding efforts of science. This is perhaps why it is the most “advanced” and “forward-looking” among us who live and work in glass ho uses. Even the fear of the cast stone has been analyzed out of us.

From: T. Cooley, pp. 194 - 199

Unit Four

TEXT I

The Lady, or the Tiger? Part I

Frank R. Stockton

1In the very olden time there lived a semi-barbaric king, whose ideas, though somewhat polished and sharpened by the progressiveness of distant Latin neighbors, were still large, florid, and untrammeled, as become the half of him which was barbaric. He was a man of exuberant fancy, and, withal, of an authority so irresistible that, at his will, he turned his varied fancies into facts. He was greatly given to self-communing; and, when he and himself agreed upon anything, the thing was done. When every member of his domestic and political systems moved smoothly in its appointed course, his nature was bland and genial; but whenever there was a little hitch, and some of his orbs got out of their orbits, he was blander and more genial still, for nothing pleased him so much as to make the crooked straight, and crush down uneven places.

2Among the borrowed notions by which his barbarism had become semified was that of the public arena, in which, by exhibition of manly and beastly valor, the minds of his subjects were refined and cultured.

3But even here the exuberant and barbaric fancy asserted itself. The arena of the king was built, not to give the people an opportunity of hearing the rhapsodies of dying gladiators, nor to enable them to view the inevitable conclusion of a conflict between religious opinions and hungry jaws, but for purposes far better adapted to widen and develop the mental energies of the people. The vast amphitheater, with its encircling galleries, its mysterious vaults, and its unseen passages, was an agent of poetic justice, in which crime was punished, or virtue rewarded, by the decrees of an impartial and incorruptible chance.

4When a subject was accused of a crime of sufficient importance to interest the king, public notice was given that on an appointed day the fate of the accused person would be decided in the king’s arena —a structure which well deserved its name; for, although its form and plan were borrowed from afar, its purpose emanated solely from the brain of this man, who, every barleycorn a king, knew no tradition to which he owed more allegiance than pleased his fancy, and who ingrafted on every adopted form of human thought and action the rich growth of his barbaric idealism.

5When all the people had assembled in the galleries, and the king, surrounded by his court, sat high up on his throne of royal state on one side of the arena, he gave a signal, a door beneath him opened, and the accused subject stepped out into the amphitheater. Directly opposite him, on the other side of the enclosed space, were two doors, exactly alike and side by side. It was the duty and the privilege of the person on trial to walk directly to these doors and open one of them. He could open either door he pleased: he was subject to no guidance or influence but that of the aforementioned impartial and incorruptible chance. If he opened the one, there came out of it a hungry tiger, the fiercest and most cruel that could be procured, which immediately sprang upon him, and tore him to pieces, as a punishment for his guilt. The moment that the case of the criminal was thus decided, doleful iron bells were clanged, great wails went up from the hired mourners posted on the outer rim of the arena, and the vast audience, with bowed heads and downcast hearts, wended slowly their homeward way, mourning greatly that one so young and fair, or so old and respected, should have merited so dire a fate.

6But, if the accused person opened the other door, there came from it a lady, the most suitable to his years and station that his majesty could select among his fair subjects; and to this lady he was immediately married, as a reward of his innocence. It mattered not that he might already possess a wife and family, or that his affections might be engaged upon an object of his own selection; the king allowed no such subordinate arrangements to interfere with his great scheme of retribution and reward. The exercises, as in the other instance, took place immediately, and in the arena. Another door opened beneath the king, and a priest, followed by a band of choristers, and dancing maidens blowing joyous airs on golden horns and treading an epithalamic measure, advanced to where the pair stood, side by side; and the wedding was promptly and cheerily solemnized. Then the gay brass bells rang forth their merry peals, the people shouted glad hurrahs, and the innocent man, preceded by children strewing flowers on his path, led his bride to his home.

7This was the king’s semi-barbaric method of administering justice. Its perfect fairness is obvious. The criminal could not know out of which door would come the lady: he opened either he pleased, without having the slightest idea whether, in the next instant, he was to be devoured or married. On some occasions the tiger came out of one door, and on some out of the other. The decisions of this tribunal were not only fair, they were positively determinate: the accused person was instantly punished if he found himself guilty; and, if innocent, he was rewarded on the spot, whether he liked it or not. There was no escape from the judgments of the king’s arena.

8The institution was a very popular one. When the people gathered together on one of the great trial days they never knew whether they were to witness a bloody slaughter or a hilarious wedding. This element of uncertainty lent an interest to the occasion which it could not otherwise have attained. Thus the masses were entertained and pleased, and the thinking part of the community could bring no charge of unfairness against this plan; for did not the accused person have the whole matter in his own hands?

From: B. Litzinger, pp. 323-324 Unit Five

TEXT I

The Lady, or the Tiger? Part II

Frank R. Stockton

1This semi-barbaric king had a daughter as blooming as his most florid fancies, and with a soul as fervent and imperious as his own. As is usual in such cases, she was the apple of his eye, and was loved by him above all humanity. Among his courtiers was a young man of that fineness of blood and lowness of station common to the conventional heroes of romance who love royal maidens. This royal maiden was well satisfied with her lover, for he was handsome and brave to a degree unsurpassed in all this kingdom; and she loved him with an ardor that had enough of barbarism in it to make it exceedingly warm and strong. This love affair moved on happily for many months, until one day the king happened to discover its existence. He did not hesitate nor waver in regard to his duty in the premises. The youth was immediately cast into prison, and a day was appointed for his trial in the king’s arena. This, of course, was an especially important occasion; and his majesty, as well as all the people, was greatly interested in the workings and development of his trial. Never before had such a case occurred; never before had a subject dared to love the daughter of a king. In after-years such things became commonplace enough; but then they were, in no slight degree, novel and startling.

2The tiger-cases of the kingdom were searched for the most savage and relentless beasts, from which the fiercest monster might be selected for the arena; and the ranks of maiden youth and beauty throughout the land were carefully surveyed by competent judges, in order that the young man might have a fitting bride in case fate did not determine for him a different destiny. Of course, everybody knew that the deed with which the accused was changed had been done. He had loved the princess, and neither he, she, nor any one else thought of denying the fact; but the king would not think of allowing any fact of this kind to interfere with the workings of the tribunal, in which he took such great delight and satisfaction. No matter how the affair turned out, the youth would be disposed of; and the king would take an aesthetic pleasure in watching the course of events, which would determine whether or not the young man had done wrong in allowing himself to love the princess.

3The appointed day arrived. From far and near the people gathered, and thronged the great galleries of the arena; and crowds, unable to gain admittance, massed themselves against its outside walls. The king and his court were in their places, opposite the twin doors —those fateful portals, so terrible in their similarity.

4All was ready. The signal was given. A door beneath the royal party opened, and the lover of the princess walked into the arena. Tall, beautiful, fair, his appearance was greeted with a low hum of admiration and anxiety. Half the audience had not known so grand a youth had lived among them. No wonder the princess loved him! What a terrible thing for him to be there!

5As the youth advanced into the arena, he turned, as the custom was, to bow to the king: but he did not think at all of that royal personage; his eyes were fixed upon the princess, who sat to the right of her father. Had it not been for the moiety of barbarism in her nature, it is probable that lady would not have been there; but her intense and fervid soul would not allow her to be absent on an occasion in which she was so terribly interested. From the moment that the decree had gone forth, that her lover should decide his fate in the king’s arena, she had thought of nothing, night or day, but this great event and the various subjects connected with it. Possessed of more power, influence, and force of character than any one who had ever before been interested in such a case, she had done what no other person had done –— she had possessed herself of the secret of the doors. She knew in which of the two rooms, that lay behind those doors, stood the cage of the tiger, with its open front, and in which waited the lady. Through these thick doors, heavily curtained with skins on the inside, it was impossible that any noise or suggestion should

come from within to the person who should approach to raise the latch of one of them; but gold, and the power of a woman’s will, had brought the secret to the princess.

6And not only did she know in which room stood the lady ready to emerge, all blushing and radiant, should her door be opened, but she knew who the lady was. It was one of the fairest and loveliest of the damsels of the court who had been selected as the reward of the accused youth, should he be proved innocent of the crime of aspiring to one so far above him; and the princess hated her. Often had she seen, or imagined that she had seen, this fair creature throwing glances of admiration upon the person of her lover, and sometimes she thought these glances were perceived and even returned. Now and then she had seen them talking together; it was but for a moment or two, but much can be said in a brief space; it may have been on most unimportant topics, but how could she know that? The girl was lovely, but she had dared to raise her eyes to the loved one of the princess; and, with all the intensity of the savage blood transmitted to her through long lines of wholly barbaric ancestors, she hated the woman who blushed and trembled behind that silent door.

7When her lover turned and looked at her, and his eye met hers as she sat there paler and whiter than any one in the vast ocean of anxious faces about her, she saw, by that power of quick perception which is given to those souls are one, that she knew behind which door crouched the tiger, and behind which stood the lady. He had expected her to know it. He understood her nature, and his soul was assured that she would never rest until she had made plain to herself this thing, hidden to all other lookers-on, even to the king. The only hope for the youth in which there was any element of certainty was based upon the success of the princess in discovering this mystery; and the moment he looked upon her, he saw she had succeeded, as in his soul he knew she would succeed.

8Then it was that his quick and anxious glance asked the question: “Which?” It was as plain to her as if he shouted it from where he stood. There was not an instant to be lost. The question was asked in a flash; it must be answered in another.

9Her right arm lay on the cushioned parapet before her. She raised her hand, and made a slight, quick movement toward the right. No one but her lover saw her. Every eye but his was fixed on the man in the arena.

10He turned, and with a firm and rapid step he walked across the empty space. Every heart stopped beating. Every breath was held, every eye was fixed immovably upon that man. Without the slightest hesitation, he went to the door on the right, and opened it.

11Now, the point of the story is this: Did the tiger come out of that door, or did the lady?

12The more we reflect upon this question, the harder it is to answer. It involves a study of the human heart which leads us through devious mazes of passion, out of which it is difficult to fine our way. Think of it, fair reader, not as if the decision of the question depended upon yourself, but upon that hot-blooded, semi-barbaric princess, her soul at a white heat beneath the combined fires of despair and jealously. She had lost him, but who should have him?

13How often, in her walking hours and in her dreams, had she started in wild horror, and covered her face with her hands as she thought of her lover opening the door on the other side of which waited the cruel fangs of the tiger!

14But how much oftener had she seen him at the other door! How in her grievous reveries had she gnashed her teeth, and torn her hair, when she saw his start of rapturous delight as he opened the door of the lady! How her soul had burned in agony when she had seen him rush to meet that woman, with her flushing cheek and sparkling eye of triumph; when she had seen him lead her forth, his whole frame kindled with the joy of recovered life; when she had heard the glad shouts from the multitude, and the wild ringing of the happy bells; when she has seen the priest, with his joyous followers, advance to the couple, and make them man and wife before her very eyes; and when she has seen them walk away together upon their path of flowers, followed by the tremendous shouts of the hilarious multitude, in which her one despairing shriek was lost and drowned!

15Would it not be better for him to die at once, and go to wait for her in the blessed regions of semi-barbaric futurity?

16And yet, that awful tiger, those shrieks, that blood!

17Her decision had been indicated in an instant, but it had been made after days and nights of anguished deliberation. She had known she would be asked, she had decided what she would answer, and, without the slightest hesitation, she had moved her hand to the right.

18The question of her decision is one not to be lightly considered, and it is not for me to presume to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door — the lady, or the tiger?

From: B. Litzinger, pp. 324 - 327

Unit Six

TEXT I

Dull Work

Eric Hoffer

1There seems to be a general assumption that brilliant people cannot stand routine; that they need a varied, exciting life in order to do their best. It is also assumed that dull people are particularly suited for dull work. We are told that the reason the present-day young protest so loudly against the dullness of factory jobs is that they are better educated and brighter than the young of the past.

2Actually, there is no evidence that people who achieve much crave for, let alone live, eventful lives. The opposite is nearer the truth. One thinks of Amos the sheepherder, Socrates the stonemason, Omar the tentmaker. Jesus probably had his first revelations while doing humdrum carpentry work. Einstein worked out his theory of relativity while serving as a clerk in Swiss patent office. Machiavelli wrote The Prince and the Discourses while immersed in the dull life of a small country town where the only excitement he knew was playing cards with muleteers at the inn. Immanuel Kant’s daily life was an unalterable routine. The housewives of Konigsberg set their clocks when they saw him pass on his way to the university. He took the same walk each morning, rain or shine. The greatest distance Kant ever traveled was sixty miles from Konigsberg.

3The outstanding characteristic of man’s creativeness is the ability to transmute trivial impulses into momentous consequences. The greatness of man is in what he can do with petty grievances and joys, and with common physiological pressures and hungers. “When I have a little vexation,” wrote Keats, “it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles.” To a creative individual all experience is seminal –—all events are equidistant from new ideas and insights — and his inordinate humanness shows itself in the ability to make the trivial and common reach an enormous way.

4An eventful life exhausts rather than stimulates. Milton, who in 1640 was a poet of great promise, spent twenty sterile years in the eventful atmosphere of the Puritan revolution. He fulfilled his great promise when the revolution was dead, and he in solitary disgrace. Cellini’s exciting life kept him from becoming the great artist he could have been. It is legitimate to doubt whether Machiavelli would have written his great books had he been allowed to continue in the diplomatic service of Florence and had he gone on interesting missions. It is usually the mediocre poets, writers, etc., who go in search of stimulating events to release their creative flow.

5It may be true that work on the assembly line dulls the faculties and empties the mind, the cure only being fewer hours of work at higher pay. But during fifty years as a workingman, I have found dull routine compatible with an active mind. I can still savor the joy I used to derive from the fact that while doing dull, repetitive work on the waterfront, I could talk with my partners and compose sentences in the back of my mind, all at the same time. Life seemed glorious. Chances are that had my work been of absorbing interest I could not have done any thinking and composing on the company’s time or even on my own time after returning from work.

6people who find dull jobs unendurable are often dull people who do not know what to do with themselves when at leisure. Children and mature people thrive on dull routine, while the adolescent, who has lost the child’s capacity for concentration and is without the inner resources of the mature, needs

excitement and novelty to stave off boredom.

From: H. Shaw, pp. 397 - 398 Unit Seven

TEXT I

Beauty

Susan Sontag

1For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: a kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be what we now have to call—lamely, enviously—whole persons. It it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish between a person’s “inside” and “outside”, they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive —and so ugly. One of Socrates’ main pedagogical acts was to be ugly and teach those innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples of his how full of paradoxes life really was.

2T hey may have resisted Socrates’ lesson. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off — with the greatest facility—the “inside” (character, intellect) from the “outside” (looks); but we are a ctually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.

3It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideals of human excellence. By limiting excellence (virtus in Latin) to moral virtue only, Christianity set beauty adrift —as an alienated, arbitrary, superficial enchantment. And beauty has continued to lose prestige. For close to two centuries it has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes: the sex which, however Fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally.

4A beautiful woman, we say in English. But a handsome man. “Handsome” is the masculine equivalent of—and refusal of—a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning overtones, by being reserved for women only. The one can call a man “beautiful” in French and in Italian suggests that Catholic countries—unlike those countries shaped by the Protestant version of Christianity—still retain some vestiges of the pagan admiration for beauty. But the difference, if one exists, is of degree only. In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex — to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.

5To be called beautiful is thought to name something essential to women’s character and concerns. (In contrast to men—whose essence is to be strong, or effective, or competent) It does not take someone in the throes of advanced feminist awareness to perceive that the way women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity. Everybody (women and men) knows that. For it is “everybody”, a whole society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how one looks. (In contrast to being masculine—which is identified with caring about what one is and does and only secondarily, if at all, about how one looks.) Given these stereotypes, it is no wonder that beauty enjoys, at best, a rather mixed reputation.

6It is not, of course, the desire to be beautiful that is wrong but the obligation to be — or to try. What is accepted by most women as a flattering idealization of their sex is a way of making women feel inferior to what they actually are — or normally grow to be. For the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and to evaluate each part separately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on—each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, often despairing scrutiny. Even if some pass muster, some will always be found wanting. Nothing less than perfection will do.

7In men, good looks is a whole, something taken in at a glance. It does not need to be confirmed by giving measurements of different regions of the body, nobody encourages a man to dissect his appearance, feature by feature. As for perfection, that is considered trivial—almost unmanly. Indeed, in the ideally

good-looking man a small imperfection or blemish is considered positively desirable. According to one movie critic (a woman) who is a declared Robert Redford fan, it is having that cluster of skin-colored moles on one cheek that saves Redford from being merely a “pretty face”. Think of the depreciation of women—as well as beauty—that is implies in that judgment.

8“The privileges of beauty are immense,” said Cocteau. To be sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly so. What is lamentable is this it is the only form of power that most women are encouraged to seek. This power is always conceived in relation to men; it is not the power to do but the power to attract. It is a power that negates itself. For this power is not one that can be chosen freely—at least, not by women—or renounced without social censure.

9To preen, for a woman, can never be just a pleasure. It is also a duty. It is her work. If a woman does real work—and even if she has clambered up to a leading position in politics, law, medicine, business, or whatever—she is always under pressure to confess that she still works at being attractive. But in so far as she is keeping up as one of the Fair Sex, she brings under suspicion her very capacity to be objective, professional, authoritative, thoughtful. Damned if they do—women are. And damned if they don’t.

10One could hardly ask for more important evidence of the dangers of considering persons as split between what is “inside” and what is “outside” than that interminable half-comic half-tragic tale, the oppression of women. How easy it is to start off by defining women as caretakers of their surfaces, and then to disparage them (or find them adorable) for being “superficial”. It is a crude trap, and kit has worked for too long. But to get out of the trap requires that women get some critical distance from that excellence and privilege which is beauty, enough distance to see how much beauty itself has been abridged in order to prop up the mythology of the “feminine”. There should be a way of saving beauty from women—and for them.

From: J. Trimmer and M. Hairston, pp. 300 - 304 Unit Eight

TEXT I

Appetite

Laurie Lee

1One of the major pleasures in life is appetite, and one of our major duties should be to preserve it. Appetite is the keenness of living; it is one of the senses that tells you that you are still curious to exist, that you still have an edge on your longings and want to bite into the world and taste its multitudinous flavours and juices.

2By appetite, of course, I don’t mean just the lust for food, but nay co ndition of unsatisfied desire, any burning in the blood that proves you want more than you’ve got, and that you haven’t yet used up your life. Wilde said he felt sorry for those who never got their heart’s desire, but sorrier still for those who did. I got mine once only, and it nearly killed me, and I’ve always preferred wanting to having since.

3For appetite, to me, is this state of wanting, which keeps one’s expectations alive. I remember learning this lesson long ago as a child, when treats and orgies were few, and when I discovered that the greatest pitch of happiness was not in actually eating a toffee but in gazing at it beforehand. True, the first bite was delicious, but once the toffee was gone one was left with nothing, neither toffee nor lust. Besides, the whole toffeeness of toffees was imperceptibly diminished by the gross act of having eaten it. No, the best was in wanting it, in sitting and looking at it, when one tasted an inexhaustible treasure-house of flavours.

4So, for me, one of the keenest pleasures of appetite remains in the wanting, not the satisfaction. In wanting a peach, or a whisky, or a particular texture or sound, or to be with a particular friend. For in this condition, of course, I know that the object of desire is always at its most flawlessly perfect. Which is why I would carry the preservation of appetite to the extent of deliberate fasting, simply because I think that appetite is too good to lose, too precious to be bludgeoned into insensibility by satiation and over-doing it.

5For that matter, I don’t really want three square meals a day — I want one huge, delicious, orgiastic, table-groaning blow-out, say every four days, and then not be too sure where the next one is coming from.

A day of fasting is not for me just a puritanical device for denying oneself a pleasure, but rather a way of anticipating a rare moment of supreme indulgence.

6Fasing is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite. So I think we should arrange to give up our pleasures regularly — our food, our friends, our lovers –— in order to preserve their intensity, and the moment of coming back to them. For this is the moment that renews and refreshes both oneself and the thing one loves. Sailors and travellers enjoyed this once, and so did hunters, I suppose. Part of the weariness of modern life may be that we live too much on top of each other, and are entertained and fed too regularly. Once we were separated by hunger both from our food and families, and then we learned to value both. The men went off hunting, and the dogs went with them; the women and children waved goodbye. The cave was empty of men for days on end; nobody ate, or knew what to do. The women crouched by the fire, the wet smoke in their eyes; the children wailed; everybody was hungry. Then one night there were shouts and the barking of dogs from the hills, and the men came back loaded with meat. This was the great reunion, and everybody gorged themselves silly, and appetite came into its own; the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred celebration of life. Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas. Very nice, but too much of it, to easy and regular, serve up without effort or wanting. We eat, we are lucky, our faces are shining with fat, but we don’t know the pleasure of being hungry any more.

7Too much of anything —too much music, entertainment, happy snacks, or time spent with one’s friends—creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear, or taste, or see, or love, or remember. Life is short and precious, and appetite is one of its guardians, and loss of appetite is a sort of death. So if we are to enjoy this short life we should respect the divinity of appetite, and keep it eager and not too much blunted.

8It is a long time now since I knew that acute moment of bliss that comes from putting parched lips to a cup of cold water. The springs are still there to be enjoyed—all one needs is the original thirst.

From: M. A. Miller, pp. 305 -308

Unit Nine

TEXT I

A Red Light for Scofflaws

Frank Trippett

1Law-and-order is the longest-running and probably the best-loved political issue in . history. Yet it is painfully apparent that millions of Americans who would never think of themselves as law-breakers, let alone criminals, are taking increasing liberties with the legal codes that are designed to protect and nourish their society. Indeed, there are moments today—amid outlaw litter, tax cheating, illicit noise and motorized anarchy—when it seems as though the scofflaw represents the wave of the future. Harvard Sociologist David Riesman suspects that a majority of Americans have blithely taken to committing supposedly minor derelictions as a matter of course. Already, Riesman says, the ethic of . society is in danger of becoming this: “you’re a fool if you obey the rules.”

2Nothing could be more obvious than the evidence supporting Riesman. Scofflaws abound in amazing variety. The graffiti-prone turn public surfaces into visual rubbish. Bicyclists often ride as though two-wheeled vehicles are exempt from all traffic laws. Litter-bugs convert their communities into trash dumps. Widespread flurries of ordinances have failed to clear public places of high-decibel portable radios, just as earlier laws failed to wipe out the beer-soaked hooliganism that plagues may parks. Tobacco addicts remain hopelessly blind to signs that say NO SMOKING. Respectably dressed pot smokers no longer bother to duck out of public sight to pass around a joint. The flagrant use of cocaine is a festering scandal in middle-and upper-class life. And then there are (hello, Everybody) the jaywalkers.

3The dangers of scofflawry vary widely. The person who illegally spits on the sidewalk remains disgusting, but clearly poses less risk to others than the company that illegally buries hazardous chemical

waste in an unauthorized location. The fare beater on the subway presents less threat to life than the landlord who ignores fire safety statutes. The most immediately and measurably dangerous scofflawry, however, also happens to be the most visible. The culprit is the American driver, whose lawless activities today add up to a colossal public nuisance. The hazards range from routine double parking that jams city streets to the drunk driving that kills some 25,000 people and injures at least 650,000 others yearly. Illegal speeding on open highways? New surveys show that on some interstate highways 83% of all drivers are currently ignoring the federal 55 speed limit.

4The most flagrant scofflaw of them all is the red-light runner. The flouting of stop signals has got so bad in Boston that residents tell an anecdote about a cabby who insists that red lights are “just for decoration.” The power of the stoplight to control traffic seems to be waning everywhe re. In Los Angeles, red-light running has become perhaps the city’s most common traffic violation. In New York City, going through an intersection is like Russian roulette. Admits Police Commissioner Robert J. McGuire: “Today it’s a 50-50 toss-up as to whe ther people will stop for a red light.” Meanwhile, his own police largely ignore the lawbreaking.

5Red-light running has always been ranked as a minor wrong, and so it may be in individual instances. When the violation becomes habitual, widespread and incessant, however, a great deal more than a traffic management problem is involved. The flouting of basic rules of the road leaves deep dents in the social mood. Innocent drivers and pedestrians pay a repetitious price in frustration, inconvenience and outrage, not to mention a justified sense of mortal peril. The significance of red-light running is magnified by its high visibility. If hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue, then furtiveness is the true outlaw’s salute to the force of law-and-order. The red-light runner, however, shows no respect whatever for the social rules, and society cannot help being harmed by any repetitions and brazen display of contempt for the fundamentals of order.

6The scofflaw spirit is pervasive. It is not really surprising when schools find, as some do, that children frequently enter not knowing some of the basic rules of living together. For all their differences, today’s scofflaws are of a piece as a symptom of elementary social demoralization —the loss by individuals of the capacity to govern their own behavior in the interest of others.

7The prospect of the collapse of public manners is not merely a matter of etiquette. Society’s first concern will remain major crime, but a foretaste of the seriousness of incivility is suggested by what has been happening in Houston. Drivers on Houston freeways have been showing an increasing tendency to replace the rules of the road with violent outbreaks. Items from the Houston police department’s new statistical category—freeway traffic violence: 1) Driver flashes high-beam lights at car that cut in front of him, whose occupants then hurl a beer can at his windshield, kick out his tail lights, slug him eight stitches’ worth. 2) Dump-truck driver annoyed by delay batters trunk of stalled car ahead and its driver with steel bolt. 3) Hurrying driver of 18-wheel truck deliberately rear-ends car whose driver was trying to stay within limit. The Houston Freeway Syndrome has fortunately not spread everywhere. But the question is: Will it?

8Americans are used to thinking that law-and-order is threatened mainly by stereotypical violent crime. When the foundations of . law have actually been shaken, however, it has always been because ordinary law-abiding citizens took to skirting the law. Major instance: Prohibition. Recalls Donald Barr Chidsey in On and Off the Wagon:“Lawbreaking proved to be not painful, not even uncomfortable, but, in a mild and perfectly safe way, exhilarating.” People wiped out Prohibition at last not only because of the alcohol issue but because scofflawry was seriously undermining the authority and legitimacy of government. Ironically, today’s scofflaw spirit, whatever its undetermined origins, is being encouraged unwittingly by government at many levels. The failure of police to enforce certain laws is only the surface of the problem: they take their mandate from the officials and constituents they serve. Worse, most state legislatures have helped subvert popular compliance with the federal . law, some of them by enacting puny fines that trivialize transgressions. On a higher level, the Administration in Washington has dramatized its wish to nullify civil rights laws simply by opposing instead of supporting certain court-ordered desegregation rulings. With considerable justification, environmental groups, in the words

of Wilderness magazine, accuse the Administration of “destroying environmental laws by failing to enforce them, or by enforcing them in ways that deliberately encourage noncompliance.” Translation: scofflawry at the top.

9The most disquieting thing about the scofflaw is its extreme infectiousness. Only a terminally foolish society would sit still and allow it to spread indefinitely.

From: M. A. Miller, pp. 266 - 269

Unit Ten

TEXT I

Straight-A Illiteracy

James P. Degnan

1Despite all the current fuss and bother about the extraordinary number of ordinary illiterates who overpopulate our schools, small attention has been given to another kind of illiterate, an illiterate whose plight is, in many ways, more important, because he is more influential. This illiterate may, as often as not, be a university president, but he is typically a ., a successful professor and textbook author. The person to whom I refer is the straight-A illiterate, and the following is written in an attempt to give him equal time with his widely publicized counterpart.

2The scene is my office, and I am at work, doing what must be done if one is to assist in the cure of a disease that, over the years, I have come to call straight-A illiteracy. I am interrogating, I am cross-examining, I am prying and probing for the meaning of a student’s paper. The student is a college senior with a straight-A average, an extremely bright, highly articulate student who has just been awarded a coveted fellows hip to one of the nation’s outstanding graduate schools. He and I have been at this, have been going over his paper sentence by sentence, word by word, for an hour. “The choice of exogenous variables in relation to multi-colinearity,” I hear myself reading from his paper, “is contingent upon the derivations of certain multiple correlation coefficients” I pause to catch my breath. “Now that statement,”

I address the student—whom I shall call, allegorically, Mr. Bright—“that statement, Mr. Bright, what on ear th does it mean?” Mr. Bright, his brow furrowed, tries mightily. Finally, with both of us combining our linguistic and imaginative resources, finally, after what seems another hour, we decode it. We decide exactly what it is that Mr. Bright is trying to say, what he really wants to say, which is: “Supply determines demand.”

3Over the past decade or so, I have known many students like him, many college seniors suffering from Bright’s disease. It attacks the best minds, and gradually destroys the critical fac ulties, making it impossible for the sufferer to detect gibberish in his own writing or in that of others. During the years of higher education it grows worse, reaching its terminal stage, typically, when its victim receives his . Obviously, the victim of Bright’s disease is no ordinary illiterate. He would never turn in a paper with misspellings or errors in punctuation; he would never use a double negative or the word “irregardless.” Nevertheless, he is illiterate, in the worst way: he is incapable of saying, in writing, simply and clearly, what he means. The ordinary illiterate—perhaps providentially protected from college and graduate school—might say: “Them people down at the shop better stock up on what our customers need, or we ain’t gonna be in business long.” Not our man. Taking his cue from years of higher education, years of reading the textbooks and professional journals that are the major sources of his affliction, he writes: “The focus of concentration must rest upon objectives centered around the knowledge of customer areas so that a sophisticated awareness of those areas can serve as an entrepreneurial filter to screen what is relevant from what is irrelevant to future commitments.” For writing such gibberish he is awarded straight As on his papers (both samples quoted above were taken from papers that received As), and the opportunity to move, inexorably, toward his fellowship and eventual Ph. D.

4As I have suggested, the major cause of such illiteracy is the stuff—the textbooks and professional journals—the straight-A illiterate is forced to read during his years of higher education. He learns to write

gibberish by reading it, and by being taught to admire it as profundity. If he is majoring in sociology, he must grapple with such journals as the American Sociological Review, journals bulging with barbarous jargon, such as “egointegrative action orientation” and “Orientation toward improvement of the gratificational-deprivation balance of the actor” (the latter of which monstrous phrases represe nts, to quote Malcolm Cowley, the sociologist’s way of saying “the pleasure principle”). In such journals, Mr. Cowley reminds us, two things are never described as being “alike.” They are “homologous” or “isomorphic.” Nor are things simply “different.” They are “allotropic.” In such journals writers never “divide anything.” They “dichotomize” or “bifurcate” things.

From: M. A. Miller, - 358 Unit Eleven

TEXT I

On Consigning Manuscripts to Floppy Discs and Archives to Oblivion

Willis E. McNelly

1Manuscript s, those vital records of an author’s creative process, are an endangered species. The advent of word processors, and their relatively low cost together with increasing simplicity, means that even impoverished, unpublished, would-be writers (as well as the names who top the best-seller list) have turned to their Wangs, IBMs and Apples, inserted Wordstar, Scriptsit or Apple Writer programs and busily begun writing, editing and revising their creative efforts. The result? A floppy disc!

2We should deplore the disappearance of manuscripts. How can anyone, student or scholar, learn anything about the creative process from a floppy disc? Can this wobbly plastic reveal the hours, the endless hours, where beauty was born out of its own despair (as William Butler Yeats put it) and blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil? Manuscripts are these records of creative agony, often sweat-stained, coffee-splattered or cigarette-charred. Manuscripts tell us what went on in a writer’s soul, how he or she felt during the agony of creation. Edna St. Vincent Millay may have burned the candle at both ends and wondered at its lovely light, but her first drafts are treasures for future generations.

3Imagine if Yeats had written those magnificent lyrics celebrating his futile love for Maud Gonne on a word processor! No floppy disc can possibly reveal the depth of his sorrow. Almost a century later his manuscripts in the National Library in Dublin still glow with the power of his passion. They tell young, wan poets of either sex that faded tear stains are now not new, that their feelings, hopes, despairs, loves and losses are actually eternal. Suppose Ray Bradbury had written “Fahrenheit 451” on a Wang. How appropriate, even ironic, it might have been had his various drafts gone the way of the burning books that he deplores and disappeared into a memory bank.

4Fortunately, any student of writing can inspect those same drafts in the Special Collections Library of California State University, Fullerton. Novices and professionals alike can examine how a brief story, “The Fireman,” grew into an unpublished novelette, “Fire Burn, Fire Burn!” and then developed into another longer version, “The Hearth and the Salamander,” also unpublished. The final copy (complete with an occasional typo, since it was typed by the author himself) is available for inspection. On these pages Bradbury’s own bold handwriting has substituted a vivid verb for a flabby one, switched a sentence or two around, sharpened or sometimes eliminated an adjective, substituted a better noun. The manuscript provides a perfect example of the artist at work. We would never see that kind of development or final polishing on any number of floppy discs.

5Moreover, put a lot of manuscripts together and you have an archive. Memoranda, diaries, journals, jottings, first, second and third drafts—these archives are important to all of us. The archives of a city are often musty collections of scribbled scraps of paper, meaningful doodles about boundary lines or endless handwritten records of mar riages, divorces, deeds, births and deaths. Our country’s archives of all kinds are a priceless heritage. The National Archives is jammed with ragged papers, preserved for the scrutiny of historians.

6manuscripts tell us how Thomas Jefferson’s mind worked as he drafted the Declaration of

Independence. A famous letter to the president of Yale informs us of Benjamin Franklin’s true feelings about religion. We’ve learned volumes from the diaries, papers, letters and exhortations of those who put our Constitution together. Would we know as much if they had done it all on a new floppy disc? Unthinkable!

7Similarly, would letters from famous men and women spewed out on a dot-matrix printer have the same fascination as an original holograph? Would a machine-signed, mass-produced letter generated in some White House basement have the same emotional impact—or the same value, for that matter—as a handwritten letter mailed by Citizen Ronald Reagan in 1965, complete with hand-addressed envelope and canceled 5-cent stamp? Hardly.

8James Joyce once wrote that the errors of an artist are the portals of discovery. Unfortunately, we’ll never know of those errors if clean, taped, neat, immaculate but errorless floppy discs replace tattered, pen-scratched, scissored, taped, yellowed, rewritten, retyped manuscripts. Libraries preserve them, students learn from them, auctioneers cry them at fabulous prices, owners cherish them. And word processors totally eliminate them. Our loss would be incalculable.

9Manuscripts are our gift to our heritage, and we have no right to deprive future generations of leaning how we think and feel, simply because we find word processing more convenient. Patiently corrected manuscripts, not floppy discs, can tell any novice writer or future historian that writing is hard work, that it takes vision and revision alike— and that it should be done on paper, not with electrons on a screen.

From: J. R. McCuen and A. C. Winkler, pp. 512-515

Unit Twelve

TEXT I

Grant and Lee: A Study in Contrasts

Bruce Catton

1When Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee met in the parlor of a modest house at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, on April 9, 1865, to work out the terms for the surrender of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, a great chapter in American life came to a close, and a great new chapter began.

2These men were bringing the Civil War to its virtual finish. To be sure, other armies had yet to surrender, and for a few days the fugitive Confederate government would struggle desperately and vainly, trying to find some way to go on living now that its chief support was gone. But in effect it was all over when Grant and Lee signed the papers. And the little room where they wrote out the terms was the scene of one of the poignant, dramatic contrasts in American history.

3They were two strong men, these oddly different generals, and they represented the strengths of two conflicting currents that, through them, had come into final collision.

4Back of Robert E. Lee was the notion that the old aristocratic concept might somehow survive and be dominant in American life.

5Lee was tidewater Virginia, and in his background were family, culture, and tradition … the age of chivalry transplanted to a New World which was making its own legends and its own myths. He embodied a way of life that had come down through the age of knighthood and the English country squire. America was a land that was beginning all over again, dedicated to nothing much more complicated than the rather hazy belief that all men had equal rights and should have an equal chance in the world. In such a land Lee stood for the feeling that it was somehow of advantage to human society to have a pronounced inequality in the social structure. There should be a leisure class, backed by ownership of land; in turn, society should be keyed to the land as the chief source of wealth and influence. It would bring forth (according to this ideal) a class of men with a strong sense of obligation to the community; men who lived not to gain advantage for themselves, but to meet the solemn obligations which had been laid on them by the very fact that they were privileged. From them the country would get its leadership; to them it could

look for the higher values—of thought, of conduct, of personal deportment—to give it strength and virtue.

6Lee embodied the noblest elements of this aristocratic ideal. Through him, the landed nobility justified itself. For four years, the Southern states had fought a desperate war to uphold the ideals for which Lee stood. In the end, it almost seemed as if the Confederacy fought for Lee; as if he himself was the Confederacy… the best thing that the way of life for which the Confederacy stood could ever have to offer. He had passed into legend before Appomattox. Thousands of tired, underfed, poorly clothed Confederate soldiers, long since past the simple enthusiasm of the early days of the struggle, somehow considered Lee the symbol of everything for which they had been willing to die. But they could not quite put this feeling into words. If the Lost Cause, sanctified by so much heroism and so many deaths, had a living justification, its justification was General Lee.

7Grant, the son of a tanner on the Western frontier, was everything Lee was not. He had come up the hard way and embodied nothing in particular except the eternal toughness and sinewy fiber of the men who grew up beyond the mountains. He was one of a body of men who owed reverence and obeisance to no one, who were self-reliant to a fault, who cared hardly anything for the past but who had a sharp eye for the future.

8These frontiersmen were the precise opposites of the tidewater aristocrats. Back of them, in the great surge that had taken people over the Alleghenies and into the opening Western country, there was a deep, implicit dissatisfaction with a past that had settled into grooves. They stood for democracy, not from any reasoned conclusion about the proper ordering of human society, but simply because they had grown up in the middle of democracy and knew how it worked. Their society might have privileges, but they would be privileges each man had won for himself. Forms and patterns meant nothing. No man was born to anything, except perhaps to a chance to show how far he could rise. Life was competition.

9Yet along with this feeling had come a deep sense of belonging to a national community. The Westerner who developed a farm, opened a shop, or set up in business as a trader, could hope to prosper only as his own community prospered—and his community ran from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada down to Mexico. If the land was settled, with towns and highways and accessible markets, he could better himself. He saw his fate in terms of the nation’s own destiny. As its horizons expanded, so did his. He had, in other words, an acute dollars-and-cents stake in the continued growth and development of his country.

10And that, perhaps, is where the contrast between Grant and Lee becomes most striking. The Virginia aristocrat, inevitably, saw himself in relation to his own region. He lived in a static society which could endure almost anything except change. Instinctively, his first loyalty would go to the locality in which that society existed. He would fight to the limit of endurance to defend it, because in defending it he was defending everything that gave his own life its deepest meaning.

11The Westerner, on the other hand, would fight with an equal tenacity for the broader concept of society. He fought so because everything he lived by was tied to growth, expansion, and a constantly widening horizon. What he lived by would survive or fall with the nation itself. He could not possibly stand by unmoved in the face of an attempt to destroy the Union. He would combat it with everything he had, because he could only see it as an effort cut the ground out from under his feet.

12So Grant and Lee were in complete contrast, representing two diametrically opposed elements in American life. Grant was the modern man emerging; beyond him, ready to come on the stage, was the great age of steel and machinery, of crowded cities and a restless burgeoning vitality. Lee might have ridden down from the old age of chivalry, lance in hand, silken banner fluttering over his head. Each man was the perfect champion of his cause, drawing both his strengths and his weaknesses from the people the led.

13Yet it was not all contrast, after all. Different as they were—in background, in personality, in underlying aspiration—these two great soldiers had much in common. Under everything else, they were marvelous fighters. Furthermore, their fighting qualities were really very much alike.

14Each man had, to begin with, the great virtue of utter tenacity and fidelity. Grant fought his way down the Mississippi Valley in spite of acute personal discouragement and profound military handicaps.

Lee hung on in the trenches at Petersburg after hope itself had died. In each man there was an indomitable quality… the born fighter’s refusal to give up as long as he can still remain on his feet and lift his two fists.

15Daring and resourcefulness they had, too; the ability to think faster and move faster than the enemy. These were the qualities which gave Lee the dazzling campaigns of Second Manassas and Chancellorsville and won Vicksburg for Grant.

16Lastly, and perhaps greatest of all, there was the ability, at the end, to turn quickly from war to peace once the fighting was over. Out of the way these two men behaved at Appomattox came the possibility of a peace of reconciliation. It was a possibility not wholly realized, in the years to come, but which did, in the end, help the two sections to become on nation again… after a war whose bitterness might have seemed to make such a reunion wholly impossible. No part of either man’s life became him more than the part he played in this brief meeting in the McLean house at Appomattox. Their behavior there put all succeeding generations of Americans in their debt. Two great Americans, Grant and Lee—very different, yet under everything very much alike. Their encounter at Appomattox was one of the great moments of American history.

From: K. Flachman and M. Flachmann, pp. 305 - 311

Unit Thirteen

TEXT I

Euphemism

Neil Postman

1A euphemism is commonly defined as an auspicious or exalted term (like “sanitation engineer”) that is used in place of a more down-to-earth term (like “garbage man”). People who are partial to euphemisms stand accused of being “phony” or trying to hide what it is they are really taking about. And there is no doubt that in doubt in some situations the accusation is entirely proper. For example, one of the more detestable euphemisms I have come across in recent years is the term “Operation Sunshine,” which is the name the U. S. Government gave to some experiments it conducted with the hydrogen bomb in the South Pacific. It is obvious that the government, in choosing this name, was trying to expunge the hideous imagery that the bomb evokes and in so doing committed, as I see it, an immoral act. This sort of process—giving pretty names to essentially ugly realities—is what has given euphemizing such a bad name. And people like George Orwell have done valuable side to euphemizing that is worth mentioning, and a few words here in its defense will not be amiss.

2To begin with, we must keep in mind that things do not have “real” names, although ma ny people believe that they do. A garbage man is not “really” a “garbage man,” any more than he is really a “sanitation engineer.” And a pig is not called a “pig” because it is so dirty, nor a shrimp a “shrimp” because it is so small. There are things, and then there are the names of things, and it is considered a fundamental error in all branches of semantics to assume that a name and a thing are one and the same. It is true, of course, that a name is usually so firmly associated with the thing it denotes that it is extremely difficult to separate one from the other. That is why, for example, advertising is so effective. Perfumes are not given names like “Bronx Odor,” and an automobile will never be called “The Lumbering Elephant.” Shakespeare was only half right in saying that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet. What we call things affects how we will perceive them. It is not only harder to sell someone a “horse mackerel” sandwich than a “tuna fish” sandwich, but even though they are the “same” t hing, we are likely to enjoy the taste of tuna more than of the horse mackerel. It would appear that human beings almost naturally come to identify names with things, which is one of our more fascinating illusions. But there is some substance to this illusion. For if you change the names of things, you change how people will regard them, and that is as good as changing the nature of the thing itself.

3Now, all sorts of scoundrels know this perfectly well and can make us love almost anything by

getting us to transfer the charm of a name to whatever worthless thing they are promoting. But at the same time and in the same vein, euphemizing is a perfectly intelligent method of generating new and useful ways of perceiving things. The man who wants us to call him a “sanitation engineer” instead of a “garbage man” is hoping we will treat him with more respect than we presently do. He wants us to see that he is of some importance to our society. His euphemism is laughable only if we think that he is not deserving of such notice or respect. The teacher who prefers us to use the term “culturally different children” instead of “slum children” is euphemizing, all right, but is doing it to encourage us to see aspects of a situation that might otherwise not be a attended to.

4The point I am making is that there is nothing in the process of euphemizing itself that is contemptible. Euphemizing is contemptible when a name makes us see something that is not true or diverts our attention from something that is. The hydrogen bomb kills. There is nothing else that it does. And when you experiment with it, you are trying to find out how widely and well it kills. Therefore, to call such an experiment “Operation Sunshine” is to suggest a purpose for the bomb that simply does not exist. But to call “slum children” “culturally different” is something else. It calls attention, for example, to legitimate reasons why such children might feel alienated from what goes on in school.

5I grant that sometimes such euphemizing does not have the intended effect. It is possible for a teacher to use the term “culturally different” but still be controlled by the term “slum children” (which the teacher may believe is their “real” name). “Old people” may be called “senior citizens,” and nothing might chan ge. And “lunatic asylums” may still be filthy, primitive prisons though they are called “mental institutions.” Nonetheless, euphemizing may be regarded as one of our more important intellectual resources for creating new perspectives on a subject. The attempt to rename “old people” “senior citizens” was obviously motivated by a desire to give them a political identity, which they not only warrant but which may yet have important consequences. In fact, the fate of euphemisms is very hard to predict. A new an d seemingly silly name may replace an old one (let us say, “chairperson” for “chairman”) and for years no one will think or act any differently because of it. And then, gradually, as people begin to assume that “chairperson” is the “real” and proper name (or “senior citizen” or “tuna fish” or “sanitation engineer”), their attitudes begin to shift, and they will approach things in a slightly different frame of mind. There is a danger, of course, in supposing that a new name can change attitudes quickly or always. There must be some authentic tendency or drift in the culture to lend support to the change, or the name will remain incongruous and may even appear ridiculous. To call a teacher a “facilitator” would be such an example. To eliminate the distinction between “boys” and “girls” by calling them “childpersons” would be another.

6But to suppose that such changes never “amount to anything” is to underestimate the power of names. I have been astounded not only by how rapidly the name “blocks” has replaced “Negroes” (a kind of euphemizing in reverse) but also by how significantly perceptions and attitudes have shifted as an accompaniment to the change.

7The key idea here is that euphemisms are a means through which a culture may alter its imagery and by so doing subtly change its style, its priorities, and its values. I reject categorically the idea that people who use “earthy” language are speaking more directly or with more authenticity than people who employ euphemisms. Saying that someone is “dead” is not t o speak more plainly or honestly than saying he has “passed away.” It is, rather, to suggest a different conception of what the event means. To ask where the “shithouse” is, is no more to the point than to the point than to ask where the “restroom” is. But in the difference between the two words, there is expressed a vast difference in one’s attitude toward privacy and propriety. What I am saying is that the process of euphemizing has no moral content. The moral dimensions are supplied by what the words in question express, what they want us to value and to see. A nation that calls experiments with bombs “Operation Sunshine” is very frightening. On the other hand, a people who call “garbage men” “sanitation engineers” can’t be all bad.

From: Ray et al, pp. 154-158

Unit Fourteen

TEXT I

That Astounding Creator — Nature

Jean George

1A bird that eats feathers, a mammal that never drinks, a fish that grows a fishing line and worm on its head to catch other fish. Creatures in a nightmare? No, they are very much with us as co-inhabitants of this earth.

2Nature has fashioned most animals to fit the many faces of the land—moose to marshes, squirrels to trees, camels to deserts, frogs to lily pads. Give nature an environment or situation and she will evolve a creature, adapting a toe here, an eye there, until the being fits the niche. As a result of his hammering and fitting, however, some really unbelievable creatures circle the sun with us.

3One summer in Maine I saw a sleek mother horned grebe herding her three bobbing young to supper among the green pickerelweed. Suddenly I noticed my binoculars that she was feeding her babies quantities of feathers from a deserted duck’s nest. As she stuffed the dry feathers into the gaping mouths, she made two or three pokes to get each one down. Finally she worked a dozen or so down throat; then, sailing low on the water, she vanished contentedly among the plants.

4I later learned that 60 percent of the grebe’s diet is feathers. When I asked why, a biologist from the . Fish and Wildlife Service answered, “Because nature finds a use for everything. Feathers seem to act as a strainer to prevent fishbones from entering and damaging the intestines.”

5Australia has many strange beasts, one of the oddest of which is the koala. Perfectly adapted to one specific tree, the eucalyptus, this living teddy bear does not need anything else, not even a drink! The moisture in the leaves is just right for the koala, making it the only land animal that doesn’t need water to supplement its food.

6The creature with the fishing line on its head was created for the dark canyons of the sea. Here food is so scarce that the deep-sea fish, which preys on smaller fish, grew a line, and an appendage on the end that wiggles like a worm. This catches the attention of the occasional passerby. A fish approaches the bait, and the toothy angler swirls up and swallows him.

7The gigantic ocean bottom creates other problems. A male angler fish could swim for years without meeting a female of his own species. Nature’s solution to this problem is for the female to carry a dwarfed husband tightly fused to her body. Marine biologists believe that this nuptial begins when the eggs first hatch and there are many fry of both sexes. A male then grabs hold of a female with his mouth and hangs on until he has literally become a part of her. His mouth becomes fused to her stomach, and for the rest of his life the male remains attached to his mate, making the most amazing union on earth.

8Sound has shaped the bodies of many beasts. Noise tapped away at the bullfrog until his ears became bigger than his eyes. Now he hears so well that at the slightest sound of danger he quickly plops to safety under a sunken leaf. The rabbit has long ears to hear the quiet “whoosh” of the owl’s wings, while the grasshopper’s ears are on the base of his abdomen, the lowest point of his body, where he can detect the tread of a crow’s foot or the stealthy approach of a shrew.

9Sometimes food will determine an animal’s appearance. Earthworms have shaped t he woodcock, a snipe-like bird of the forest floor. This creature has a long narrow bill that looks like a pencil and its fits neatly into the burrows of the worms. But the bill has its disadvantages; with it buried deep in a worm hole the woodcock is vulnerable to attack from above. To counteract this danger the woodcock has eyes near the top of his head. This singular device permits him to scan the trees for danger even when his beak is buried. A successful arrangement for longevity—but it certainly creates an odd-looking creature.

10The need to catch elusive prey had evolved some staggering biological tricks. The sea anemone, a flower-like animal of the tidemark, is usually riveted to one spot, yet it feeds on darting fish. A diabolically clever trap was necessary to catch them, so the anemone developed tentacles with bombs in the end of each. When a fish forages into these tentacles the ends shoot a thin thread into the fish’s body.