4. In Ciardis view, what is the gist of happiness? Does he offer a solution to the attainment of happiness? How is his view different from that of Lin Yutang?
5. The author believes that happiness is “neither in having nor in being, but in becoming.” How do you understand his point? Do you agree or disagree with him? What does happiness mean for Chinese people? What is your own perception of happiness?
Unit Four
Text A
Remembering the Farm
Mark Twain
Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (18351910), American writer and humorist, whose best work is characterized by broad, often irreverent humor and biting social satire. Twains writing is also known for realism of place and language, memorable characters, and sharp criticism of hypocrisy and oppression. He was renowned for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885). He was considered among the greatest writers in the literary community. The following is an excerpt from Twains autobiography.
1As I have said, I spent some part of every year at the farm1 until I was twelve or thirteen years old. The life which I led there with my cousins was full of charm, and so is the memory of it yet. I can call back the solemn twilight and mystery of the deep woods, the earthy smells, the faint odors of the wild flowers, the sheen of rainwashed foliage, the rattling clatter of drops when the wind shook the trees, the faroff hammering of woodpeckers and the muffled drumming of woodpheasants in the remoteness of the forest, the snapshot glimpses of disturbed wild creatures scurrying through the grass,—I can call it all back and make it as real as it ever was, and as blessed. I can call back the prairie, and its loneliness and peace, and a vast hawk hanging motionless in the sky, with his wings spread wide and the blue of the vault showing through the fringe of their endfeathers. I can see the woods in their autumn dress, the oaks purple, the hickories washed with gold, the maples and the sumachs luminous with crimson fires, and I can hear the rustle made by the fallen leaves as we ploughed through them. I can see the blue clusters of wild grapes hanging amongst the foliage of the saplings, and I remember the taste of them and the smell. I know how the wild blackberries looked, and how they tasted; and the same with the pawpaws, the hazelnuts and the persimmons; and I can feel the thumping rain, upon my head, of hickorynuts and walnuts when we were out in the frosty dawn to scramble for them with the pigs, and the gusts of wind loosed them and sent them down. I know the stain of blackberries, and how pretty it is; and I know the stain of walnut hulls, and how little it minds soap and water; also what grudged experience it had of either of them. I know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it, and how to arrange the troughs and the delivery tubes, and how to boil down the juice, and how to hook the sugar after it is made; also how much better hooked sugar tastes than any that is honestly come by, let bigots say what they will. I know how a prize watermelon looks when it is sunning its fat rotundity among pumpkinvines and “simblins”; I know how to tell when it is ripe without “plugging” it; I know how inviting it looks when it is cooling itself in a tub of water under the bed, waiting; I know how it looks when it lies on the table in the sheltered great floorspace between house and kitchen, and the children gathered for the sacrifice and their mouths watering; I know the crackling sound it makes when the carvingknife enters its end, and I can see the split fly along in front of the blade as the knife cleaves its way to the other end; I can see its halves fall apart and display the rich red meat and the black seeds, and the heart standing up, a luxury fit for the elect; I know how a boy looks, behind a yardlong slice of that melon, and I know how he feels; for I have been there. I know the taste of the watermelon which has been honestly come by, and I know the taste of the watermelon which has been acquired by art. Both taste good, but the experienced know which tastes best. I know the look of green apples and peaches and pears on the trees, and I know how entertaining they are when they are inside of a person. I know how ripe ones look when they are piled in pyramids under the trees, and how pretty they are and how vivid their colors. I know how a frozen apple looks, in a barrel down cellar in the wintertime, and how hard it is to bite, and how the frost makes the teeth ache, and yet how good it is, notwithstanding. I know the disposition of elderly people to select the specked apples for the children, and I once knew ways to beat the game. I know the look of an apple that is roasting and sizzling on a hearth on a winters evening, and I know the comfort that comes of eating it hot, along with some sugar and a drench of cream. I know the delicate art and mystery of so cracking hickorynuts and walnuts on a flatiron with a hammer that the kernels will be delivered whole, and I know how the nuts, taken in conjunction with winter apples, cider and doughnuts, make old peoples tales and old jokes sound fresh and crisp and enchanting, and juggle an evening away before you know what went with the time. I know the look of Uncle Danls2 kitchen as it was on privileged nights3 when I was a child, and I can see the white and black children grouped on the hearth, with the firelight playing on their faces and the shadows flickering upon the walls, clear back toward the cavernous gloom of the rear, and I can hear Uncle Danl telling the immortal tales which Uncle Remus Harris4 was to gather into his books and charm the world with, by and by; and I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghoststory of the “Golden Arm” was reached—and the sense of regret, too, which came over me, for it was always the last story of the evening, and there was nothing between it and the unwelcome bed.
2I can remember the bare wooden stairway in my uncles house, and the turn to the left above the landing, and the rafters and the slanting roof over my bed, and the squares of moonlight on the floor, and the white cold world of snow outside, seen through the curtainless window. I can remember the howling of the wind and the quaking of the house on stormy nights, and how snug and cozy one felt, under the blankets, listening, and how the powdery snow used to sift in, around the sashes, and lie in little ridges on the floor, and make the place look chilly in the morning, and curb the wild desire to get up—in case there was any. I can remember how very dark that room was, in the dark of the moon, and how packed it was with ghostly stillness when one woke up by accident away in the night, and forgotten sins came flocking out of the secret chambers of the memory and wanted a hearing; and how ill chosen the time seemed for this kind of business; and how dismal was the hoohooing of the owl and the wailing of the wolf, sent mourning by on the night wind.
3I remember the raging of the rain on that roof, summer nights, and how pleasant it was to lie and listen to it, and enjoy the white splendor of the lightning and the majestic booming and crashing of the thunder. It was a very satisfactory room; and there was a lightningrod which was reachable from the window, an adorable and skittish thing to climb up and down, summer nights, when there were duties on hand of a sort to make privacy desirable.
4I remember the coon and possum5 hunts, nights, with the negroes, and the long marches through the black gloom of the woods, and the excitement which fired everybody when the distant bay of an experienced dog announced that the game was treed; then the wild scramblings and stumblings through briers and bushes and over roots to get to the spot; then the lighting of a fire and the felling of the tree, the joyful frenzy of the dogs and the negroes, and the weird picture it all made in the red glare—I remember it all well, and the delight that every one got out of it, except the coon.
5I remember the pigeon seasons, when the birds would come in millions, and cover the trees, and by their weight break down the branches. They were clubbed to death with sticks; guns were not necessary, and were not used. I remember the squirrel hunts, and the prairiechicken6 hunts, and the wildturkey hunts, and all that; and how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go. A toot on a tin horn brought twice as many dogs as were needed, and in their happiness they raced and scampered about, and knocked small people down, and made no end of unnecessary noise. At the word, they vanished away toward the woods, and we drifted silently after them in the melancholy gloom. But presently the gray dawn stole over the world, the birds piped up, then the sun rose and poured light and comfort all around, everything was fresh and dewy and fragrant, and life was a boon again. After three hours of tramping we arrived back wholesomely tired, overladen with game, very hungry, and just in time for breakfast.
Notes
1. the farm: The farm, located in Florida, Missouri, belonged to Twains uncle, John Quarles, the husband of his mothers younger sister. Twain spent his summers at the Quarles farm from about age seven until he was eleven or twelve.
2. Uncle Danl: a middleaged slave belonging to Twains uncle John Quarles. Twain recalled him fondly in his autobiography and traced his “strong liking for his race” to his childhood visits to his uncles farm. He was casted as “Jim” in Twains The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
3. privileged nights: special evenings of the holidays, such as Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, etc.
4. Uncle Remus Harris: Joel Chandler Harris (18481908), American journalist, fiction writer, and folklorist, best known as the author of Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), a collection of animal folktales revealing the struggles on the plantations in the Southern United States. He wrote his stories in a dialect that represented the voice of the narrator. Twain met Harris in 1882 when he traveled down the Mississippi River in preparation for writing Life on the Mississippi.
5. coon and possum: coon, a shortened word for raccoon, a small North American animal with black marks on its face and a long tail with black rings on it; possum, a shortened word for opossum, a small animal with a long tail that carries its young in a pouch and is noted for pretending to be dead when in danger
6. prairiechicken: a large North American grouse found on the prairies, the male being noted for the display dance in which it inflates two orange neck pouches and makes a booming sound
Questions for Comprehension
1. What can help you sense the narrators sweet and delighted memory of his boyhood on the farm?
2. What kind of series of natural sights came over “my mind” as “I” mentioned my life on the farm? Try to describe them vividly so that you may acquire a sense of beauty.
3. Why did the little boy hold a feeling of regret when the time for the ghost story was impending?
4. Have you ever held the feeling of enjoying the rain, lightning, and thunder? Try to find relevant descriptions in the essay and tell us something about them.
5. In the last paragraph, the narrator offers us a description of a hunting experience in which the scenery of dawn is vividly described. Do you enjoy the description? Imitate this writing style and write a short passage on scenery.
Vocabulary and Structure Exercises
Ⅰ. Complete the following sentences with words or phrases from this lesson.
1. Was the money honestly ? (Para.1)
2. The police worked the army. (Para.1)
3. The sun is a object because it is a source of light. (Para.1)
4. They the syrup until it is very thick. (Para.1)
5. The good harvest the prices . (Para.1)
6. The sea down there looks so. (Para.1)
7. The speaker shouted and the table. (Para.1)
8. The nice room makes you feel as as a bug in a rug. (Para.2)
9. Bobs interest in astronomy was by the astronaut. (Para.4)
10. Mist the valley. (Para.5)
Ⅱ. Explain the difference in the meaning or use of the italicized words in the groups of sentences.
1. a. Delicate plants must be protected from cold wind and frost.
b. The international situation is very delicate at present.
c. With the surgeons delicate touch, the pregnant calmed down gradually.
d. It is said that this Italian restaurant can serve the customers food with a delicate flavor.
2. a. I scrambled quickly up the hill.
b. The players scramble to get possession of the ball.
c. The jets scrambled from the airfield and headed east.
d. His words and thought patterns were scrambled and made no sense.
3. a. In a small bay big waves will never build up.
b. The prosecutor bayed for a death penalty.
c. The dogs ran mad and bayed the sky.
4. a. The workers in the office clubbed together to buy her a present for her birthday.
b. We club together for the purpose of raising funds for the front.
c. As an energetic, active young girl, Christina enjoys going clubbing.
d. Due to the love for the pastoral life, he founded a garden club in order to gather people with the same hobby.
5. a. The parents packed both children off to bed.
b. Dishes pack more easily than glasses.
c. The climber carried some food in a pack on his back.
d. The passengers packed into the train as soon as it pulled up at the station.
6. a. The disposition of furniture in the room is orderly.
b. Jack is a man with a cheerful disposition.
c. There was a general disposition to leave early, and most people seemed to wish to leave early.
d. Who has the disposition of this property?
7. a. Some new books have been delivered to the school.
b. He will deliver a lecture on endangered species.
c. The pitcher delivered the ball.
d. She delivered a baby boy this morning.
8. a. He tramped up and down the platform waiting for the train.
b. Someone tramped on my toes on the bus.
c. The troop tramped over the moors.
d. We go for a tramp in the country.
Ⅲ. Paraphrase the italicized parts in the following sentences.
1. I know the taste of maple sap, and when to gather it, and how to arrange the troughs and the delivery tubes, and how to boil down the juice, and how to hook the sugar after it is made; also how much better hooked sugar tastes than any that is honestly come by, let bigots say what they will.
2. I know how a boy looks, behind a yardlong slice of that melon, and I know how he feels, for I have been there.
3. I know the taste of the watermelon which has been honestly come by, and I know the taste of the watermelon which has been acquired by art. Both taste good, but the experienced know which tastes best.
4. I know the disposition of elderly people to select the specked apples for the children, and I once knew ways to beat the game.
5. I remember the squirrel hunts, and the prairiechicken hunts, and the wildturkey hunts, and all that; and how we turned out, mornings, while it was still dark, to go on these expeditions, and how chilly and dismal it was, and how often I regretted that I was well enough to go.
Rhetorical Exercise
Transferred Epithet is a figure of speech in which an epithet is transferred from the noun it should rightly modify to another to which it does not really apply or belong, for example, “a sleepless night,” or “a sleepy corner.” Identify the transferred epithet used in each of the following sentences.
1. I can feel again the creepy joy which quivered through me when the time for the ghost story was reached—and the sense of regret, too, which came over me, for it was always the last story of the evening and there was nothing between it and the unwelcome bed.
2. At the word, they vanished away toward the woods, and we drifted silently after them in the melancholy gloom.
3. I can remember how very dark that room was, in the dark of the moon, and how packed it was with ghostly stillness when one woke up by accident away in the night.
4. It was a very satisfactory room, and there was a lightning rod which was reachable from the window, an adorable and skittish thing to climb up and down, summer nights, when there were duties on hand of a sort to make privacy desirable.
5. In the wonderful performance, the passionate throat of a young man touched us deeply so that we could not control ourselves and shed tears.
Questions for Discussion
1. In “Remembering the Farm,” the narrator recalls his sweet boyhood memories on the farm, which reminds us of our own childhood. Say something about your own childhood. Did you also once live in the countryside? Imitate the authors writing style and write an essay on your wonderful childhood.
2. Mark Twain is a master of language; he employs many figures of speech. Discuss with your partners and sum up the figures of speech used in this essay. See if you really comprehend them.
Text B
My Wood
E. M. Forster
Edward Morgan Forster (18791970) was an English novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Many of his novels examined class difference and hypocrisy in early 20thcentury British society, notably A Room with a View (1908), Howards End (1910), and A Passage to India (1924). In his writings, Forster often criticized Victorian middle class attitudes and British colonialism.
1A few years ago I wrote a book which dealt in part with the difficulties of the English in India. Feeling that they would have had no difficulties in India themselves, the Americans read the book freely. The more they read it the better it made them feel, and a cheque to the author was the result. I bought a wood with the cheque. It is not a large wood—it contains scarcely any trees, and it is intersected, blast it, by a public footpath. Still, it is the first property that I have owned, so it is right that other people should participate in my shame, and should ask themselves, in accents that will vary in horror, this very important question: What is the effect of property upon the character? Dont lets touch economics; the effect of private ownership upon the community as a whole is another question—a more important question, perhaps, but another one. Lets keep to psychology. If you own things, whats their effect on you? Whats the effect on me of my wood?
2In the first place, it makes me feel heavy. Property does have this effect. Property produces men of weight, and it was a man of weight who failed to get into the Kingdom of Heaven. He was not wicked, that unfortunate millionaire in the parable, he was only stout; he stuck out in front, not to mention behind, and as he wedged himself this way and that in the crystalline entrance and bruised his wellfed flanks, he saw beneath him a comparatively slim camel passing through the eye of a needle1 and being woven into the robe of God. The Gospels2 all through couple stoutness and slowness. They point out what is perfectly obvious, yet seldom realized: that if you have a lot of things you cannot move about a lot, that furniture requires dusting, dusters require servants, servants require insurance stamps, and the whole tangle of them makes you think twice before you accept an invitation to dinner or go for a bathe in the Jordan. Sometimes the Gospels proceed further and say with Tolstoy3 that property is sinful; they approach the difficult ground of asceticism4 here, where I cannot follow them. But as to the immediate effects of property on people, they just show straightforward logic. It produces men of weight. Men of weight cannot, by definition, move like the lightning from the East unto the West, and the ascent of a fourteenstone bishop into a pulpit is thus the exact antithesis of the coming of the Son of Man5. My wood makes me feel heavy.
3In the second place, it makes me feel it ought to be larger.
4The other day I heard a twig snap in it. I was annoyed at first, for I thought that someone was blackberrying, and depreciating the value of the undergrowth. On coming nearer, I saw it was not a man who had trodden on the twig and snapped it, but a bird, and I felt pleased. My bird. The bird was not equally pleased. Ignoring the relation between us, it took fright as soon as it saw the shape of my face, and flew straight over the boundary hedge into a field, the property of Mrs. Henessy, where it sat down with a loud squawk. It had become Mrs. Henessys bird. Something seemed grossly amiss here, something that would not have occurred had the wood been larger. I could not afford to buy Mrs. Henessy out, I dared not murder her, and limitations of this sort beset me on every side. Ahab6 did not want that vineyard—he only needed it to round off his property, preparatory to plotting a new curve—and all the land around my wood has become necessary to me in order to round off the wood. A boundary protects. But—poor little thing—the boundary ought in its turn to be protected. Noises on the edge of it. Children throw stones. A little more, and then a little more, until we reach the sea. Happy Canute! Happier Alexander7! And after all, why should even the world be the limit of possession? A rocket containing a Union Jack, will, it is hoped, be shortly fired at the moon. Mars. Sirius. Beyond which...But these immensities ended by saddening me. I could not suppose that my wood was the destined nucleus of universal dominion—it is so very small and contains no mineral wealth beyond the blackberries. Nor was I comforted when Mrs. Henessys bird took alarm for the second time and flew clean away from us all, under the belief that it belonged to itself.
5In the third place, property makes its owner feel that he ought to do something to it. Yet he isnt sure what. A restlessness comes over him, a vague sense that he has a personality to express—the same sense which, without any vagueness, leads the artist to an act of creation. Sometimes I think I will cut down such trees as remain in the wood, at other times I want to fill up the gaps between them with new trees. Both impulses are pretentious and empty. They are not honest movements towards moneymaking or beauty. They spring from a foolish desire to express myself and from an inability to enjoy what I have got. Creation, property, enjoyment form a sinister trinity in the human mind. Creation and enjoyment are both very, very good, yet they are often unattainable without a material basis, and at such moments property pushes itself in as a substitute, saying, “Accept me instead—Im good enough for all three.” It is not enough. It is, as Shakespeare said of lust, “The expense of spirit in a waste of shame”: it is “Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.” Yet we dont know how to shun it. It is forced on us by our economic system as the alternative to starvation. It is also forced on us by an internal defect in the soul, by the feeling that in property may lie the germs of selfdevelopment and of exquisite or heroic deeds. Our life on earth is, and ought to be, material and carnal. But we have not yet learned to manage our materialism and carnality properly; they are still entangled with the desire for ownership, where (in the words of Dante8) “Possession is one with loss.”
6And this brings us to our fourth and final point: the blackberries.
7Blackberries are not plentiful in this meagre grove, but they are easily seen from the public footpath which traverses it, and all too easily gathered. Foxgloves, too—people will pull up the foxgloves, and ladies of an educational tendency even grub for toadstools to show them on the Monday in class. Other ladies, less educated, roll down the bracken in the arms of their gentlemen friends. There is paper; there are tins. Pray, does my wood belong to me or doesnt it? And, if it does, should I not own it best by allowing no one else to walk there? There is a wood near Lyme Regis, also cursed by a public footpath, where the owner has not hesitated on this point. He had built high stone walls each side of the path, and has spanned it by bridges, so that the public circulate like termites while he gorges on the blackberries unseen. He really does own his wood, this able chap. Dives in Hell did pretty well, but the gulf dividing him from Lazarus9 could be traversed by vision, and nothing traverses it here. And perhaps I shall come to this in time. I shall wall in and fence out until I really taste the sweets of property. Enormously stout, endlessly avaricious, pseudocreative, intensely selfish, I shall weave upon my forehead the quadruple crown of possession until those nasty Bolshies come and take it off again and thrust me aside into the outer darkness.
Notes
1. a comparatively slim camel passing through the eye of a needle: This expression originates from the Bible. The original text is, “Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.”
2. the Gospels: the record of Christs life and teaching in the first four books of the New Testament
3. Tolstoy: Leo Tolstoy (18281910), the greatest Russian novelist and the most influential Russian philosopher
4. asceticism: According to the doctrine, the austere life releases the soul from bondage to the body and permits union with the divine. And it advocates the practice of giving up all material comfort and exercising severe selfdiscipline.
5. the Son of Man: also Son of God, Jesus Christ
6. Ahab: a king of Israel and husband of Jezebel who, according to the Old Testament, was overthrown by Jehu
7. Happy Canute! Happier Alexander: Canute (995? 1035), King of England (10161035), Denmark (10181035), and Norway (10281035) whose reign, at first brutal, was later marked by wisdom and temperance. Alexander the Great (356323 BC), King of Macedon (336323), conquered Persia, Egypt, Syria, Mesopotamia, Bactria, and the Punjab. Here the writer says that Alexander is happier than Canute because Alexander reigns more land and owns more power than Canute. Indeed, this is an irony used to mock at the greed of human beings.
8. Dante: Dante Alighieri (12651321), Italian poet, whose reputation rests chiefly on Devine Comedy, an epic poem describing his spiritual journey through Hell and Purgatory and finally to Paradise. Here “Possession is one with loss,” taken from Dantes Convivio, means the greed for property may make a person lose himself and bring about destructive results.
9. Dives and Lazarus: the rich man and the poor beggar. In the New Testament, Dives is a hypothetical rich man who lived in luxury every day, while Lazarus, laid by Dives gate, is the beggar covered with sores. The ending is, in hell, where Dives was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. Dives begged Abraham to have pity on him, but Abraham told him, “Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony.”
Study Questions
1. In “My Wood,” the writer asks, “if you own things, whats their effect on you? And whats their effect on me of my mood?” Imagine if you own a piece of property, in what degree will it affect your character?
2. Reading through the essay, we could strongly sense the sarcastic tone throughout the whole text. Could you give some examples of this technique?
3. Why did the writer say that the impulses to cut down trees in the wood and to fill up the gaps between them with new trees were both pretentious and empty? At the end of the essay, the writer said, “I shall wall in and fence out until I really taste the sweets of property. Enormously stout, endlessly avaricious, pseudocreative, intensely selfish. I shall weave upon my forehead the quadruple crown of possession until those nasty Bolshies come and take it off again and thrust me aside into the outer darkness.” Did the writer really mean to do so? How do you interpret it?
4. In Text A, the farm brought Mark Twain a sweet memory and a delightful experience while in Text B the wood—Forsters property—brought him a lot of burden. Why do they have different attitudes towards a piece of property?
5. Allusion, a kind of rhetorical device, often connected with some fixed expressions, is designed to call something to mind without mentioning it explicitly, for instance, an allusion to Shakespeare. In this essay, many allusions are employed. Could you list some used in the text?
Unit Five
Text A
A Different Kind of Mother
Amy Wu
Amy Wu is a Chinese American writer based in California who writes about cross cultural issues. She earned her bachelors degree in history from New York University and her masters degree in journalism from Columbia University. She spent six years working in Hong Kong and has worked and traveled throughout the AsiaPacific region. Over 20 years she has been working as a journalist at international media organizations including Time, Gannett, The San Francisco Chronicle and The Deal.
1My best friend once asked me what it was like being brought up by a Chinese mother. Surprisingly, I could find no answer. I found myself describing my mothers beauty—the way my mothers hair was so silky and black, how her eyes were not small and squinty, but shaped like perfect almonds, how her lips and cheeks were bright red even if she put on no makeup.
2 But unlike my friends, who see my mother as a Chinese mother, I see my mother as simply “my” mother. The language between any mother and daughter is universal. Beyond the layers of arguments and rhetoric1, and beyond the incidents of humiliation and misunderstandings, there is a love that unites every mother and daughter.
3I am not blind, however, to the disciplinary differences between a culture from the west and a culture from the east. Unlike American mothers, who encourage their young children to speak whatever is on their mind, my mother told me to hold my tongue. Once, when I was 5 or 6, I interrupted my mother during a dinner with her friends and told her that I disliked the meal. My mothers eyes transformed from serene pools of blackness into stormy balls of fire. “Quiet!” She hissed, “Do you not know that silent waters run deep2?” She ordered me to turn my chair to the wall and think about what I have done. I remember throwing a redfaced tantrum3 before my mothers friends, pounding my fist into the rug, and throwing my utensils at the steaming dishes. Not only did I receive a harsh scolding, but a painful spanking. By the end of that evening, I had learned the first of many lessons. I learned to choose my words carefully before I opened my undisciplined mouth.
4Whenever my friends and I strike up conversations about our mothers in the cafeteria or at slumber parties4, I find myself telling them this story. Nevertheless, they respond to my story with straight and pale faces. “How?” one of my friends asked, “Can a mother be so cruel?” “You mean she beat you in front of other people?” another asked. My best friend told me that her mother disciplined her children wisely instead of abusing them. She sat them on her lap, patiently explaining what they had done wrong. She didnt believe in beating children into submission.
5What my American friends cannot understand, however, is how my mothers lessons have become so embedded within me, while my friends have easily forgotten their mothers words. My mothers eyes are so powerful, her fists so strong, that somehow I cannot erase her words or advice. To this day, I choose my words carefully before I speak, unlike so many of my friends whose words spill out aimlessly when they open their mouths. My mother says that American girls are taught to squabble like chickens, but a Chinese girl is taught how to speak intelligently.
6Only latterly have I also discovered that Chinese mothers show their love in different ways. Ever since I was a little girl, my mother has spent hours cooking intricate dishes. I remember Friday evenings she would lay out the precious china her mother had given her as a wedding present—how she laid down the utensils and glasses so meticulously, how she made sure there was not a crease in the tablecloth.
7She would spend the entire day steaming fish, baking ribs, cutting beef into thin strips, and rolling dough to make dumplings. In the evening, her work of labor and art would be unveiled. My father and I and a few Chinese neighbors and friends would be invited to feast on my mothers work of art.
8 I remember how silent my mother was as she watched her loved ones devour her labor of love. She would sit back, with a small smile on her face. She would nibble at the food in her dish while urging others to eat more, to take seconds, and thirds and fourths. “Eat, eat!” she would order me. I dared not tell her I was too full.
9 She would fill my bowl with mounds of rice and my dish with endless vegetables, fish, and fried delicacies. A Chinese mothers love flows from the time and energy she puts into forming a banquet. A Chinese mothers love comes through her order to eat more.
10My American friends laugh so hard that tears come out of their eyes, when I tell them how my Chinese mother displays her love. “So she wants you to get fat!” one screamed. They said that their mother showed love by hugging them tightly, buying them clothes, and kiss them on the cheeks.
11Deep inside, I know that my mother does show her love, except she does it when she thinks I am asleep. Every so often, she will tiptoe into my dark room, sit on the edge of my bed, and stroke my hair. When I am awake, however, she is like a professor constantly hounding her prize student and expecting only the best. All throughout my childhood, she drilled on lessons of cleanliness and respect.
12 A few years ago at my Grandpa Dus 67th birthday, I ran up in to my grandfather and planted a wet, juicy kiss on his right cheek. To this day, I can easily remember the horrified looks on my relatives faces. My grandfather turned pale for a second and then smiled meekly. He nodded his head and quickly sat down.
13Later that evening, my mother cornered me against the wall, “Do you not know that respect to elderly is to bow!” she screamed. Her face turned bright purple. My excuses of“I didnt know...” were lost in her powerful words.
14 From that day on, I bowed to anyone Chinese and older than I. I have learned that respect for the elderly earns a young person a different kind of respect. These days, my grandfather points to me and tells my little cousins to follow my example. “She has been taught well,” he tells them.
15It saddens me that my Chinese mother is so often misunderstood. After she threw my friends out during my twelfth birthday party, because they refused to take off their shoes, they saw her as a callous, cruel animal. One of my friends went home and told her father that I had an abusive mother. Her father even volunteered to call the child welfare department5. They never dared to step foot in my house again.
16My mother has given me so many fine values and morals because of her way of teaching me. I choose words carefully before I speak. I am careful to speak and act toward the elderly in a certain way. Without my mothers strong words and teachings, I believe that I would be a rather undisciplined person who didnt value life greatly. I would most likely have been spoiled and callous and ignorant. I have also learned that there is more than one definition of love between a mother and a daughter.
Notes
1. rhetoric: the art of using speech to persuade and influence. Here it means both the mother and the daughter try to use language effectively in convincing or persuading each other in their daily dialogues.
2. silent waters run deep: The usual form of the proverb is “Still waters run deep,” which usually indicates someone who can be very knowledgeable though he or she says very little. Here, the Chinese American mother might intentionally use “silent” instead of “still” so as to convince her daughter that a quiet, controlled, and thoughtful person has more depth of character than one who is noisy, undisciplined, and overly excitable.
3. throwing a redfaced tantrum: losing temper and getting extremely angry
4. slumber parties: also known as sleepovers or pajama parties, an overnight gathering especially of teenage girls who dress in night clothes and pass the night talking at the home of a friend
5. child welfare department: a department which is created to assure the safety, permanency and wellbeing of children at the risk of abuse, neglect, or exploitation. In this context, to call that department means to report child abuse to the authority.
Questions for Comprehension
1. Why does Amy think the language between any mother and daughter is universal? What is that language?
2. According to the writer, what are the disciplinary differences in child rearing between the oriental and the occidental cultures?
3. How did Amys western friends react to her mothers Chinese way of family education? Could they understand it? Did they approve of it?
4. How does Amys mother show her love for her? Illustrate it with some examples.
5. What values and morals has Amys mother imparted to her? Can you summarize some of them? How does Amy understand her mothers disciplinary love despite others misunderstandings?
Vocabulary and Structure Exercises
Ⅰ. Complete the following sentences with words or phrases from this lesson.
1. We immediately a lively conversation when we were introduced. (Para. 4)
2. It is unethical and barbaric to animals. (Para. 4)
3. This precious moment is forever in my heart. (Para. 5)
4. Im very impressed with the embroidery decorations on the beautiful handmade backpack. (Para. 6)
5. This small English town now has a beautifully and built new gallery to house a cherished local art collection. (Para. 6)
6. The president will an overall housing strategy in the next few weeks. (Para. 7)
7. In the blaze, the flames the documents in the office at once. (Para. 8)
8. She waited until her son was asleep, and then quietly out of the bedroom. (Para. 11)
9. The CEO has been into reluctantly admitting that he has known about the problem for years. (Para. 13)
10. In some books, Chinese parents are portrayed as scheming and people indifferent to their childrens true interests. (Para. 15)
Ⅱ. Explain the difference in the meaning or use of the italicized words in the groups of sentences.
1. a. The waves were pounding on the shore.
b. She pounded out a tune on the old piano.
c. Her heart was pounding after running up the stairs.
d. The women in the village were pounding cloves with salt and pepper.
2. a. The man was struck on the head with a stick.
b. It struck me that I had forgotten to get a gift for the party.
c. The two sides struck a compromise.
d. A bright light struck her face.
3. a. I spilt coffee on my silk shirt.
b. Too much blood has already been spilt over this foolish dispute.
c. That horse managed to spill every rider who got on it.
d. The witness spilt all the details about the suspect.
4. a. The steak dinner was a feast.
b. The book is a veritable feast for the mind.
c. I feasted my friends on my birthday.
d. We feasted on the beautiful paintings in the gallery.
5. a. Caviar is a great delicacy.
b. The bracelet is made of pearls of exquisite delicacy.
c. This problem should be addressed with the utmost delicacy.
d. She criticized him with such delicacy that he was not offended.
6. a. The slowdown of emerging markets has pushed the world to the edge of recession.
b. He gained the edge on his opponent.
c. The car edged up to the curb.
d. The knife is blunt. Could you edge it?
7. a. The hunter has ten hounds.
b. The suspect was hounded by the police for weeks.
c. Her parents hounded her until she agreed to look for a better job.
d. She is a coffee hound.
8. a. There is a giant auto plant in the suburbs.
b. She planted a kiss on her daughters cheek.
c. We need to plant a love for learning in children.
d. The passenger insisted that the drugs had been planted on her without her knowledge.
Ⅲ. Paraphrase the italicized parts in the following sentences.
1. Beyond the layers of arguments and rhetoric, and beyond the incidents of humiliation and misunderstandings, there is a love that unites every mother and daughter.
2. I learned to choose my words carefully before I opened my undisciplined mouth.
3. In the evening, her work of labor and art would be unveiled.
4. I have learned that respect for the elderly earns a young person a different kind of respect.
5. Without my mothers strong words and teachings, I believe that I would be a rather undisciplined person who didnt value life greatly. I would most likely have been spoiled and callous and ignorant.
Rhetorical Exercise
Metaphor is probably the most frequently used figure of speech in any language, so is simile, another rhetorical device that is closely related to metaphor. In both metaphor and simile, two fundamentally unlike things are compared. While a simile is usually introduced by connecting words like “as” or “like,” metaphor is an implied comparison achieved without such indicators. In the text, the sentence “My mothers eyes transformed from serene pools of blackness into stormy balls of fire” is a metaphor that likens the mothers eyes implicitly to “serene pools of blackness” and “stormy balls of fire.” Read the following sentences and decide whether they are metaphors or similes.
1. ... my mothers hair was so silky and black, how her eyes were not small and squinty, but shaped like perfect almonds.
2. My mother says that American girls are taught to squabble like chickens.
3. When I am awake, however, she is like a professor constantly hounding her prize student and expecting only the best.
4. “Your dad couldnt keep money,” my mother said. “Money burned a hole in his pocket.”
5. Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string of spiny yellow perch, in the other a bottle of Carlsberg beer.
Questions for Discussion
1. In the text, the author discusses her experiences of being brought up by her Chinese mother in America. Do some further research on the differences between Chinese and American family education. What are the major differences? What do you think are the causes for such differences?
2. The author says that there is more than one definition of love between a mother and a daughter. How do you understand the statement? Do you agree or disagree with her? Write a passage to define maternal love.
Text B
My Fathers Life
Raymond Carver
Raymond Carver (19391988), American author, was born in Clatskanie, Oregon. A son of a saw mill worker and a waitress, Carver developed his interest in writing early in school and later became seriously interested in writing after taking a creative writing course in Chico State College in 1958. His realistic writing frequently focuses on lost dreams, failed relationships, and disillusionment of the working poor, which mirrored his own life. He is recognized as one of the foremost shortstory writers in the English language. In his writing career, he is the recipient of numerous awards. His collections of fiction include Will You Please Be Quiet, Please? (1976), What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981), and Cathedral (1983).
1My dads name was Clevie Raymond Carver. His family called him Raymond and friends called him C. R. I was named Raymond Clevie Carver Jr. I hated the “Junior” part. When I was little my dad called me Frog, which was okay. But later, like everybody else in the family, he began calling me Junior. He went on calling me this until I was thirteen or fourteen and announced that I wouldnt answer to that name any longer. So he began calling me Doc. From then until his death, on June 17, 1967, he called me Doc, or else Son.
2When he died, my mother telephoned my wife with the news. I was away from my family at the time, between lives, trying to enroll in the School of Library Science at the University of Iowa. When my wife answered the phone, my mother blurted out, “Raymonds dead?” For a moment, my wife thought my mother was telling her that I was dead. Then my mother made it clear which Raymond she was talking about and my wife said, “Thank God. I thought you meant my Raymond.”
3My dad walked, hitched rides, and rode in empty boxcars when he went from Arkansas to Washington State in 1934, looking for work. I dont know whether he was pursuing a dream when he went out to Washington. I doubt it. I dont think he dreamed much. I believe he was simply looking for steady work at decent pay. Steady work was meaningful work. He picked apples for a time and then landed a construction laborers job on the Grand Coulee Dam. After hed put aside a little money, he bought a car and drove back to Arkansas to help his folks, my grandparents, pack up for the move west. He said later that they were about to starve down there, and this wasnt meant as a figure of speech. It was during that short while in Arkansas, in a town called Leola, that my mother met my dad on the sidewalk as he came out of a tavern.
4“He was drunk,” she said. “I dont know why I let him talk to me. His eyes were glittery. I wish Id had a crystal ball1.” Theyd met once, a year or so before, at a dance. Hed had girlfriends before her, my mother told me. “Your dad always had a girlfriend, even after we married. He was my first and last. I never had another man. But I didnt miss anything.”
5They were married by a justice of the peace2 on the day they left for Washington, this big, tall country girl and a farmhandturnedconstruction worker. My mother spent her wedding night with my dad and his folks, all of them camped beside the road in Arkansas.
6In Omak, Washington, my dad and mother lived in a little place not much bigger than a cabin. My grandparents lived next door. My dad was still working on the dam, and later, with the huge turbines producing electricity and the water backed up for a hundred miles into Canada, he stood in the crowd and heard Franklin D. Roosevelt when he spoke at the construction site. “He never mentioned those guys who died building that dam,” my dad said. Some of his friends had died there, men from Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Missouri.
7He then took a job in a sawmill in Clatskanie, Oregon, a little town alongside the Columbia River. I was born there, and my mother has a picture of my dad standing in front of the gate to the mill, proudly holding me up to face the camera. My bonnet is on crooked and about to come untied. His hat is pushed back on his forehead, and hes wearing a big grin. Was he going in to work or just finishing his shift? It doesnt matter. In either case, he had a job and a family. These were his salad days3.
8In 1941 we moved to Yakima, Washington, where my dad went to work as a saw filer, a skilled trade hed learned in Clatskanie. When war broke out, he was given a deferment because his work was considered necessary to the war effort. Finished lumber was in demand by the armed services, and he kept his saws so sharp they could shave the hair off your arm.
9After my dad had moved us to Yakima, he moved his folks into the same neighborhood. By the mid1940s the rest of my dads family—his brother, his sister, and her husband, as well as uncles, cousins, nephews, and most of their extended family4 and friends—had come out from Arkansas. All because my dad came out first. The men went to work at Boise Cascade, where my dad worked, and the women packed apples in the canneries. And in just a little while, it seemed—according to my mother—everybody was better off than my dad. “Your dad couldnt keep money,” my mother said. “Money burned a hole in his pocket5. He was always doing for others.”
10The first house I clearly remember living in, at 1515 South Fifteenth Street, in Yakima, had an outdoor toilet. On Halloween night, or just any night, for the hell of it6, neighbor kids, kids in their early teens, would carry out toilet away and leave it next to the road. My dad would have to get somebody to help him bring it home. Or these kids would take the toilet and stand it in somebody elses backyard. Once they actually set it on fire. But ours wasnt the only house that had an outdoor toilet. When I was old enough to know what I was doing, I threw rocks at the other toilets when Id see someone go inside. This was called bombing the toilets. After a while, though, everyone went to indoor plumbing until, suddenly, our toilet was the last outdoor one in the neighborhood. I remember the shame I felt when my thirdgrade teacher, Mr. Wise, drove me home from school one day. I asked him to stop at the house just before ours, claiming I lived there.
11I can recall what happened one night when my dad came home late to find that my mother had locked all the doors on him from the inside. He was drunk, and we could feel the house shudder as he rattled the door. When hed managed to force open a window, she hit him between the eyes with a colander and knocked him out. We could see him down there on the grass. For years afterward, I used to pick up this colander—it was as heavy as a rolling pin—and imagine what it would feel like to be hit in the head with something like that.
12It was during this period that I remember my dad taking me into the bedroom, sitting me down on the bed, and telling me that I might have to go live with my Aunt LaVon for a while. I couldnt understand what Id done that meant Id have to go away from home to live. But this, too—whatever prompted it—must have blown over, more or less, anyway, because we stayed together, and I didnt have to go live with her or anyone else.
13I remember my mother pouring his whiskey down the sink. Sometimes shed pour it all out and sometimes, if she was afraid of getting caught, shed only pour half of it out and then add water to the rest. I tasted some of his whiskey once myself. It was terrible stuff, and I dont see how anybody could drink it.
14After a long time without one, we finally got a car, in 1949 or 1950, a 1938 Ford.But it threw a rod7 the first week we had it, and my dad had to have the motor rebuilt.
15“We drove the oldest car in town,” my mother said. “We could have had a Cadillac for all he spent on car repairs.” One time she found someone elses tube of lipstick on the floorboard, along with a lacy handkerchief. “See this?” she said to me. “Some floozy left this in the car.”
16Once I saw her take a pan of warm water into the bedroom where my dad was sleeping. She took his hand from under the covers and held it in the water. I stood in the doorway and watched. I wanted to know what was going on. This would make him talk in his sleep, she told me. There were things she needed to know, things she was sure he was keeping from her.
17Every year or so, when I was little, we would take the North Coast Limited8 across the Cascade Range from Yakima to Seattle and stay in the Vance Hotel and eat, I remember, at a place called the Dinner Bell Cafe. Once we went to Ivars Acres of Clams and drank glasses of warm clam broth.
18In 1956, the year I was to graduate from high school, my dad quit his job at the mill in Yakima and took a job in Chester, a little sawmill town in northern California. The reasons given at the time for his taking the job had to do with a higher hourly wage and the vague promise that he might, in a few years time, succeed to the job of head filer in this new mill. But I think, in the main, that my dad had grown restless and simply wanted to try his luck elsewhere. Things had gotten a little too predictable for him in Yakima. Also, the year before, there had been the deaths, within six months of each other, of both his parents.
19But just a few days after graduation, when my mother and I were packed to move to Chester, my dad penciled a letter to say hed been sick for a while. He didnt want us to worry, he said, but hed cut himself on a saw. Maybe hed got a tiny sliver of steel in his blood. Anyway, something had happened and hed had to miss work, he said. In the same mail was an unsigned postcard from somebody down there telling my mother that my dad was about to die and that he was drinking “raw whiskey.”
20When we arrived in Chester, my dad was living in a trailer that belonged to the company. I didnt recognize him immediately. I guess for a moment I didnt want to recognize him. He was skinny and pale and looked bewildered. His pants wouldnt stay up. He didnt look like my dad. My mother began to cry. My dad put his arm around her and patted her shoulder vaguely, like he didnt know what this was all about, either. The three of us took up life together in the trailer, and we looked after him as best we could. But my dad was sick, and he couldnt get any better. I worked with him in the mill that summer and part of the fall. Wed get up in the mornings and eat eggs and toast while we listened to the radio, and then go out the door with our lunch pails. Wed pass through the gate together at eight in the morning, and I wouldnt see him again until quitting time. In November I went back to Yakima to be closer to my girlfriend, the girl Id made up my mind I was going to marry.
21He worked at the mill in Chester until the following February, when he collapsed on the job and was taken to the hospital. My mother asked if I would come down there and help. I caught a bus from Yakima to Chester, intending to drive them back to Yakima. But now, in addition to being physically sick, my dad was in the midst of a nervous breakdown, though none of us knew to call it that at the time. During the entire trip back to Yakima, he didnt speak, not even when asked a direct question. (“How do you feel, Raymond?” “You okay, Dad?”) Hed communicate if he communicated at all, by moving his head or by turning his palms up as if to say he didnt know or care. The only time he said anything on the trip, and for nearly a month afterward, was when I was speeding down a gravel road in Oregon and the car muffler came loose. “You were going too fast,” he said.
22Back in Yakima a doctor saw to it that my dad went to a psychiatrist. My mother and dad had to go on relief9, as it was called, and the county paid for the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist asked my dad, “Who is the President?” Hed had a question put to him that he could answer. “Ike,” my dad said. Nevertheless, they put him on the fifth floor of Valley Memorial Hospital and began giving him electroshock treatments. I was married by then and about to start my own family. My dad was still locked up when my wife went into this same hospital, just one floor down, to have our first baby. After she had delivered, I went upstairs to give my dad the news. They let me in through a steel door and showed me where I could find him. He was sitting on a couch with a blanket over his lap. Hey, I thought. What in hell is happening to my dad? I sat down next to him and told him he was a grandfather. He waited a minute and then said, “I feel like a grandfather.” Thats all he said. He didnt smile or move. He was in a big room with a lot of other people. Then I hugged him, and he began to cry.
23Somehow he got out of there. But now came the years when he couldnt work and just sat around the house trying to figure what next and what hed done wrong in his life that hed wound up like this. My mother went from job to crummy job. Much later she referred to that time he was in the hospital, and those years just afterward, as “when Raymond was sick.” The word sick was never the same for me again.
24In 1964, through the help of a friend, he was lucky enough to be hired on at a mill in Klamath, California. He moved down there by himself to see if he could hack it. He lived not far from the mill, in a oneroom cabin not much different from the place he and my mother had started out living in when they went west. He scrawled letters to my mother, and if I called shed read them aloud to me over the phone. In the letters, he said it was touch and go10. Every day that he went to work, he felt like it was the most important day of his life. But every day, he told her, made the next day that much easier. He said for her to tell me he said hello. If he couldnt sleep at night, he said, he thought about me and the good times we used to have. Finally, after a couple of months, he regained some of his confidence. He could do the work and didnt think he had to worry that hed let anybody down ever again. When he was sure, he sent for my mother.
25Hed been off from work for six years and had lost everything in that time—home, car, furniture, and appliances, including the big freezer that had been my mothers pride and joy. Hed lost his good name too—Raymond Carver was someone who couldnt pay his bills—and his selfrespect was gone. Hed even lost his virility. My mother told my wife, “All during that time Raymond was sick we slept together in the same bed, but we didnt have relations. He wanted to a few times, but nothing happened. I didnt miss it, but I think he wanted to, you know.”
26During those years I was trying to raise my own family and earn a living. But, one thing and another, we found ourselves having to move a lot. I couldnt keep track of what was going down in my dads life. But I did have a chance on Christmas to tell him I wanted to be a writer. I might as well have told him I wanted to become a plastic surgeon. “What are you going to write about?” he wanted to know. Then, as if to help me out, he said, “Write about stuff you know about. Write about some of those fishing trips we took.” I said I would, but I knew I wouldnt. “Send me what you write,” he said. I said Id do that, but then I didnt. I wasnt writing anything about fishing, and I didnt think hed particularly care about, or even necessarily understand, what I was writing in those days. Besides, he wasnt a reader. Not the sort, anyway, I imagined I was writing for.
27Then he died. I was a long way off, in Iowa City, with things still to say to him. I didnt have the chance to tell him goodbye, or that I thought he was doing great at his new job. That I was proud of him for making a comeback.
28My mother said he came in from work that night and ate a big supper. Then he sat at the table by himself and finished what was left of a bottle of whiskey, a bottle she found hidden in the bottom of the garbage under some coffee grounds a day or so later. Then he got up and went to bed, where my mother joined him a little later. But in the night she had to get up and make a bed for herself on the couch.“He was snoring so loud I couldnt sleep,” she said. The next morning when she looked in on him, he was on his back with his mouth open, his cheeks caved in. “Graylooking,” she said. She knew he was dead—she didnt need a doctor to tell her that. But she called one anyway, and then she called my wife.
29Among the pictures my mother kept of my dad and herself during those early days in Washington was a photograph of him standing in front of a car, holding a beer and a stringer of fish. In the photograph he is wearing his hat back on his forehead and has this awkward grin on his face. I asked her for it and she gave it to me, along with some others. I put it up on my wall, and each time we moved, I took the picture along and put it up on another wall. I looked at it carefully from time to time, trying to figure out some things about my dad, and maybe myself in the process. But I couldnt. My dad just kept moving further and further away from me and back into time. Finally, in the course of another move, I lost the photograph. It was then that I tried to recall it, and at the same time make an attempt to say something about my dad, and how I thought that in some important ways we might be alike. I wrote the poem when I was living in an apartment house in an urban area south of San Francisco, at a time when I found myself, like my dad, having trouble with alcohol. The poem was a way of trying to connect up with him.
30Photograph of My Father in His TwentySecond YearOctober. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my fathers embarrassed young mans face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other a bottle of Carlsberg beer.
In jeans and flannel shirt, he leans against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose brave and hearty for his posterity,
wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you, I who cant hold my liquor either
and dont even know the places to fish.
31The poem is true in its particulars, except that my dad died in June and not October, as the first word of the poem says. I wanted a word with more than one syllable to it to make it linger a little. But more than that, I wanted a month appropriate to what I felt at the time I wrote the poem a month of short days and failing light, smoke in the air, things perishing. June was summer nights and days, graduations, my wedding anniversary, the birthday of one of my children. June wasnt a month your father died in.
32After the service at the funeral home, after we had moved outside, a woman I didnt know came over to me and said, “Hes happier where he is now.” I stared at this woman until she moved away. I still remember the little knob of a hat she was wearing. Then one of my dads cousins—I didnt know the mans name—reached out and took my hand, “We all miss him,” he said, and I knew he wasnt saying it just to be polite.
33I began to weep for the first time since receiving the news. I hadnt been able to before. I hadnt had the time, for one thing. Now, suddenly, I couldnt stop. I held my wife and wept while she said and did what she could do to comfort me there in the middle of that summer afternoon.
34I listened to people say consoling things to my mother, and I was glad that my dads family had turned up, had come to where he was. I thought Id remember everything that was said and done that day and maybe find a way to tell it sometime. But I didnt. I forgot it all, or nearly. What I do remember is that I heard our name used a lot that afternoon, my dads name and mine. But I knew they were talking about my dad. Raymond, these people kept saying in their beautiful voices out of my childhood, Raymond.
Notes
1. crystal ball: a ball made of crystal, usually used for fortunetellers to predict future events
2. justice of the peace: a local official who has the power to decide minor legal cases, and in the U.S.A., to perform marriages
3. salad days: the years of life when someone was young and lacking in experience
4. extended family: a family group making up one household that consists of parents, children, and other close relatives
5. Money burned a hole in his pocket: Money tempts him to spend it quickly and extravagantly.
6. for the hell of it: just for fun
7. to throw a rod: In a car, the rod is the part that connects between the crank and the piston. To throw a rod means the rod has broken off and is now sticking out through a hole in the engine block, which means you need a whole new engine.
8. North Coast Limited: a passenger train operated by the Northern Pacific Railway between Chicago and Seattle
9. on relief: receiving state assistance because of need
10. touch and go: risky, highly uncertain or unpredictable
Study Questions
1. What is your initial impression of the father? Use some adjectives to portrait his characters.
2. Why did the writer tell Mr. Wise his neighbors house was his own? What is he trying to cover up?
3. Did the writers family get to own a Cadillac in 1950? Why or why not?
4. Do you think the life of the father is a remarkable success or a complete failure? Try to defend your arguments.
5. Why did the writer mention in the poem that the father died in “October” instead of “June”?
Unit Six
Text A
Speaking of Pictures
Nora Ephron
Nora Ephron (19412012), American writer and filmmaker, was born in New York. In 1962 she graduated from Wellesley College with a degree in political science. From 1963 to 1968, Ephron worked as a reporter at the New York Post before turning to freelance journalism. Her columns and articles for Esquire and New York magazines during the early 1970s grabbed attention and were collected in Wallflower at the Orgy (1970), Crazy Salad (1975), and Scribble, Scribble (1978). Ephron made a transition into screenwriting in the 1980s and later into directing in 1990s. She was nominated three times for the Academy Award for Best Writing for her romantic comedies: Silkwood (1983), When Harry Met Sally (1989), and Sleepless in Seattle (1993). In 1990, she won a BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay for When Harry Met Sally. In 2009, Ephron received wide acclaim for directing and writing Julie & Julia, a comedy earning nearly $130 million at the box office.
1“I made all kinds of pictures because I thought it would be a good rescue shot over the ladder... never dreamed it would be anything else...I kept having to move around because of the light set1. The sky was bright and they were in deep shadow. I wouldnt have had any detail. I was making pictures with a motor drive2 and he, the fire fighter, was reaching up and, I dont know, everything started falling. I followed the girl down taking pictures...I made three or four frames. I realized what was going on and I completely turned around because I didnt want to see her hit. I just knew in my mind it wasnt going to add to anything. She fell behind a picket fence. I wouldnt have had it anyway.”
2You probably saw the photographs. In most newspapers, there were three of them. The first showed some people on a fire escape—a fireman, a woman and a child. The fireman had a nice strong jaw and looked very brave. The woman was holding the child. Smoke was pouring from the building behind them. A rescue ladder was approaching, just a few feet away, and the fireman had one arm around the woman and one arm reaching out toward the ladder. The second picture showed the fire escape slipping off the building. The child had fallen on the escape and seemed about to slide off the edge. The woman was grasping desperately at the legs of the fireman, who had managed to grab the ladder. The third picture showed the woman and child in midair, falling to the ground. Their arms and legs were outstretched, horribly distended. A potted plant was falling, too. The caption said that the woman, Diana Bryant, nineteen, died in the fall. The child landed on the womans body and lived.
3The pictures were taken by Stanley Forman, thirty, of the Boston Herald American. He used a motordriven Nikon F set at 1\/250, f 5.6S. Because of the motor, the camera can click off three frames a second. More than four hundred newspapers in the United States alone carried the photographs; the tear sheets3 from overseas are still coming in. The New York Times ran them on the first page of its second section; a paper in south Georgia gave them nineteen columns; The Chicago Tribune, The Washington Post and The Washington Star filled almost half their front pages; The Star under a somewhat redundant headline that read: SENSATIONAL PHOTOS OF RESCUE ATTEMPT THAT FAILED.
4The photographs are indeed sensational. They are pictures of death in action, of that split second when luck runs out, and it is impossible to look at them without feeling their extraordinary impact and remembering, in an almost subconscious way, the morbid fantasy of falling, falling off a building, falling to ones death. Beyond that, the pictures are classics, oldfashioned but perfect examples of photojournalism at its most spectacular. Theyre throwbacks, really, fire pictures,1930s tabloid shots; at the same time theyre technically superb and thoroughly modern—the sequence could not have been taken at all until the development of the motordriven camera some sixteen years ago.
5Most newspaper editors anticipate some reader reaction to photographs like Formans; even so, the response around the country was enormous, and almost all of it was negative. I have read hundreds of the letters that were printed in letterstotheeditor sections, and they repeat the same points. “Invading the privacy of death.” “Cheap sensationalism.” “I thought I was reading the National Enquirer4.” “Assigning the agony of a human being in terror of imminent death to the status of a sideshow act.” “A tawdry way to sell newspapers.” The Seattle Times received sixty letters and calls; its managing editor even got a couple of them at home. A reader wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Jaws5 and Towering Inferno6 are playing downtown; dont take business away from people who pay good money to advertise in your own paper.” Another reader wrote the Chicago SunTimes: “I shall try to hide my disappointment that Miss Bryant wasnt wearing a skirt when she fell to her death. You could have had some awardwinning photographs of her underpants as her skirt billowed over her head, you voyeurs.” Several newspaper editors wrote columns defending the pictures: Thomas Keevil of the Costa Mesa (California) Daily Pilot printed a ballot for readers to vote on whether they would have printed the pictures; Marshall L. Stone of Maines Bangor Daily News, which refused to print the famous assassination picture of the Vietcong7 prisoner in Saigon, claimed that the Boston pictures showed the dangers of fire escapes and raised questions about slumlords. (The burning building was a fivestory brick apartment house on Marlborough Street in the Back Bay section of Boston.)
6For the last five years,The Washington Post has employed various journalists as ombudsmen, whose job is to monitor the paper on behalf of the public. The Posts current ombudsman is Charles Seib, former managing editor of The Washington Star. The day the Boston photographs appeared, the paper received over seventy calls in protest. As Seib later wrote in a column about the pictures, it was “the largest reaction to a published item that I have experienced, in eight months as The Posts ombudsman....
7“In the Posts newsroom, on the other hand, I found no doubts, no second thoughts...the question was not whether they should be printed but how they should be displayed. When I talked to editors...they used words like ‘interesting’ and ‘riveting’ and ‘gripping’ to describe them. The pictures told of something about life in the ghetto, they said (although the neighborhood where the tragedy occurred is not a ghetto, I am told). They dramatized the need to check on the safety of fire escapes. They dramatically conveyed something that had happened, and that is the business were in. They were news....
8“Was publication of that [third] picture a bow to the same taste for the morbidly sensational that makes gold mines of disaster movies? Most papers will not print the picture of a dead body except in the most unusual circumstances. Does the fact that the final picture was taken a millisecond before the young woman died make a difference? Most papers will not print a picture of a bare female breast. Is that a more inappropriate subject for display than the picture of a human beings last agonized instant of life?” Seib offered no answers to the questions he raised, but he went on to say that although as an editor he would probably have run the pictures, as a reader he was revolted by them.
9In conclusion, Seib wrote: “Any editor who decided to print those pictures without giving at least a moments thought to what purpose they served and what their effect was likely to be on the reader should ask another question: Have I become so preoccupied with manufacturing a product according to professional traditions and standards that I have forgotten about the consumer, the reader?”
10It should be clear that the phone calls and letters and Seibs own reaction were occasioned by one factor alone: the death of the woman. Obviously, had she survived the fall, no one would have protested; the pictures would have had a completely different impact. Equally obviously, had the child died as well—or instead—Seib would undoubtedly have received ten times the phone calls he did. In each case, the pictures would have been exactly the same—only the captions, and thus the responses, would have been different.
11But the questions Seib raises are worth discussing—though not exactly for the reasons he mentions. For it may be that the real lesson of the Boston photographs is not the danger that editors will be forgetful of reader reaction but that they will continue to censor pictures of death precisely because of that reaction. The protests Seib fielded were really a variation on an old theme—and we saw plenty of it during the NixonAgnew years8—the “Why doesnt the press print the good news?” argument. In this case, of course, the objections were all dressed up and cleverly disguised as righteous indignation about the privacy of death. This is a form of puritanism that is often justifiable; just as often it is merely puritanical.
12Seib takes it for granted that the widespread though fairly recent newspaper policy against printing pictures of dead bodies is a sound one; I dont know that it makes any sense at all. I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism; the fact is, however, that people die. Death happens to be one of lifes main events. And it is irresponsible—and more than that, inaccurate—for newspapers to fail to show it, or to show it only when an astonishing set of photos comes in over the Associated Press wire. Most papers covering fatal automobile accidents will print pictures of mangled cars. But the significance of fatal automobile accidents is not that a great deal of steel is twisted but that people die. Why not show it? Thats what accidents are about. Throughout the Vietnam war, editors were reluctant to print atrocity pictures. Why not print them? Thats what that war was about. Murder victims are almost never photographed; they are granted their privacy. But their relatives are relentlessly pictured on their way in and out of hospitals and morgues and funerals.
13Im not advocating that newspapers print these things in order to teach their readers a lesson. The Post editors justified their printing of the Boston pictures with several arguments in that direction; every one of them is irrelevant. The pictures dont show anything about slum life; the incident could have happened anywhere, and it did. It is extremely unlikely that anyone who saw them rushed out and had his fire escape strengthened. And the pictures were not news—at least they were not national news. It is not news in Washington, or New York, or Los Angeles that a woman was killed in a Boston fire. The only newsworthy thing about the pictures is that they were taken. They deserve to be printed because they are great pictures, breathtaking pictures of something that happened. That they disturb readers is exactly as it should be: thats why photojournalism is often more powerful than written journalism.
Notes
1. the light set: the set of lighting devices attached to the camera
2. motor drive: a motorized mechanism in a camera used to wind the film rapidly between exposures
3. tear sheet:a sheet torn, or taken in unbound form, from a publication for special distribution
4. National Enquirer: a news and gossip tabloid
5. Jaws: a film about a homicidal shark attacking swimmers on the shore of a New England beach resort, based on a popular novel by Peter Benchley, released in 1975
6. Towering Inferno: a film produced by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation in 1974 about a horrible fire engulfing the worlds largest skyscraper trapping a group of people on the top floor
7. Vietcong: a member or supporter of the Communistled armed forces of the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam that fought to unite the country with North Vietnam between 1954 and 1976
8. the NixonAgnew years: the period of 1972 to 1973, when Spiro Theodore Agnew was elected vice president with Nixon as the President. Agnew resigned on account of criminal charges. As vice president, he became known for his attacks on those, including journalists, who were critical of the Nixon administration.
Questions for Comprehension
1. What can you infer from the photographers statements in the first paragraph, especially from the sentences in subjunctive mood “I wouldnt have had any detail” and “I wouldnt have had it anyway”? What was his intention of taking these pictures?
2. Why does Ephron devote considerable space to the description of the three pictures, and the strongly negative reader response to them? Why did so many readers object to the printing of the pictures? How did some editors justify printing them?
3. What attitudes, according to Ephron, are actually motivating the angry readers? What is her opinion of the editors justifications?
4. Whats Ephrons purpose of writing Charles Seibs contradictory points of view, from the angles of an editor and a reader respectively? Have you ever thought that a picture, a sentence, or an event might bring about different reactions from different people?
5. Why does Ephron think the pictures should be published? Does her argument convince you?
Vocabulary and Structure Exercises
Ⅰ. Complete the following sentences with words or phrases from this lesson.
1. Popular newspapers often offer a somewhat view of the news. (Para. 3)
2. The balloon was because of filling of hydrogen. (Para. 2)
3. The most explosive eruptions are essentially blasts of steam that create displays. (Para. 4)
4. The grandma has undergone the of the cruel war. (Para. 5)
5. The abnormal man was fascinated by dead bodies. (Para. 8)
6. The car was almost beyond recognition. (Para. 12)
7. Alexander Pope, the poet of the 18th century, wrote largely in heroic couplets. (Para. 4)
8. During World War II, German air force bombed England . (Para. 12)
9. Many species of monkeys are in danger of extinction because of habitat loss. (Para. 5)
10. A striking feature of the original prairie was the vast expanse of tall grass in the wind. (Para. 5)
Ⅱ. Explain the difference in the meaning or use of the italicized words in the groups of sentences.
1. a. The student wrote down what he wanted to ask on a slip of paper.
b. If the ailerons alone are used, the airplane will sideslip, or slip sideways and downward.
c. There is many a slip between the cup and the lip.
d. At that time, you were little more than a slip of a girl.
e. On hearing his mothers steps, the little boy slipped out of his garment and slipped into the quilt.
f. A beautiful ladys address was never likely to slip his mind.
g. The little boy slipped over the icy road.
2. a. At the age of fifteen weeks the snails are ready for the pot.
b. They made pots of money on their investment.
c. He potted at a wild duck with his new gun.
d. Fish can be potted in the same way as pork.
e. If you dont attend to your garden, it will go to pot.
3. a. She took a shot of me holding a lamp near my face.
b. A shot made from beyond the threepoint line scores three points instead of the usual two in a basketball game.
c. He was shot in the leg in an armed robbery.
d. The cloth is blue shot with green.
e. What they said was only a shot in the dark.
f. She is taking a shot at losing weight.
4. a. When the trees bow down their heads, the wind is passing by.
b. This novel will make its bow in the spring.
c. They are tired of bowing to the authority.
d. The ship hit a rock and damaged its bows.
e. The actor took a bow at the end of the play.
f. All the children are fascinated by the rare bow in the cloud.
5. a. His insulting remark was the occasion of the bitter quarrel.
b. I take occasion to tell him about my project.
c. This is not an occasion for laughter.
d. Bills behavior occasioned his parents much anxiety.
e. We have no occasion to scold him.
6. a. The novel is set in 17thcentury Spain.
b. He has set the poem to music.
c. She really admired the firm set of his shoulders.
d. The wind has a western set.
e. All the students have been reading the set books for the examinations.
7. a. The trees make a pleasant frame to the house.
b. An examiner must frame his question explicitly.
c. I will have this wonderful picture framed so that I can hang it on the wall.
d. Mary shook her slender frame.
e. Im not in the right frame of mind to start discussing money.
f. The young man claimed that he was framed because he hadnt committed the crime.
8. a. The word “scientist” came gradually to refer to a practitioner of a specialized field of knowledge.
b. The field was won after two hours of fighting.
c. The minister easily fielded all the tough questions from the press.
d. In this baseball game, she fielded the ball.
Ⅲ. Paraphrase the italicized parts in the following sentences.
1. “Assigning the agony of a human being in terror of imminent death to the status of a sideshow act.”
2. A reader wrote The Philadelphia Inquirer: “Jaws and Towering Inferno are playing downtown; dont take business away from people who pay good money to advertise in your own paper.”
3. “Was publication of that [third] picture a bow to the same taste for the morbidly sensational that makes gold mines of disaster movies?”
4. I recognize that printing pictures of corpses raises all sorts of problems about taste and titillation and sensationalism.
5. Murder victims are almost never photographed; they are granted their privacy.
Rhetorical Exercise
A rhetorical question is a question asked neither to expect an answer nor to gain information but to assert more emphatically the obvious answer to what is asked. The “question” acts as a signal to readers that the point made is important. It can also suggest that the answer will be forthcoming if they read on or continue to listen. Usually, it is a statement in disguise that forces readers or listeners to agree with the writers or speakers viewpoint. Ephron uses a lot of rhetorical questions in this essay quite effectively, especially in Paragraph 8 and Paragraph 12. Study them carefully and change the following statements into rhetorical questions.
1. You never offered to intercede on my behalf.
2. Human beings cannot survive without water.
3. I think God wouldnt allow this to happen.
4. Society cant accept this needless slaughter on the roads any longer.
5. Spring cant be far behind if winter comes.
6. We certainly cant understand our racial problems when we cant even understand each other.
Questions for Discussion
1. You must have read news of various kinds with illustrating pictures. What is your response to the pictures of horrible violence and lifeanddeath scenes? Do you understand the editors intentions of printing them? Browse your local newspapers to see whether you can find such pictures and write a comment.
2. Suppose you are a photographer for a newspaper, will you decide on the importance of pictures before you take them? What kinds of pictures are newsworthy?
Text B
Television: The PlugIn Drug
Marie Winn
Born in Czechoslovakia, Marie Winn (1936), journalist, author and bird watcher, immigrated to the United States with her family in 1939. A graduate of Radcliffe College, Columbia University in 1959, she is best known for critiques of televisions effects on children and families. She has contributed to a number of publications ranging from The New York Times Magazine to Library Quarterly. Her works include The Playgroup Book (1967), The PlugIn Drug: Television, Children, and Family (1977, revised 1985), Unplugging the PlugIn Drug (1987), RedTails in Love (1998, updated 2005), and Central Park in the Dark (2008). Apart from writing, she has translated a lot of Czech and Russian novels and plays into English. The present essay is excerpted from the updated version of her famous book The PlugIn Drug, retitled The PlugIn Drug: Television, Computers, and Family Life (2002).
1Not much more than fifty years after the introduction of television into American society1, the medium has become so deeply ingrained in American life that in many states the television set has attained the rank of a legal necessity, safe from repossession in case of debt along with clothes and cooking utensils. Only in the early years after televisions introduction did writers and commentators have sufficient perspective to separate the activity of watching television from the actual content it offers the viewer. In those days writers frequently discussed the effects of television on family life. However, a curious myopia afflicted those first observers: almost without exception they regarded television as a favorable, beneficial, indeed, wondrous influence upon the family.
2“Television is going to be a real asset in every home where there are children,” predicted a writer in 1949.
3“Television will take over your way of living and change your childrens habits, but this change can be a wonderful improvement,” claimed another commentator.
4“No surveys needed, of course, to establish that television has brought the family together in one room,” wrote The New York Timess television critic in 1949.
5The early articles about television were almost invariably accompanied by a photograph or illustration showing a family cozily sitting together before the television set, Sis on Moms lap, Buddy perched on the arm of Dads chair, Dad with his arm around Moms shoulder. Who could have guessed that twenty or so years later Mom would be watching a drama in the kitchen, the kids would be looking at cartoons in their room, while Dad would be taking in the ball game in the living room?
6Of course television sets were enormously expensive when they first came out on the market. The idea that by the year 2000 more than three quarters of all American families would own two or more sets would have seemed preposterous. The splintering of the multipleset family was something the early writers did not foresee. Nor did anyone imagine the number of hours children would eventually devote to television, the changes television would effect upon childrearing methods, the increasing domination of family schedules by childrens viewing requirements—in short, the power of television to dominate family life.
7As childrens consumption of the new medium increased together with parental concern about the possible effects of so much television viewing, a steady refrain helped soothe and reassure anxious parents. “Television always enters a pattern of influences that already exist: the home, the peer group, the school, the church and culture generally,” wrote the authors of an early and influential study of televisions effects on children. In other words, if the childs home life is all right, parents need not worry about the effects of too much television watching.
8But television did not merely influence the child: it deeply influenced that “pattern of influences” everyone hoped would ameliorate the new mediums effects. Home and family life have changed in important ways since the advent of television. The peer group has become televisionoriented, and much of the time children spend together is occupied by television viewing. Culture generally has been transformed by television. Participation in church and community activities has diminished, with television a primary cause of this change. Therefore it is improper to assign to television the subsidiary role its many apologists insist it plays. Television is not merely one of a number of important influences upon todays child. Through the changes it has made in family life, television emerges as the important influence in childrens lives today.
9Televisions contribution to family life has been an equivocal one. For while it has, indeed, kept the members of the family from dispersing, it has not served to bring them together. By its domination of the time families spend together, it destroys the special quality that distinguishes one family from another, a quality that depends to a great extent on what a family does, what special rituals, games, recurrent jokes, familiar songs, and shared activities it accumulates.
10 Yet parents have accepted a televisiondominated family life so completely that they cannot see how the medium is involved in whatever problems they might be having. A firstgrade teacher reports:
I have one child in the group whos an only child. I wanted to find out more about her family life because this little girl was quite isolated from the group, didnt make friends, so I talked to her mother. Well, they dont have time to do anything in the evening, the mother said. The parents come home after picking up the child at the babysitters. Then the mother fixes dinner while the child watches TV. Then they have dinner and the child goes to bed. I said to this mother, “Well, couldnt she help you fix dinner? That would be a nice time for the two of you to talk,” and the mother said, “Oh, but Id hate to have her miss Zoom2. Its such a good program.”
11Several decades ago a writer and mother of two boys aged three and seven described her familys television schedule in a newspaper article. Though some of the programs her kids watched then have changed, the situation she describes remains the same for great numbers of families today:
We were in the midst of a fullscale war. Every day was a new battle and every program was a major skirmish. We agreed it was a bad scene all around and were ready to enter diplomatic negotiations...In principle we have agreed on 21\/2 hours of TV a day, Sesame Street3, Electric Company4 (with dinner gobbled up in between) and two halfhour shows between 7 and 8:30 which enables the grownups to eat in peace and prevents the two boys from destroying one another. Their prebedtime choice is dreadful, because as Josh recently admitted, “Theres nothing much on I really like.” So...its Whats My Line5 or To Tell the Truth6...Clearly there is a need for firstrate childrens shows at this time...
12Consider the “family life” described here: Presumably the father comes home from work during the Sesame StreetElectric Company stint. The children are either watching television, gobbling their dinner, or both. While the parents eat their dinner in peaceful privacy, the children watch another hour of television. Then there is only a half hour left before bedtime, just enough time for baths, getting pajamas on, brushing teeth, and so on. The childrens evening is regimented with an almost military precision. They watch their favorite programs, and when there is “nothing much on I really like,” they watch whatever else is on—because watching is the important thing. Their mother does not see anything amiss with watching programs just for the sake of watching; she only wishes there were some firstrate childrens shows on at those times.
13Without conjuring up fantasies of bygone eras with family games and long, leisurely meals, the question arises: Isnt there a better family life available than this dismal, mechanized arrangement of children watching television for however long is allowed them, evening after evening?
14Of course, families today still do things together at times: go camping in the summer, go to the zoo on a nice Sunday, and take various trips and expeditions. But their ordinary daily life together is diminished—those hours of sitting around at the dinner table, the spontaneous taking up of an activity, the little games invented by children on the spur of the moment when there is nothing else to do, the scribbling, the chatting, and even the quarreling, all the things that form the fabric of a family, that define a childhood. Instead, the children have their regular schedule of television programs and bedtime, and the parents have their peaceful dinner together.
15 The author of the quoted newspaper article notes that “keeping a family sane means mediating between the needs of both children and adults.” But surely the needs of the adults in that family were being better met than the needs of the children. The kids were effectively shunted away and rendered untroublesome, while their parents enjoyed a life as undemanding as that of any childless couple. In reality, it is those very demands that young children make upon a family that lead to growth, and it is the way parents respond to those demands that builds the relationships upon which the future of the family depends. If the family does not accumulate its backlog of shared experiences, shared everyday experiences that occur and recur and change and develop, then it is not likely to survive as anything other than a caretaking institution.
Notes
1. On April 7, 1927, Bell Telephone Labs and AT&T gave the first American public mechanical television demonstration over both wire and radio circuits. Pictures and sound were sent by wire from Washington D.C. to New York City. The first successful American public television broadcast occurred in January 1928.
2. Zoom：a halfhour educational TV program, created almost entirely by children, which aired on PBS from 1972 to 1978
3. Sesame Street: an educational childrens TV series that combines live action, sketch comedy, animation and puppetry. Since its debut on November 10, 1969， it has aired on PBS, with its first run moving to HBO on January 16, 2016.
4. The Electric Company: an educational childrens TV series which aired on PBS from 1971 to 1977. It was intended for children who had graduated from Sesame Street, so the humor was more mature than what was seen there.
5. Whats My Line: a panel game show that originally ran in the U.S.A. on the CBS from 1950 to 1967, with several international versions and subsequent U.S. revivals. The game requires celebrity panelists to question a contestant in order to determine his or her occupation, i.e., “line [of work],” with panelists being called on to identify a weekly celebrity “mystery guest.”
6. To Tell the Truth: a panel game show in which four celebrity panelists are presented with three contestants and must identify which is the “central character” whose unusual experience has been read out by the host. When the panelists question the contestants, the two “impostors” may lie whereas the “central character” must tell the truth. It aired continuously from 1956 to 1978 and intermittently since then, reaching a total of 26 seasons in 2016.
Study Questions
1. How did writers and commentators see television in the early days of television?What does the change in the price of television sets from their invention to today have to do with Winns argument?
2. What is the pattern of influences that television changes? How does it change them?
3. How do you understand the paradox in Paragraph 9: “While it has, indeed, kept the members of the family from dispersing, it has not served to bring them together”? Do you have personal experiences which might illustrate this paradox?
4. What are the effects of television viewing upon children and family relationships respectively according to Winn? What is her warning to the parents?
5. Nowadays children are surrounded and much influenced by a variety of media—games, television, movie, and the Internet. There are reports about how children slip into bad habits through these media. People have a tendency to clump all media together and to blame “the media.” What are your views on various media and their influences? What is to blame? Why?
Unit Seven
Text A
How to Get the Best out of Books
Richard Le Gallienne
Richard Thomas Gallienne (18661947), author and poet, was born in Liverpool, England. He started working in an accountants office but abandoned this job to become a professional writer. In 1891, he joined the staff of the newspaper The Star. He also wrote for various papers by the name Logroller and contributed to The Yellow Book, a quarterly literary periodical. In 1903, he moved to the U.S.A. and continued to write and publish. In 1927, he moved to Paris. He was a prolific writer and his works included, among others, My Ladies Sonnets (1887), Prose Fancies (1894), and From a Paris Garret (1936). The present essay is excerpted from his book How to Get the Best out of Books (1904).
1One is sometimes asked by young people panting after the waterbrooks of knowledge: “How shall I get the best out of books?” Here indeed, is one of those questions which can be answered only in general terms, with possible illustrations from ones own personal experience. Misgivings, too, as to ones fitness to answer it may well arise, as wistfully looking round ones own bookshelves, one asks oneself: “Have I myself got the best out of this wonderful world of books?” It is almost like asking oneself: “Have I got the best out of life?”
2As we make the survey, it will surely happen that our eyes fall on many writers whom the stress of life, or spiritual indolence, has prevented us from using as all the while they have been eager to be used; friends we might have made yet never have made, neglected counsellors we would so often have done well to consult, guides that could have saved us many a wrong turning in the difficult way. There, in unvisited corners of our shelves, what neglected fountains of refreshments, gardens in which we have never walked, hills we have never climbed!
3“Well,” we say with a sigh, “a man cannot read everything; it is life that has interrupted our studies, and probably the fact is that we have accumulated more books than we really need.” The young readers appetite is largely in his eyes, and it is very natural for one who is born with a taste for books to gather them about him at first indiscriminately, on the hearsay recommendation of fame, before he really knows what his own individual tastes are, or are going to be, and in that wistful survey I have imagined, our eyes will fall, too, with some amusement, on not a few volumes to which we never have had any really personal relation, and which, whatever their distinction or their value for others, were never meant for us. The way to do with such books is to hand them over to someone who has a use for them. On our shelves they are like so much good thrown away, invitations to entertainments for which we have no taste. In all vital libraries, such a process of progressive refection is continually going on, and to realize what we do not want in books, or cannot use, must, obviously, be a first principle in our getting the best out of them.
4Yes, we read too many books, and too many that, as they do not really interest us, bring us neither benefit nor diversion. Even from the point of view of reading for pleasure, we manage our reading badly. We listlessly allow ourselves to be bullied by publishers advertisements into reading the latest fatuity in fiction, without, in one case out of twenty, finding any of that pleasure we are ostensibly seeking. Instead, indeed, we are bored and enervated, where we might have been refreshed, either by romance or laughter. Such reading resembles the idle absorption of innocuous but interesting beverages, which cheer as little as they inebriate, and yet at the same time make frivolous demands on the digestive functions. No one but a publisher could call such reading “light.” Actually it is weariness of the flesh and heaviness of the spirit.
5If, therefore, our idea of the best in books is the recreation they can so well bring; if we go to books as to a playground to forget our cares and to blow off the cobwebs of business, let us make sure that we find what we seek. It is there, sure enough. The playgrounds of literature are indeed wide, and alive with bracing excitement, nor is there any limit to the variety of the games. But let us be sure, when we set out to be amused, that we really are amused, that our humorists do really make us laugh, and that our storytellers have stories to tell and know how to tell them. Beware of imitations, and, when in doubt, try Shakespeare1, and Dumas2—even Ouida3. As a rule, avoid the “spring lists,” or “summer reading.” “Summer reading” is usually very hot work.
6Hackneyed as it is, there is no better general advice on reading than Shakespeares—No profit is where is no pleasure taken,
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.4
Not only in regard to books whose purpose, frankly, is recreation, but also in regard to the graver uses of books, this counsel no less holds. No reading does us any good that is not a pleasure to us. Her paths are paths of pleasantness. Yet, of course, this does not mean that all profitable reading is easy reading. Some of the books that give us the finest pleasure need the closest application for their enjoyment. There is always a certain spiritual and mental effort necessary to be made before we tackle the great books. One might compare it to the effort of getting up to see the sun rise. It is no little of a tug to leave ones warm bed—but once we are out in the crystalline morning air, wasnt it worth it? Perhaps our finest pleasure always demands some such austerity of preparation. That is the secret of the truest Epicureanism. Books like Dantes Divine Comedy5, or Platos dialogues6, will not give themselves to a lounging reader. They demand a braced, attentive spirit. But when the first effort has been made, how exhilarating are the altitudes in which we find ourselves; what a glow of pure joy is the reward which we are almost sure to win by our mental mountaineering.
7But such books are not for moments when we are unwilling or unable to make that necessary effort. We cannot always be in the mood for the great books, and often we are too tired physically, or too low down on the depressed levels of daily life, even to lift our eyes toward the hills. To attempt the great books—or any books at all—in such moods and moments, is a mistake. We may thus contract a prejudice against some writer who, approached in more fortunate moments, would prove the very man we were looking for.
8To know when to read is hardly less important than to know what to read. Of course,everyone must decide the matter for himself; but one general counsel may be ventured: Read only what you want to read, and only when you want to read it.
9Some readers find the early morning, when they have all the world to themselves, their best time for reading, and, if you are a good sleeper and do not find early rising more wearying than refreshing, there is certainly no other time of the day when the mind is so eagerly receptive, has so keen an edge of appetite, and absorbs a book in so fine an intoxication. For you true booklover there is no other exhilaration so exquisite as that with which one reads an inspiring book in the solemn freshness of early morning. Ones nerves seem peculiarly strung for exquisite impressions in the first dewy hours of the day, there is a virginal sensitiveness and purity about all our senses, and the mere delight of the eye in the printed page is keener than at any other time. “The Muses7 love the morning, and that is a fit time for study,” said Erasmus8 to his friend Christianus of Lubeck; and, certainly, if early rising agrees with one, there is no better time for getting the very best out of a book. Moreover, morning reading has a way of casting a spell of peace over the whole day. It has a sweet, solemnizing effect on our thoughts—a sort of mental matins—and through the days business it accompanies us as with hidden music.
10There are other readers who prefer to do their reading at night, and I presume that most readers of this paper are so circumstanced as to have no time to spare for reading during the day. Personally, I think that one of the best places to read in is bed. Paradoxical as it may sound, one is not so apt to fall asleep over his book in bed as in the postprandial armchair. While ones body rests itself, ones mind remains alert, and, when the time for sleep comes at last, it passes into unconsciousness, tranquilized and sweetened with thought and pleasantly weary with healthy exercise. One awakens, too, next morning, with, so to say, a very pleasant taste of meditation in the mouth. Erasmus, again, has a counsel for the bedtime reader, expressed with much felicity. “A little before you sleep,” he says, “read something that is exquisite, and worth remembering; and contemplate upon it till you fall asleep; and, when you awake in the morning, call yourself to an account for it.”
11In an old Atlantic Monthly, from which, if I remember aright, he never rescued it, Oliver Wendell Holmes9 has a delightful paper on the delights of reading in bed, entitled “PillowSmoothing Authors.”
12Then, though I suppose we shall have the oculists against us, the cars are good places to read in—if you have the power of detachment, and are able to switch off your ears from other peoples conversation. It is a good plan to have a book with you in all places and at all times. Most likely you will carry it many a day and never give it a single look, but, even so, a book in the hand is always a companionable reminder of that happier world of fancy, which, alas! most of us can only visit by playing truant from the real world. As some men wear boutonnieres, so a reader carries a book, and sometimes, when he is feeling the need of beauty, or the solace of a friend, he opens it, and finds both. Probably he will count among the most fruitful moments of his reading the snatched glimpses of beauty and wisdom he has caught in the morning car. The covers of his book have often proved like some secret door, through which, surreptitiously opened, he has looked for a moment into his own particular fairy land. Never mind the oculist, therefore, but, whenever you feel like it, read in the car.
13One or two technical considerations may be dealt with in this place. How to remember what one reads is one of them. Some people are blest with such good memories that they never forget anything that they have once read. Literary history has recorded many miraculous memories. Still, it is quite possible to remember too much, and thus turn ones mind into a lumberroom of useless information. A good reader forgets even more than he remembers. Probably we remember all that is really necessary for us, and, except in so far as our reading is technical and directed toward some exact science or, profession, accuracy of memory is not important. As the Sabbath10 was made for man, so books were made for the reader, and, when a reader has assimilated from any given book his own proper nourishment and pleasure, the rest of the book is so much oyster shell. The end of true reading is the development of individuality. Like a certain water insect, the reader instinctively selects from the outspread world of books the building materials for the house of his soul. He chooses here and rejects there, and remembers or forgets according to the formative desire of his nature. Yet it often happens that he forgets much that he needs to remember, and thus the question of methodical aids to memory arises.
14Ones first thought, of course, is of the commonplace book11. Well, have you ever kept one, or, to be more accurate, tried to keep one? Personally, I believe in the commonplace book so long as we dont expect too much from it. Its two dangers are (1) that one is apt to make far too many and too minute entries, and (2) that one is apt to leave all the remembering to the commonplace book, with a consequent relaxation of ones own attention. On the other hand, the mere discipline of a commonplace book is a good thing, and if—as I think is the best way—we copy out the passages at full length, they are thus the more securely fixed in the memory. A commonplace book kept with moderation is really useful, and may be delightful. But the entries should be made at full length. Otherwise, the thing becomes a mere index, an index which encourages us to forget.
15Another familiar way of assisting ones memory in reading is to mark ones own striking passages. This method is chiefly worthwhile for the sake of ones second and subsequent readings; though it all depends when one makes the markings—at what time of his life, I mean. Markings made at the age of twenty years are of little use at thirty—except negatively. In fact, I have usually found that all I care to read again of a book read at twenty is just the passages I did not mark. This consideration, however, does not depreciate the value of ones comparatively contemporary markings. At the same time, marking, like indexing, is apt, unless guarded against, to relax the memory. One is apt to mark a passage in lieu of remembering it. Still, for a second reading, as I say—a second reading not too long after the first—marking is a useful method, particularly if one regards his first reading of a book as a prospecting of the ground rather than a taking possession. Ones first reading is a sort of flying visit12, during which he notes the places he would like to visit again and really come to know. A brief index of ones markings at the end of a volume is a method of memory that commended itself to the booklovers of former days—to Leigh Hunt13, for instance.
16Yet none of these external methods, useful as they may prove, can compare with a habit of thorough attention. We read far too hurriedly, too much in the spirit of the“quick lunch14.” No doubt we do so a great deal from the misleading idea that there is so very much to read. Actually, there is very little to read—if we wish for real reading, and there is time to read it all twice over. We—Americans—bolt our books as we do our food, and so get far too little good out of them. We treat our mental digestions as brutally as we treat our stomachs. Meditation is the digestion of the mind, but we allow ourselves no time for meditation. We gorge our eyes with the printed page, but all too little of what we take in with our eyes ever reaches our minds or our spirits. We assimilate what we can from all this hurry of superfluous food, and the rest goes to waste, and, as a natural consequence, contributes only to the wear and tear of our mental organism.
17Books should be real things. They were so once, when a man would give a fat field in exchange for a small manuscript; and they are no less real today—some of them. Each age contributes one or two real books to the eternal library—and always the old books remain, magic springs of healing and refreshment. If no one should write a book for a thousand years, there are quite enough books to keep us going. Real books there are in plenty. Perhaps there are more real books than there are real readers. Books are the strong tincture of experience. They are to be taken carefully, drop by drop, not carelessly gulped down by the bottle. Therefore, if you would get the best out of books, spend a quarter of an hour in reading, and threequarters of an hour in thinking over what you have read.
Notes
1. Shakespeare: William Shakespeare (15641616), English playwright and poet, widely considered as the greatest dramatist in the English language
2. Dumas: Alexandre Dumas, père (father) (18021870), French writer, one of the most widely read French authors, whose famous works include The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers
3. Ouida: the pseudonym of the English novelist Maria Louise Ramé (18391908), whose works include Moths and A Dog of Flanders
4. These lines are taken from Shakespeares The Taming of the Shrew, Act I. The original version is: No profit grows where is no pleasure taen. \/ In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
5. Divine Comedy: an epic poem by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri (c. 12651321). The poem describes the poets travels through Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, and is regarded as one of the greatest works in world literature.
6. Platos dialogues: Plato (428\/427348\/347 BC), great philosopher of ancient Greece, whose works are in the form of dialogues, where several characters argue a topic by asking each other questions. His dialogues include Apology, The Republic, and Laws.
7. Muses: nine goddesses in Greek mythology who presided over the arts and literature
8. Erasmus: Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (14691536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest and social critic who wrote The Praise of Folly and On Free Will
9. Oliver Wendell Holmes: Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.(18091894), American physician and writer, one of the founding sponsors of The Atlantic Monthly, a literary magazine that he named
10. Sabbath: for Christians, a day of holiness set aside for rest and worship
11. commonplace book: a notebook in which noteworthy quotations, comments, etc., are written
12. flying visit: a quick and brief visit
13. Leigh Hunt: James Henry Leigh Hunt (17841859), English critic, poet, and writer, editor of the newspaper Examiner
14. quick lunch: takeaway food as ones lunch, such as a sandwich. The spirit of “quick lunch” refers to the tendency to get things quickly done.
Questions for Comprehension
1. According to Le Gallienne, what is the first principle of getting the best out of books? Why does he believe that we manage our reading badly, even from the viewpoint of reading for pleasure?
2. What principles does the author advise readers to follow with regard to selecting and reading great books so as to get the best out of them?
3. In the authors opinion, when is the best time to read? What are the recommended places to read in? How does he illustrate his recommendations?
4. How do you understand that “A good reader forgets even more than he remembers”? Is it selfcontradictory? What suggestions do the forgetful readers get from the author to enhance their memory? Which one is the most important? How does the author justify his view?
5. At the end of the essay, the author mentions “real reading,” “real books,” and “real readers,” what do you think they refer to? How are they related?
Vocabulary and Structure Exercises
Ⅰ. Complete the following sentences with words or phrases from this lesson.
1. After a sudden burst of activity, the team lapsed back into . (Para. 2)
2. Sleep deprivation can impair motor skills as much as alcohol can. (Para. 9)
3. His poetry displays great purity of diction and of expression. (Para. 10)
4. He always preserves a chilly in his relations with the family. No one can understand his indifference. (Para. 12)
5. You shouldnt expect immigrants to into a new culture immediately. (Para. 13)
6. in eating should help you keep in shape. (Para. 14)
7. Those explosions must have been to our departure, because we didnt hear anything when we were there. (Para. 15)
8. An increase in the supply of money the currency. (Para. 15)
9. Emigration affords a natural outlet for the labor force of a country. (Para.16)
10. Seat covers on trains take a lot of . (Para. 16)
Ⅱ. Explain the difference in the meaning or use of the italicized words in the groups of sentences.
1. a. Embers glowed in the fireplace.
b. The little girls cheeks glowed from the cold.
c. The setting sun cast a deep red glow over the mountains.
d. The parents felt a glow of pride as they watched their son collect the award.
2. a. Your email really lifted my spirits.
b. They will have to conserve food and water until the siege against the city is lifted.
c. The author lifted the plot from another writers novel.
d. For the protagonist of the new play, the author has lifted a character from an early novel.
e. By afternoon the haze had lifted.
3. a. The pupils of her eyes contracted in the bright light.
b. After the accident, she contracted pneumonia.
c. The word “am” is contracted to “m” in “Im.”
d. He squandered his money and contracted huge debts.
4. a. The gambler cast the dice.
b. He cast the newspaper in the wastebasket.
c. They cast him as Hamlet in their production.
d. The moon cast a white light into the room.
e. The speaker cast his remarks to fit the occasion.
5. a. The old woman cast a spell on the prince and he turned into a beast.
b. I lived in New York for a spell.
c. According to the weather forecast, there will be rainy spells in the coming week.
d. The new regulations could spell disaster for small businesses.
6. a. The roof is apt to leak when it rains.
b. We have some particularly apt students in the class this year.
c. Many apt metaphors are used in Richard Le Galliennes essay.
7. a. She gave a fascinating account of her life in the rainforest.
b. What is the account for this loss?
c. Its of no account to me whether she comes or not.
d. I need to draw some money out of my account.
e. The new employee accounted himself well paid.
8. a. The exact distance is 5.686 meters.
b. The scholar is an exact thinker. Many hours of meticulous preparation have gone into writing his book.
c. The surgery exacts tremendous skill and concentration of the doctors.
d. The blackmailer exacted a total of $10,000 from his victim.
Ⅲ. Paraphrase the italicized parts in the following sentences.
1. As we make the survey, it will surely happen that our eyes fall on many writers whom the stress of life, or spiritual indolence, has prevented us from using as all the while they have been eager to be used.
2. We may thus contract a prejudice against some writer who, approached in more fortunate moments, would prove the very man we were looking for.
3. Most likely you will carry it many a day and never give it a single look, but, even so,a book in the hand is always a companionable reminder of that happier world of fancy, which, alas! most of us can only visit by playing truant from the real world.
4. Still, for a second reading, as I say—a second reading not too long after the first—marking is a useful method, particularly if one regards his first reading of a book as a prospecting of the ground rather than a taking possession.
5. We gorge our eyes with the printed page, but all too little of what we take in with our eyes ever reaches our minds or our spirits.
Rhetorical Exercise
Paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself or the established fact, but it is actually reasonable and can reveal unanticipated truth. The purpose of a paradox is to capture attention and stimulate thinking. Paradox usually offers an enlightening way of seeing or understanding things. For example, in this text, the author says, “A good reader forgets even more than he remembers.” Analyze the following sentences and explain the implication of paradox in each sentence.
1. Less is more.
2. Grasp all, lose all.
3. You can save money by spending it.
4. I close my eyes so I can see. (“Shut the Door,” song of American band “Fugazi”)
5. Child is father of the man. (“My Heart Leaps up When I Behold,” poem by William Wordsworth)
Questions for Discussion
1. Recall your own reading experience. Do you think you have got the best of the books you have read? Apart from the authors suggestions, what else do you think is essential for a reader to get the best out of a book?
2. In this essay, the author points out some major problems with American readers at that time. As far as you know, what do you think are the major problems with contemporary Chinese readers? Can you offer some advice and illustrate your point?
Text B
Reading: From Many Rules to One Habit
Mortimer J. Adler
Mortimer J. Adler (19022001), American scholar and author, was born to Jewish immigrant parents in New York. In 1945, he became associate editor of Great Books of the Western World (54 volumes, 19451952). Adler published numerous books, including How to Read a Book (1940), The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes (1967), and Philosopher at Large (1977). He was editor in chief of The Annals of America (20 vols., 1969) and served as director of planning for the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica, which appeared in 1974.
1While you are in the stage of learning to read, you have to go over a book more than once. If it is worth reading at all, it is worth three readings at least.
2Lest you become unduly alarmed at the demands that are going to be made of you, let me hasten to say that the expert reader can do these three readings at the same time. What I have called “three readings” need not be three in time. They are, strictly speaking, three in manner. They are three ways of reading a book. To be well read, each book should be read in these three ways each time it is read. The number of distinct times you can read something profitably depends partly on the book and partly on you as a reader, your resourcefulness and industry.
3Only at the beginning, I repeat, the three ways of reading a book must be done separately. Before you become expert, you cannot coalesce a lot of different acts into one complex, harmonious performance. You cannot telescope the different parts of the job so that they run into one another and fuse intimately. Each deserves your full attention while you are doing it. After you have practice the parts separately, you not only can do each with greater facility and less attention but you can also gradually put them together into a smoothly running whole.
4I am saying nothing here which is not common knowledge about learning a complex skill. I merely want to be sure you realize that learning to read is at least as complex as learning to typewrite or learning to play tennis. If you can recall your patience in any other learning experience you have had, perhaps you will be more tolerant of a tutor who is shortly going to enumerate a long list of rules for reading.
5The experimental psychologists have put the learning process under glass for any to look at. The learning curves they have plotted, during countless laboratory studies of every sort of manual skill, show graphically the rate of progress from one state of practice to another. I want to call your attention to two of their findings.
6The first is called the “learning plateau.” During a series of days in which a performance, such as typewriting or receiving the Morse code telegraphically, is practiced, the curve shows improvement both in speed and in the reduction of errors. Then suddenly the curve flattens out. For some days, the learner cannot make any advances. His hard work seems to yield no substantial effects in either speed or accuracy. The rule that every bit of practice makes a little more perfect appears to break down. Then, just as suddenly, the learner gets off the plateau and starts to climb again. The curve which records his achievements again shows steady progress from day to day. And this continues, though perhaps with a slightly diminishing acceleration, until the learner hits another plateau.
7Plateaus are not found in all learning curves, but only in those which record progress in gaining a complex skill. In fact, the more complex the performance to be learned, the more frequent such stationary periods appear. The psychologists have discovered, however, that learning is going on during these periods, though it is hidden in the sense of having no manifest practice effects at the time. The discovery that “higher units” of skills are then being formed is the second of the two findings I referred to before. While the learner is improving in typing single letters, he makes progress in speed and accuracy. But he has to form the habit of typing syllables and words as units, and then later phrases and sentences.
8The stage during which the learner is passing from a lower to a higher unit of skill appears to be one of no advance in efficiency, because the learner must develop a certain number of “word units” before he can perform at that level. When he has enough of these units mastered, he makes a new spurt of progress until he has to pass to a higher unit of operation. What at first consisted of a larger number of single acts—the typing of each individual letter—becomes finally one complex act—the typing of a whole sentence. The habit is perfectly formed only when the learner has reached the highest unit of operation. Where before there seemed to be many habits, which it was difficult to make work together, now there is one habit by virtue of the organization of all the separate acts into one smoothly flowing performance.
9The laboratory findings merely confirm what I think most of us know already from our own experience, though we might not have recognized the plateau as a period in which hidden learning is going on. If you are learning to play tennis, you have to learn how to serve the ball, how to receive your opponents service or return, how to play net, or at the midcourt and base line. Each of these is part of the total skill. At first, each must be mastered separately, because there is a technique for doing each. But none of these by itself is the game of tennis. You have to pass from these lower units to the higher unit in which all the separate skills are put together and become one complex skill. You have to be able to move from one act to another so rapidly and automatically that our attention is free for the strategy of play.
10The man who has done one experience in acquiring a complex skill knows that he need not fear the array of rules which present themselves at the beginning of something to be learned. He knows that he does not have to worry about all the different acts, in which he must become separately proficient, are going to work together. Knowing that the plateaus in learning are periods of hidden progress may prevent discouragement. Higher units of activity are getting formed even if they do not increase ones efficiency all at once.
11What is true of tennis holds for reading, not simply the grammarschool rudiments, but the highest type of reading for understanding. Anyone who recognizes that such reading is a complex activity will acknowledge this. I have made all this explicit so that you will not think that the demands to be made here are any more exasperating than in other fields of learning.
12Not only will you become proficient in following each of the rules, you will gradually cease to concern yourself with the rules as distinct and the separate acts they regulate. You will be doing a larger job, confident that the parts will take care of themselves. You will no longer pay so much attention to yourself as a reader, and be able to put your mind wholly on the book you are reading.
13But for the present, we must pay attention to the separate rules. These rules fall into three main groups, each dealing with one of the three indispensable ways a book must be read. I shall now try to explain why there must be three readings.
14In the first place, you must be able to grasp what is being offered as knowledge. In the second place, you must judge whether what is being offered is really acceptable to you as knowledge. In other words, there is first the task of understanding the book, and second the job of criticizing it. These two are quite separate, as you will see more and more.
15The process of understanding can be further divided. To understand a book, you must approach it, first, as a whole, having a unity and a structure of parts; and, second, in terms of its elements, its units of language and thought.
16Thus, there are three distinct readings, which can be variously named and described as follows:
Ⅰ. The first reading can be called structural or analytic. Here the reader proceeds from the whole to its parts.
Ⅱ. The second reading can be called interpretative or synthetic. Here the reader proceeds from the parts to the whole.
Ⅲ. The third reading can be called critical or evaluative. Here the reader judges the author, and decides whether he agrees or disagrees.
17In each of these three main divisions, there are several steps to be taken, and hence several rules. You have already being introduced to three of the four rules for doing the second reading: (1) you must discover and interpret the most important words in the book; (2) you must do the same for the most important sentences, and (3) similarly for the paragraphs which express arguments. The fourth rule, which I have not yet mentioned, is that you must know which of his problems the author solved, and which he failed on.
18To accomplish the first reading you must know (1) what kind of book it is; that is, the subject matter it is about. You must also know (2) what the book as a whole is trying to say; (3) into what parts that whole is divided, and (4) what the main problems are that the author is trying to solve. Here, too, there are four steps and four rules.
19Notice that the parts which you come to by analyzing the whole in this first reading are not exactly the same as the parts you start with to construct the whole in the second reading. In the former case, the parts are the ultimate divisions of the authors treatment of his subject matter or problem. In the latter case, the parts are such things as terms, propositions, and syllogisms; that is, the authors ideas, assertions, and arguments.
20The third reading also involves a number of steps. There are first several general rules about how you must undertake the task of criticism, and then there are a number of critical points you can make—four in all. The rules for the third reading tell you what points can be made and how to make them.
21Knowing what the whole book is about and what its main divisions are will help you discover its leading terms and propositions. If you can discover what the chief contentions of the author are and how he supports these by argument and evidence, you will be aided in determining the general tenor of his treatment and its major divisions.
22The last step in the first reading is to define the problem or problems the author is trying to solve. The last step in the second reading is to decide whether the author has solved these problems, or which he has and which he has not. Thus you see how closely the first two readings are related, converging as it were in their final steps.
23As you become more expert, you will be able to do these two readings together. The better you can do them together, the more they will help each other get done. But the third reading will never become, in fact never can become, absolutely simultaneous with the other two. Even the most expert reader must do the first two and the third somewhat separately. Understanding an author must always precede criticizing or judging him.
24I have met many “readers” who do the third reading first. Worse than that, they fail to do the first two readings at all. They pick up a book and soon begin to tell you what is wrong with it. They are full of opinions which the book is merely a pretext for expressing. They can hardly be called “readers” at all. They are more like people you know who think a conversation is an occasion for talking but not listening. Not only are such people not worth your effort in talking, but they are usually not worth listening either.
25The reason why the first two readings can grow together is that both are attempts to understand the book, whereas the third remains distinct because it undertakes criticism after understanding is reached. But even after the first two readings are habitually fused, they can still be analytically separated. This is important. If you had to check your reading of a book, you would have to divide the whole process into its parts. You might have to reexamine separately each step you took, though at the time you did not take it separately, so habitual had the process of reading become.
26For this reason, it is important to remember that the various rules remain distinct from one another as rules. They could not help you check your reading unless you could consult them as so many different rules. The teacher of English composition, going over a paper with a student and explaining his marks, points to this or that rule the student violated. At that time, the student must be reminded of the different rules, but the teacher does not want him to write with a rule sheet before him. He wants him to write well habitually, as if the rules were part of his nature. The same is true of reading.
27Now there is one further complication. Not only must you read a book three ways (and at the beginning that may mean three times), but you must also be able to read two or more books in relation to one another in order to read any one of them well. I do not mean that you must be able to read any collection of books together. I am thinking only of books which are related because they deal with the same subject matter or treat the same group of problems. If you cannot read such books in relation to one another, you probably cannot read any one of them very well. If the authors are saying the same or different things, if they are agreeing or disagreeing, what assurance can you have that you understand one of them unless you recognize such overlappings and divergences?
28This point calls for a distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic reading. I hope these two words are not misleading. I know of no other way to name the difference. By “intrinsic reading” I mean reading a book in itself, quite apart from all other books. By “extrinsic reading” I mean reading a book in the light of other books. The other books may, in some cases, be only reference books, such as dictionaries, encyclopedias, and almanacs. They may be secondary books, which are useful commentaries or digests. They may be other great books. Another extrinsic aid to reading is relevant experience. The experiences to which one may have to refer in order to understand a book may be either of the sort that occur only in a laboratory, or of the sort which men possess in the course of their daily lives. Intrinsic and extrinsic readings tend to fuse in the actual process of understanding, or even criticizing, a book.
29What I said before about being able to read related books in relation to one another applies especially to the great books. Frequently, in lecturing about education, I refer to the great books. Members of the audience usually write to me later to ask for a list of such books. I tell them to get either the list which the American Library Association has published under the title Classics of the Western World, or the list printed by St. Johns College, in Annapolis, Maryland, as part of its announcement. Later I am informed by these people that they have great difficulties in reading the books. The enthusiasm which prompted them to send for the list and to start reading has given way to a hopeless feeling of inadequacy.
30There are two reasons for this. One, of course, is that they do not know how to read. But that is not all. The other reason is that they think they should be able to understand the first book they pick out, without having read the others to which it is closely related. They may try to read The Federalist Papers1 without having read the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution. Or they may try all these without having read Montesquieus2 The Spirit of the Laws, Rousseaus3 The Social Contract, and John Lockes4 essay Of Civil Government.
31Not only are many of the great books related, but they have actually been written in a certain order which should not be ignored. A later writer has been influenced by an earlier one. If you read the earlier writer first, he may help you understand the later book. Reading related books in relation to one another and in an order which renders the later ones more intelligible is a basic rule of extrinsic reading.
32I shall discuss the extrinsic aids to reading later. Until then, we shall be concerned only with the rules of intrinsic reading. Again, I must remind you that we have to make such separations in the process of learning, even though the learning is completed only when the separations disappear. The expert reader has other books in mind, or relevant experiences, while he is reading a particular book to which these other things are related. But for the present, you must pay attention to the steps in reading a single book, as if that book were a whole world in itself. I do not mean, of course, that your own experience can ever be excluded from the process of understanding what a book is saying. That much of extrinsic reference beyond the book is absolutely indispensable, as we shall see. After all, you cannot enter the world of a single book without bringing your mind along and with it the whole of your past experience.
33These rules of intrinsic reading apply not only to reading a book but also to taking a course of lectures. I am sure that a person who could read a whole book well could get more out of a course of lectures than most people do, in or out of college. The two situations are largely the same, though following a series of lectures may call for a greater exercise of memory or note taking. There is one other difficulty about the lectures. You can read a book three times if you have to read it separately in each of three ways. That is not possible with lectures. Lectures may be all right for those who are expert in receiving communication, but they are quite difficult for the untrained.
34This suggests an educational principle: perhaps it would be a sound plan to be sure that people knew how to read a whole book before they were encouraged to attend a course of lectures. It does not happen that way in college now. It does not happen in adult education either. Many people think that taking a course of lectures is a short cut to getting what they are not able to read in books. But it is not a short cut to the same goal. In fact, they might as well be going in the opposite direction.
Notes
1. The Federalist papers: an enduring American document composed in 1787 by federalist leaders Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison to counter doubts about the proposed new government
2. Montesquieu: French political philosopher, an outstanding figure of the early French Enlightenment, who advocated the separation of executive and legislative and judicial powers. He wrote the influential Persian Letters (1721), a veiled attack on the monarchy, and The Spirit of Laws (1748), a discourse on government, in which he examined the three main types of government—republic, monarchy, and despotism.
3. Rousseau: Jean Jacques Rousseau (17121778), French philosopher, social and political theorist, musician, botanist, and one of the most eloquent writers of the Age of Enlightenment. In his famous political treatise The Social Contract (1762), he developed a case for civil liberty and helped prepare the ideological background of the French Revolution by defending the popular will against divine right.
4. John Locke: English philosopher who founded the school of empiricism. In his Two Treatises of Civil Government, he argued that sovereignty did not reside in the state but with the people, and that the state is supreme, but only if it is bound by civil and what he called “natural” law.
Study Questions
1. What does Mortimer J. Adler mean by “three readings”? When must they be done separately? What will determine the number of times a reader should read a book?
2. What psychological experiment does the author mention in this essay? What are the research findings mentioned in the text? Why does he want to draw the readers attention to such findings?
3. Why does the author assert that those who do the third reading first can hardly be called “readers” at all?
4. What phenomenon does the author criticize in the last paragraph? Is it true of some students? Is there any short cut to learning?
5. The author offers readers many rules for reading in a stepbystep fashion, which he hopes that they can apply habitually as part of their nature. Which rule do you think is the most important to the seniors who have to write a thesis for graduation? Why?
Unit Eight
Text A
Women Are Prisoners of Their Sex
Brigid Brophy
Brigid Antonia Brophy (19291995), British novelist, critic, feminist, and campaigner for social reforms, was born in Ealing, England. She attended St Hughs College in Oxford University in 1947, but left in 1948 without a degree. The daughter of the novelist John Brophy, Brigid began writing at an early age. Her major novels include Hackenfellers Ape (1953), Flesh (1962), The Snow Ball (1962), In Transit (1969) and Palace without Chairs (1978). Her important nonfiction works include Dont Ever Forget (1966), Black and White: A Portrait of Aubrey Beardsley (1968) and Prancing Novelist (1973). With satire and wit, her novels explore the psychology of sex while her nonfiction and plays reflect her interests in psychology, art, and sexual liberation.
1All right, nobodys disputing it. Women are free. At least, they look free. They even feel free. But in reality women in the western, industrialized world today are like the animals in a modern zoo. There are no bars. It appears that cages have been abolished. Yet in practice, women are still kept in their place just as firmly as the animals are kept in their enclosures. The barriers which keep them in now are invisible.
2It is about forty years since the pioneer feminists raised such a rumpus by rattling the cage bars that society was at last obliged to pay attention. The result was that the bars were uprooted, the cage thrown open: whereupon the majority of the women who had been held captive decided they would rather stay inside anyway.
3To be more precise, they thought they decided; and society, which can with perfect truth point out, “Look, no bars,” thought it was giving them the choice. There are no laws and very little discrimination to prevent western, industrialized women from voting, being voted for, or entering the professions. If there are still few women lawyers and engineers, let alone women Presidents of the United States, what are women to conclude except that this is the result either of their own free choice or of something inherent in female nature?
4Many of them do draw just this conclusion. They have come back to the old argument of the antifeminists that women are unfit by nature for life outside the cage. And in letting this old wheel come full cycle1, women have fallen victim to one of the most insidious and ingenious confidence tricks2 ever perpetrated.
5In point of fact, neither female nature nor womens individual free choice has been put to the test. As American Negroes3 have discovered, to be officially free is by no means the same as being actually and psychologically free. A society as adept at propaganda as ours has become should know that “persuasion,” which means the art of launching myths and artificially inducing inhibitions, is every bit as effective as force of law. No doubt, the reason society eventually agreed to abolish its antiwomen laws was that it had become confident of commanding a battery of hidden dissuaders which would do the job just as well. Cage bars are clumsy methods of control, which excite the more rebellious personalities inside to rattle them. Modern society, like the modern zoo, has contrived to get rid of the bars without altering the fact of imprisonment. All the zoo architect needs to do is run a zone of hot or cold air, whichever the animal concerned cannot tolerate, round the cage where the bars used to be. Human animals are not less sensitive to social climate.
6The ingenious point about the newmodel zoo is that it deceives both sides of the invisible barrier. Not only cannot the animal see how it is imprisoned; the visitors conscience is relieved of the unkindness of keeping animals shut up. He can say, “Look, no bars round the animals,” just as society can say, “Look, no laws restricting women,” even while it keeps women rigidly in place by zones of fierce social pressure.
7There is, however, one great difference. A woman, being a thinking animal, may actually be more distressed because the bars of her cage cannot be seen. What relieves societys conscience may afflict hers. Unable to perceive what is holding her back, she may accuse herself and her whole sex of craven timidity because women have not jumped at what has the appearance of an offer of freedom. Evidently quite a lot of women have succumbed to guilt of this sort, since in recent years quite an industry has arisen to assuage it. Comforting voices make the air as thick and reassuring as cotton wool while they explain that there is nothing shameful in not wanting a career, that to be intellectually unadventurous is no sin, that taking care of home and family may be personally “fulfilling” for a woman and socially valuable.
8This is an argument without a flaw—except that it is addressed exclusively to women. Address it to both sexes and instantly it becomes progressive and humane. As it stands, it is merely antiwoman prejudice revamped.
9That many women would be happier not pursuing careers or intellectual adventures is only part of the truth. The whole truth is that many people would be. If society had the clear sight to assure men as well as women that there is no shame in preferring to stay noncompetitively and nonaggressively at home, many masculine neuroses and ulcers4 would be avoided, and many children would enjoy the benefit of being brought up by a father with a talent for the job of childrearing instead of by a mother with no talent for it but a sense of guilt about the lack.
10But society does nothing so sensible. Blindly it goes on insisting on the tradition that men are the ones who go out to work and adventure—an arrangement which simply throws talent away. All the homemaking talent born inside male bodies is wasted; and our businesses and governments are staffed quite largely by people whose aptitude for the work consists solely of their being what is, by tradition, the right sex for it.
11The pressures society exerts to drive men out of the house are very nearly as irrational and unjust as those by which it keeps women in. The mistake of the early reformers was to assume that men were emancipated already and that therefore reform need ask only for the emancipation of women. What we ought to do now is go right back to scratch5 and demand the emancipation of both sexes.
12The zones of hot and cold air which society uses to perpetuate its uneconomic and unreasonable state of affairs are the simplest and most effective conceivable. Society is playing on our sexual vanity. Tell a man that he is not a real man, or a woman that she is not 100 percent woman, and you are threatening both with not being attractive to the opposite sex. No one can bear not to be attractive to the opposite sex. That is the climate which the human animal cannot tolerate.
13So society has us all at its mercy. It has only to murmur to the man that staying at home is a feminine characteristic, and he will be out of the house like a bullet. It has only to suggest to the woman that logic and reason are the exclusive province of the masculine mind, whereas “intuition” and “feeling” are the female forte, and she will throw her physics textbooks out of the window, barricade herself into the house and give herself up to having wishywashy poetical feelings while she arranges the flowers.
14She will, incidentally, take care that her feelings are wishywashy. She has been persuaded that to have cogent feelings, of the kind which really do go into great poems—most of which are by men—would make her an unfeminine woman, a woman who imitates men. In fact, she would not be imitating men as such, most of whom have never written a line of great poetry, but poets, most of whom so far happen to be men. But the bad logic passes muster with a woman because part of the mythology she has swallowed ingeniously informs her that logic is not her forte.
15Should a womans talent or intelligence be so irrepressible that she insists on producing cogent works of art or watertight meshes of argument, she will be said to have “a mind like a mans.” This is simply a current idiom; translated, it means “a good mind.” The use of the idiom contributes to an apparently watertight proof that all good minds are masculine since whenever they occur in women, they are described as “like a mans.”
16What is more, this habit of thought actually contributes to perpetuating a state of affairs where most good minds really do belong to men. It is difficult for a woman to want to be intelligent when she has been told that to be so will make her like a man. She inclines to think an intelligence would be as unbecoming to her as a moustache; and, pathetically, many women have tried in furtive privacy to disembarrass themselves of intellect as though it were facial hair.
17Discouraged from growing “a mind like a mans,” women are encouraged to have thoughts and feelings of a specifically feminine tone. Women, it is said, have some specifically feminine contribution to make to culture. Unfortunately, as culture had already been shaped and largely built up by men before the invitation was issued, this leaves women little to do. Culture consists of reasoned thought and works of art composed of cogent feeling and imagination. There is only one way to be reasonable, and that is to reason correctly; and the only kind of art which is any good is good art. If women are to eschew reason and artistic imagination in favor of “intuition” and “feeling,” it is pretty clear what is meant. “Intuition” is just a polite name for bad reasoning, and “feeling” for bad art.
18In reality, the whole idea of a specifically feminine—or, for the matter of that, masculine—contribution to culture is a contradiction of culture. A contribution to culture is not something which could not have been made by the other sex; it is something which could not have been made by any other person. The arts are a sphere where women seem to have done well; but really they have done too well—too well for the good of the arts. Rather than women sharing the esteem which ought to belong to artists, art is becoming smeared with femininity. We are approaching a Philistine6 state of affairs where the arts are something which it is nice for women to take up in their spare time—men having slammed out of the house to get on with societys “serious” business, like making money, running the country and the professions.
19In that “serious” sphere, it is still rare to encounter a woman. A man sentenced to prison would probably feel his punishment was redoubled by indignity if he were to be sentenced by a woman judge under a law drafted by a woman legislator—and if, on admission, he were to be examined by a woman prison doctor. If such a thing happened every day, it would be no indignity but the natural course of events. It has never been given the chance to become the natural course of events and never will be so long as women remain persuaded it would be unnatural of them to want it.
20So brilliantly has society contrived to terrorize women with this threat that certain behavior is unnatural and unwomanly, that it has left them no time to consider—or even sheerly observe—what womanly nature really is. For centuries arrant superstitions were accepted as natural law. The physiological fact that only women can secrete milk for feeding babies was extended into the pure myth that it was womens business to cook for and wait on the entire family. The kitchen became womans “natural” place because, for the first few months of her babys life, the nursery really was. To this day a woman may fear she is unfeminine if she can discover in herself no aptitude or liking for cooking. Fright has thrown her into such a muddle that she confuses having no taste for cookery with having no breasts, and conversely assumes that nature has unfailingly endowed the human female with a special handiness with frying pans.
21Even psychoanalysis, which in general has been the greatest benefactor of civilization since the wheel7, has unwittingly reinforced the terrorization campaign. The trouble was that it brought with it from its origin in medical therapy a criterion of normality instead of rationality. On sheer statistics every pioneer, genius, and social reformer, including the first woman who demanded to be let out of the kitchen and into the polling booth, is abnormal, along with every lunatic and eccentric. What distinguishes the genius from the lunatic is that the geniuss abnormality is justifiable by reason or aesthetics. If a woman who is irked by confinement to the kitchen merely looks round to see what other women are doing and finds they are accepting their kitchens, she may well conclude that she is abnormal and had better enlist her psychoanalysts help towards “living with” her kitchen. What she ought to ask is whether it is rational for women to be kept to the kitchen, and whether nature really does insist on that in the way it insists women have breasts. And in a farreaching sense to ask that question is much more normal and natural than learning to “live with” the handicap of womens inferior social status. The normal and natural thing for human beings is not to tolerate handicaps but to reform society and to circumvent or supplement nature. We dont learn to live minus a leg; we devise an artificial limb.
22That, indeed, is the crux of the matter. Not only are the distinctions we draw between male nature and female nature largely arbitrary and often pure superstition, they are completely beside the point. They ignore the essence of human nature. The important question is not whether women are or are not less logical by nature than men, but whether education, effort and the abolition of our illogical social pressures can improve on nature and make them—and, incidentally, men as well—more logical. What distinguishes human from any other animal nature is its ability to be unnatural. Logic and art are not natural or instinctive activities; but our nature includes a propensity to acquire them. It is not natural for the human body to orbit the earth, but the human mind has a natural adventurousness which enables it to invent machines whereby the body can do so.
23Civilization consists not necessarily in defying nature but in making it possible for us to do so if we judge it desirable. The higher we can lift our noses from the grindstone of nature, the wider the area we have of choice; and the more choices we have freely made, the more individualized we are. We are at our most civilized when nature does not dictate to us, as it does to animals, but when we can opt to fall in with it or better it. If modern civilization has invented methods of education which make it possible for men to feed babies and for women to think logically, we are betraying civilization itself if we do not set both sexes free to make a free choice.
Notes
1. letting this old wheel come full cycle: letting the situation return to its original state
2. confidence tricks: dishonest tricks done to get peoples money after first gaining their trust; also called confidence game, or confidence scheme
3. American Negroes: black people in the United States of America (The word “Negro” was considered a proper English term for black people of African origin before the 1960s. Today in the United States of America the proper term for people of African origin is African American.)
4. neuroses and ulcers: mental disorders and physical pains, usually considered results or symptoms of too much pressure and tension
5. back to scratch: back to the starting condition; back to the starting line
6. Philistine: materialistic and antiintellectual, lacking in culture or artistic appreciation
7. since the wheel: since a long time ago (The wheel is believed to be one of the first human inventions in history.)
Questions for Comprehension
1. Why does the author say that women in the western, industrialized world are actually like the animals in a modern zoo?
2. In contrast with caged animals, do women have anything different in the same imprisonment condition?
3. What is the authors attitude toward the comforting voices? Try to describe them. In your view, what is the essence of the comforting voices?
4. In the authors opinion, what is the real connotation of “intuition” and “feeling” in a malecentered society?
5. Why would a man sentenced to prison probably feel this punishment redoubled if a woman judge sentenced him under a law drafted by a woman legislator? What is the root cause of such a reaction?
Vocabulary and Structure Exercises
Ⅰ. Complete the following sentences with words or phrases from this lesson.
1. We are much to you for your help. (Para. 2)
2. She was at the fine art of irritating people. (Para. 5)
3. In the rest of his life, he was with a conscience. (Para. 7)
4. I that I could not make her change her mind. (Para. 7)
5. He believed that she had to his charms. (Para. 7)
6. Constant reassurance could not their fears. (Para. 7)
7. Those demagogues are good at the public opinion. (Para. 12)
8. The new library will its founders great love of learning. (Para. 12)
9. We tried every means to contact her. (Para. 12)
10. We are both by water and land, without either fleet or army. (Para. 12)
Ⅱ. Explain the difference in the meaning or use of the italicized words in the groups of sentences.
1. a. Her friends disputed her intentions.
b. They disputed how to bring into full play the potential of the staff.
c. The soldiers managed to dispute the landing by the enemy.
2. a. She contrived a meeting between the warring factions.
b. She somehow contrived to be a wellliked teacher.
c. The gang contrived a way to hack into the main computer system.
3. a. They had a sale of distressed goods.
b. The mother was in great distress when her baby became ill.
c. He was distressed at the bad news that he was fired.
4. a. The windows and doors rattled in the wind.
b. There are just the two of us rattling around in this place.
c. The accident rattled me.
d. Benjamin rattled away as fast as his tongue could go.
5. a. He had to swallow the insult.
b. Swallow your pride and apologize.
c. Theyll never swallow anything so farfetched.
d. One swallow does not make a summer.
6. a. The money vanished into thin air.
b. The rumor is that a merger is in the air.
c. In class, you should be brave to air your views.
d. He had an air of mystery about him.
7. a. She drafted her plans for the park.
b. He was drafted and sent off early in the war.
c. Its only a draft proposal.
8. a. He administered justice in the fairest possible manner.
b. Physical exercise administers to the circulation of the blood.
c. Remember to administer medicine to your little patient.
Ⅲ. Paraphrase the italicized parts in the following sentences.
1. As American Negroes have discovered, to be officially free is by no means the same as being actually and psychologically free.
2. Our businesses and governments are staffed quite largely by people whose aptitude for the work consists solely of their being what is, by tradition, the right sex for it.
3. No one can bear not to be attractive to the opposite sex. That is the climate which the human animal cannot tolerate.
4. It has never been given the chance to become the natural course of events and never will be so long as women remain persuaded it would be unnatural of them to want it.
5. If modern civilization has invented methods of education which make it possible for men to feed babies and for women to think logically, we are betraying civilization itself if we do not set both sexes free to make a free choice.
Rhetorical Exercise
Understatement consists of meiosis and litotes. As the word implies, it is the opposite of overstatement or hyperbole. It achieves its effect of emphasizing a fact by deliberately understating it. It aims to impress the listener or the reader more by what is merely talked of. For instance, “Human animals are not less sensitive to social climate.” It actually means that humans are more sensitive or very sensitive to social climate. Identify the rhetorical devices of understatement used in the following sentences.
1. I am not unmindful of your devotion.
2. As lean was his horse as is a rake．
And he was not right fat.
3. Thou wouldst be great,
Art not without ambition, but without
The illness should attend it.
4. He was a man of no mean wealth.
5. The English poet Thomas Gray showed no inconsiderable powers as a prose writer.
Questions for Discussion
1. In the essay, the author mentions that people always think that “all good minds are masculine.” Do you think it is true? Can you give some examples to argue for or against the point?
2. Feminism is committed to securing and defending equal rights and opportunities for women. What do you think of feminism? Do you think that women in China need feminism, too? Give examples to justify your arguments.
Text B
Womens Business
Ilene Kantrov
Ilene Kantrov (1950), American writer, editor, and developer of educational programs, received her BA from the University of Chicago, and MA and PhD from Tuffs University. She was once a senior staff editor for the biographical encyclopedia Notable American Women and taught writing in Tufts University and Wheelock College. A Freelance writer, she has written book reviews for Equal Times, New Age and Second Wave. Now with the Education Development Center, she has focused her career on developing innovative programs and resources that promote student achievement and build educators effectiveness. Currently she is the director of EDCs Pathways to College and Careers programs.
1The face of the kindly matron beamed from the pages of newspapers and magazines across the country. The advertising copy promised relief from “falling of the womb and all female weaknesses,” touting the product as “the greatest remedy in the world.” The year was 1879, and the product was an unproven home remedy called Lydia E. Pinkhams Vegetable Compound. Lydia Pinkham1, the woman whose countenance graced the periodical pages, developed the advertising campaign that traded on her benign image.
2Pinkham brought to her marketing effort the passionate social activism characteristic of many women of her era. Convinced that she offered more than a mere product, she used her advertising to champion womens rights, temperance, and fiscal reform. One of her cleverest marketing techniques was a Department of Advice. Encouraging women to bypass male physicians to seek guidance from another woman, she dispensed practical suggestions about diet, exercise, and hygiene, along with endorsements of her own medicine.
3Yet Pinkham did not hesitate to exploit traditional feminine fears—and feminine stereotypes—to market her product. She printed testimonials from women reporting cures not only for a range of physical symptoms, but also for infertility, “nervousness,” “hysteria,” and even marital discord. According to one early newspaper ad, the murder of a Connecticut clergyman by his wife, whose insanity was “brought on by 16 years of suffering with female complaints2,” could have been prevented by timely administration of the Compound to the afflicted woman.
4As a result of such bold marketing, the company that Pinkham had founded with her sons earned $200,000 in 1881. Lydia Pinkham herself became something of a folk heroine—the subject of popular songs, jokes, and bawdy verse.
5Pinkhams introduction of feminine packaging to capitalist enterprise earned her a special place in the annals of American business as well as womens history. It also set a pattern for women entrepreneurs in the following century. The handful of women who emulated Pinkhams success likewise followed her in importing traditional feminine roles into the masculine world of commerce. When feminine ideals collided with the realities of the marketplace, however, the businesswoman often bested the lady.
6Like Pinkham, her successors consciously exploited their images as women to promote their products. In some cases, the image was that of glamorous socialite: archrivals Helena Rubinstein3 and Elizabeth Arden4 competed not only in selling cosmetics but also in luring publicity by their marriages to European aristocrats. More often the image cultivated was that of mother or grandmother: following Pinkham in this mold, for example, were Margaret Rudkin5, founder of Pepperidge Farm, Inc., and Jennie Grossinger6, who ran a resort hotel in upstate New York renowned for its food and entertainment. Grossinger managed to remain the solicitous Jewish grandmother in the eyes of her customers long after she had hired a public relations man and Grossingers Hotel began serving 150,000 guests a year.
7Womens businesses tended to grow out of traditional womens skills and catered mainly to women. Lydia Pinkham had collected and administered folk remedies to her family for years before the collapse of her husbands real estate business led her to begin marketing herbal preparations for “female complaints.” Margaret Rudkin, faced with a comparable need to supplement her husbands income, also looked close to home. She reportedly baked her first loaf of additivefree whole wheat bread as part of a special diet for an asthmatic son, and secured her first order from her neighborhood grocer in 1937.
8To transform a home craft into a thriving business, these female capitalists joined a canny sense of womens tastes with the audacity of a gambler in creating and marketing innovations designed to shape those tastes. In 1909 Elizabeth Arden introduced her first line of makeup, not then widely considered respectable, as “facial treatments.” As the beauty market began to expand in the 1920s she kept several steps ahead of demand: introducing, for example, such exotic and vaguely medicinal concoctions as Sensation salve, Arden gland cream, and the Vienna Youth Mask. Applications of the Youth Mask, constructed of papiermché and tinfoil, required the customer to be hooked up to a diathermy machine, which applied heat via electric current. Arden assured the women who submitted to the treatment—and paid dearly for the privilege—that they were restoring dead skin tissue.
9In addition to skincare and cosmetics, Elizabeth Arden salons eventually added hairstyling, readymade and custom clothes, and advice on nutrition and exercise. Arden herself practiced and advocated yoga, adapting the exercises for the women who frequented her salons and Maine health spa. Competing salon proprietor Helena Rubinstein published a book expounding the benefit of eating raw foods and sold her customers on the diet. In promoting the idea that a beauty salon could provide women with the means to “remake” themselves, inside and out, both women manifested the conviction of American businesswomen from Lydia Pinkham on that they were providing other women with something more than a product.
10Few of them matched Pinkham in the degree to which she merged her marketing effort with a crusade7 for economic and social change. But other American women entrepreneurs combined an equally shrewd eye for profit with a passionate belief in their products social or moral efficacy. Gertrude Muller8, who invented the “toidey seat9” in 1924 and parlayed it into an entire line of child care products, in 1930 began enclosing in the packages pamphlets she wrote about child raising. Her products, and the literature that accompanied them, embodied a progressive philosophy of child rearing, and one of her booklets was widely distributed by doctors and used by home economics instructors. Of course, none of this free publicity hurt business.
11A black female capitalist, Annie TurnboMalone10 also cast herself in the role of social activist. Her business was founded at the turn of the century on a hairdressing preparation that, like Lydia Pinkhams Vegetable Compound, was of questionable efficacy. But, again like Pinkham, she developed an innovative marketing strategy—a network of franchised sales agents—and used it both to earn big money and to promote her causes. TurnboMalone established a school for training agents in her “poro” system of hairdressing, named it Poro College, and advertised it as a vehicle for the uplift of her race and a passport to economic independence for women. Her literature also branched out beyond hair care to advocate the benefits of good hygiene, thrift, and other homely virtues.
12TurnboMalone and her sister capitalists genuinely believed in the beneficence of their products and services. If not all of them proclaimed themselves, as Lydia Pinkham did, “Saviour of her Sex,” several of them acted the part. And a number turned their profits into good works11: TurnboMalone, Helena Rubinstein, and Jennie Grossinger, for example, were noted philanthropists as well as executives. They contributed lavishly to hospitals, schools, and cultural organizations.
13Though they aimed to serve as well as to sell, however, these businesswomen frequently put profit ahead of altruism. Their advertising claims were often extravagant, even misleading. And when regulatory agencies such as the FDA12 and FTC13 began to crack down on questionable business practices, female entrepreneurs were as likely to be cited as their male counterparts. Helena Rubinstein, for instance, was forced by the FDA to withdraw some of the medicinal claims she made for her products.
14The latent conflict between the profit motive and the social service ethic of female entrepreneurs is perhaps best exemplified once again by Lydia Pinkham: a passionate temperance advocate who had no qualms about selling a product that contained sufficient alcohol to make it 40 proof. “Grandma,” backed by the Womens Christian Temperance Union14, was selling booze.
Notes
1. Lydia Pinkham: Lydia Estes Pinkham (18191883), an iconic concocter and shrewd marketer of a commercially successful herbalalcoholic “womens tonic,” meant to relieve menstrual and menopausal pains
2. female complaints: any of various illdefined disorders of the female usually held to be associated with or attributed to the generative function
3. Helena Rubinstein: born Chaja Rubinstein (18721965), Polish American businesswoman and philanthropist, the founder of Helena Rubinstein Incorporated cosmetics company, which was sold to Colgate Palmolive in 1973 and is now owned by LOréal
4. Elizabeth Arden: the business name of Florence Nightingale Graham (18781966), a Canadianborn American businesswoman, founder of what is now Elizabeth Arden Incorporated cosmetics company
5. Margaret Rudkin: founder of Pepperidge Farm, a commercial bakery devoted to sell healthy food items
6. Jennie Grossinger: Austrian American businesswoman who turned a small rundown Catskill Mountain farm into a large hotel renowned for serving good food and entertainment
7. crusade: originally, any of the medieval military expeditions made by European Christians to recover the Holy Land from the Muslims from 11th to 13th centuries; now generally referring to a vigorous concerted action to promote or eliminate something
8. Gertrude Muller: born Gertrude Agnes Muller (18871954), American businesswoman and inventor, manufacturer of childcare products and child safety expert, credited with inventing the first childs car seat and so on
9. toidey seat: a portable toilet seat for a small child designed either to be fitted over the toilet bowl, or used separately with a basin or potty underneath
10. Annie TurnboMalone: Annie Minerva Turnbo Malone (18771957), African American businesswoman, inventor and philanthropist, who founded and developed a large and prominent commercial and educational enterprise centered on cosmetics for AfricanAmerican women in the first three decades of the 20th century
11. good works: charitable acts
12. FDA: Food and Drug Administration, agency of the United States Department of Health and Human Services
13. FTC: Federal Trade Commission, independent agency of the U.S. government created by the Federal Trade Commission Act of 1914
14. Womans Christian Temperance Union: a prominent antidrinking organization in the United States, a leading force in the adoption of Prohibition (19201933), the legal ban on the manufacture and sale of intoxicating beverages
Study Questions
1. At the beginning of the essay, the narrator first introduces Lydia Pinkham as the representative of women entrepreneurs. What effects can this method achieve? And why does the author utilize several paragraphs to introduce this woman?
2. In the success of womens business, what role does the largescale advertising play?
3. How do you view those womens business behaviors? Do you think that womens methods of managing a business are different from mens or their methods have something in common?
4. As far as Pinkham is concerned, does womens business only offer women a product? What are the inventive parts in their business?
5. In Text A, the author believes women are not really free, then do you think Text B also justifies that point?How would the feminist react to this essay?
Unit Nine
Text A
Walden
E.B.White
Elwyn Brooks White (18991985) was born in Mount Vernon, New York. In 1921, he graduated from Cornell University. He joined the staff of the New Yorker magazine as a writer and a contributing editor in 1927 and stayed with this literary publication the rest of his career. He was a leading American essayist and literary stylist of his time, known for his crisp, graceful, and relaxed style. His works ranged from satire to childrens fiction such as Stuart Little (1945) and Charlottes Web (1952). While he often wrote from the perspective of slightly ironic onlooker, he also was a sensitive spokesman for the freedom of the individual. This essay is selected from his One Mans Meat (1942).
Miss Nims, take a letter to Henry David Thoreau.
1Dear Henry: I thought of you the other afternoon as I was approaching Concord1, doing fifty on Route 622. That is a high speed at which to hold a philosopher in ones mind, but in this century we are a nimble bunch.
2On one of the lawns in the outskirts of the village, a woman was cutting the grass with a motorized lawn mower. What made me think of you was that the machine had rather got away from her, although she was game enough, and in the brief glimpse I had of the scene, it appeared to me that the lawn was mowing the lady. She kept a tight grip on the handles, which throbbed violently with every explosion of the onecylinder motor, and as she sheered around bushes and lurched along at a reluctant trot behind her impetuous servant, she looked like a puppy who had grabbed something that was too much for him. Concord hasnt changed much, Henry; the farm implements and the animals still have the upper hand.
3I may as well admit that I was journeying to Concord with the deliberate intention of visiting your woods; for although I have never knelt at the grave of a philosopher nor placed wreaths on moldy poets, and have often gone a mile out of my way to avoid some place of historical interest, I have always wanted to see Walden Pond3. The account which you left of your sojourn there is, you will be amused to learn, a document of increasing pertinence; each year it seems to gain a little headway, as the world loses ground. We may all be transcendental4 yet, whether we like it or not. As our common complexities increase, any tale of individual simplicity (and yours is the best written and the cockiest) acquires a new fascination; as our goods accumulate, but not our wellbeing, your report of an existence without material adornment takes on a certain awkward credibility.
4My purpose in going to Walden Pond, like yours, was not to live cheaply or to live dearly there, but to transact some private business with the fewest obstacles. Approaching Concord, doing forty, doing fortyfive, doing fifty, the steering wheel held snug in my palms, the highway held grimly in my vision, the crown of the road now serving me (on the righthand curves), now defeating me (on the lefthand curves), I began to rouse myself from the stupefaction which a days motor journey induces. It was a delicious evening, Henry, when the whole body is one sense, and imbibes delight through every pore, if I may coin a phrase. Fields were richly brown where the harrow, drawn by the stripped Ford, had lately sunk its teeth; pastures were green; and overhead the sky had that same everlasting great look which you will find on page 144 of the Oxford pocket edition. I could feel the road entering me, through tire, wheel, spring, and cushion; shall I not have intelligence with earth too? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mold myself?—a man of infinite horsepower, yet partly leaves.
5Stay with me on 62, and it will take you into Concord. As I say, it was a delicious evening. The snake had come forth to die in a bloody S on the highway, the wheel upon its head, its bowels flat now and exposed. The turtle had come up too to cross the road and die in the attempt, its hard shell smashed under the rubber blow, its intestinal yearning (for the other side of the road) forever squashed. There was a sign by the wayside which announced that the road had a “cotton surface.” You wouldnt know what that is, but neither, for that matter, did I. There is a cryptic ingredient in many of our modern improvements—we are awed and pleased without knowing quite what we are enjoying. It is something to be traveling on a road with a cotton surface.
6The civilization around Concord today is an odd distillation of city, village, farm, and manor. The houses, yards, fields look not quite suburban, not quite rural. Under the bronze beech and the blue spruce of the departed baron grazes the milch goat of the heirs. Under the portecochere5 stands the reconditioned station wagon; under the grape arbor sit the puppies for sale. (But why do men degenerate ever? What makes families run out?)
7It was June and everywhere June was publishing her immemorial stanza; in the lilacs, in the syringa, in the freshly edged paths and sweetness of moist, beloved gardens, and the little wire wickets that preserve the tulips front. Farmers were already moving the fruits of their toil into their yards, arranging the rhubarb, the asparagus, the strictly fresh eggs on the painted stands under the little shed roofs with patent shingles. And though it was only a hundred years since you had taken your ax and started cutting out your home on Walden Pond, I was interested to observe that the philosophical spirit was still alive in Massachusetts: in the center of a vacant lot, some boys were assembling the framework of the rude shelter, their whole mind and skill concentrated in the rather inauspicious helterskeleton of studs and rafters. They too were escaping from town, to live naturally, in a rich blend of savagery and philosophy.
8That evening, after supper at the inn, I strolled out into the twilight to dream my shapeless transcendental dreams and see that the car was locked up for the night (first open the right front door, then reach over, straining, and pull up the handles of the left rear and the left front till you hear the click, then the handle of the right rear, then shut the right front but open it again, remembering that the key is still in the ignition switch, remove the key, shut the right front again with a bang, push the tiny keyhole cover to one side, insert key, turn, and withdraw). It is what we all do, Henry. It is called locking the car. It is said to confuse thieves and keep them from making off with the laprobe. Four doors to lock behind one robe. The driver himself never uses a laprobe, the free movement of his legs being vital to the operation of the vehicle; so that when he locks the car, it is a pure and unselfish act. I have in my life gained very little essential heat from laprobes, yet I have ever been at pains to lock them up.
9The evening was full of sounds, some of which would have stirred your memory. The robins still love the elms of New England villages at sundown. There is enough of the thrush in them to make song inevitable at the end of day, and enough of the tramp to make them hang round the dwellings of men. A robin, like many another American, dearly loves a white house with green blinds. Concord is still full of them.
10Your fellow townsmen were stirring abroad—not many afoot, most of them in their cars; and the sound which they made in Concord at evening was a rustling and a whispering. The sound lacks steadfastness and is wholly unlike that of a train. A train, as you know who lived so near the Fitchburg line, whistles once or twice sadly and is gone, trailing a memory in smoke, soothing to ear and mind. Automobiles, skirting a village green, are like flies that have gained the inner ear—they buzz, cease, pause, start, shift, stop, halt, brake, and the whole effect is a nervous polytone, curiously disturbing.
11As I wandered along, the toc toc of ping pong balls drifted from the attic window. In front of the Reuben Brown house, a Buick was drawn up. At the wheel, motionless, his hat upon his head, a man sat, listening to Amos and Andy on the radio (it is a drama of many scenes and without an end). The deep voice of Andrew Brown, emerging from the car, although it originated more than two hundred miles away, was unstrained by distance. When you used to sit on the shore of your pond on Sunday morning, listening to the church bells of Acton and Concord, you were aware of the excellent filter of the intervening atmosphere. Science has attended to that, and sound now maintains its intensity without regard for distance. Properly sponsored, it goes on forever.
12A fire engine, out for a trial spin, roared past Emersons6 house, hot with readiness for public duty. Over the barn roofs the martins dipped and chittered. A swarthy daughter of an asparagus grower, in culottes, shirt, and bandanna, pedaled past on her bicycle. It was indeed a delicious evening, and I returned to the inn (I believe it was your house once) to rock with the old ladies on the concrete veranda.
13Next morning early, I started afoot for Walden, out Main Street and down Thoreau, past the depot and the Minuteman Chevrolet Company. The morning was fresh and in a bean field along the way, I flushed an agriculturalist, quietly studying his bean. Thoreau Street soon joined Number 126, an artery of the state. We number our highways nowadays, our speed being so great, we can remember little of their quality or characters and are lucky to remember their number. (Men have an indistinct notion that if they keep up this activity long enough, all will at length ride somewhere, in next to no time.) Your pond is on 126.
14I knew I must be nearing your woodland retreat when the Golden Pheasant lunchroom came into view—Sealtest ice cream, toasted sandwiches, hot frankfurters, waffles, tonics and lunches. Were I the proprietor, I should add rice, Indian meal, and molasses just for old times sake. The Pheasant, incidentally, is for sale: a chance for some nature lover who wishes to set himself up beside a pond in the Concord atmosphere and live deliberately, fronting only the essential facts of life on Number 126. Beyond the Pheasant was a place called Walden Breezes, an oasis whose porch pillars were made of old green shutters sawed into lengths. On the porch was a distorting mirror, to give the traveler a comical image of himself, who had miraculously learned to gaze in an ordinary glass without smiling. Behind the Breezes, in a sunparched clearing, dwelt your philosophical descendants in their trailers, each trailer the size of your hut, but all grouped together for the sake of congeniality. Trailer people leave the city, as you did, to discover solitude7 and in any weather, at any hour of the day or night, to improve the nick of time; but they soon collect in villages and get bogged deeper in the mud than ever. The camp Walden Breezes was just rousing itself to the morning. The ground was packed hard under the heel, and the sun came through the clearing to bake the soil and enlarge the wry smell of cramped housekeeping. Cushmans bakery truck had stopped to deliver an early basket of rolls. A camp dog, seeing me in the road, barked petulantly. A man emerged from one of the trailers and set forth with a bucket to draw water from some forest tap.
15Leaving the highway, I turned off into the woods toward the pond, which was apparent through the foliage. The floor of the forest was strewn with dried old oak leaves and
Transcripts. From beneath the flattened popcorn wrapper (granum explosum ) peeped the frail violet. I followed a footpath and descended to the waters edge. The pond lay clear and blue in the morning light, as you have seen it so many times. In the shallows a mans waterlogged shirt undulated gently. A few flies came out to greet me and convoy me to your cove, past the No Bathing signs on which the fellows and the girls had scrawled their names. I felt strangely excited suddenly to be snooping around your premises, tiptoeing along watchfully, as though not to tread by mistake upon the intervening century. Before I got to the cove, I heard something which seemed to me quite wonderful: I heard your frog, a full, clear troonk, guiding me, still hoarse and solemn, bridging the years as the robins had bridged them in the sweetness of the village evening. But he soon quit, and I came on a couple of young boys throwing stones at him.