高级英语第二册课文原文

Face to Face with Hurricane Camille

Joseph P

. Blank

1 John Koshak, Jr., knew that Hurricane Camille would be bad. Radio and television warnings had sounded

throughout that Sunday, last August 17, as Camille lashed northwestward across the Gulf of Mexico. It was certain

to

pummel

Gulfport, Miss., where the Koshers lived. Along the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, nearly

150,000 people fled inland to safer 8round. But, like thousands of others in the coastal communities, john was

reluctant to abandon his home unless the family -- his wife, Janis, and their seven children, abed 3 to 11 -- was

clearly endangered.

2 Trying to reason out the best course of action, he talked with his father and mother, who had moved into the

ten- room house with the Koshaks a month earlier from California. He also consulted Charles Hill, a long time friend,

who had driven from Las Vegas for a visit.

3 John, 37 -- whose business was right there in his home ( he designed and developed educational toys and

supplies, and all of Magna Products'

correspondence

, engineering drawings and art work were there on the first

floor) -- was familiar with the power of a hurricane. Four years earlier, Hurricane Betsy had demolished

undefined

his former home a few miles west of Gulfport (Koshak had moved his family to a

motel

for the night). But that house

had stood only a few feet above sea level.

from the sea. The place has been here since 1915, and no hurricane has ever bothered it. We' II probably be as safe

here as anyplace else.

4 The elder Koshak, a gruff, warmhearted expert machinist of 67, agreed.

batten down

and ride it out,

he said.

5 The men

methodically

prepared for the hurricane. Since water mains might be damaged, they filled bathtubs

and pails. A power failure was likely, so they checked out batteries for the portable radio and flashlights, and fuel for

the lantern. John's father moved a small generator into the downstairs hallway, wired several light bulbs to it and

prepared a connection to the refrigerator.

6 Rain fell steadily that afternoon; gray clouds

scudded

in from the Gulf on the rising wind. The family had an

early supper. A neighbor, whose husband was in Vietnam, asked if she and her two children could sit out the storm

with the Koshaks. Another neighbor came by on his way in- land

—

would the Koshaks mind taking care of his dog?

7 It grew dark before seven o' clock. Wind and rain now whipped the house. John sent his

oldest son and

daughter upstairs to bring down mattresses and pillows for the younger children. He wanted to keep the group

together on one floor.

panes

. As the wind mounted to a roar, the house began leaking- the rain seemingly driven right through the walls.

With mops, towels, pots and buckets the Koshaks began a struggle against the rapidly spreading water. At 8:30,

power failed, and Pop Koshak turned on the

generator

.

8 The roar of the hurricane now was overwhelming. The house shook, and the ceiling in the living room was

falling piece by piece. The French doors in an upstairs room blew in with an explosive sound, and the group heard

gun- like reports as other upstairs windows

disintegrated

. Water rose above their

ankles

.

9 Then the front door started to break away from its frame. John and Charlie put their shoulders against it, but a

blast of water hit the house, flinging open the door and shoving them down the hall. The generator was doused, and

the lights went out. Charlie licked his lips and shouted to John.

The sea had reached the house, and the water was rising by the minute!

10

them! Nine!

11 The children went from adult to adult like buckets in a

fire brigade

. But the cars wouldn't start; the electrical

systems had been killed by water. The wind was too Strong and the water too deep to flee on foot.

house!

12 As they

scrambled

back, john ordered,

settled on the stairs, which were protected by two

interior

walls. The children put the oat, Spooky, and a box with her

four kittens on the landing. She

peered

nervously at her litter. The neighbor's dog curled up and went to sleep.

13 The wind sounded like the roar of a train passing a few yards away. The house shuddered and shifted on its

foundations. Water inched its way up the steps as first- floor outside walls collapsed. No one spoke. Everyone knew

there was no escape; they would live or die in the house.

14 Charlie Hill had more or less taken responsibility for the neighbor and her two children. The mother was on

the verge of panic. She clutched his arm and kept repeating,

can't swim.

15

16 Grandmother Koshak reached an arm around her husband's shoulder and put her mouth close to his ear.

gruffness.

17 John watched the water lap at the steps, and felt a crushing guilt. He had

underestimated

the

ferocity

of

Camille. He had assumed that what had never happened could not happen. He held his head between his hands,

and silently prayed:

18 A moment later, the hurricane, in one mighty swipe, lifted the entire roof off the house and skimmed it 40 feet

through the air. The bottom steps of the staircase broke apart. One wall began crumbling on the

marooned

group.

19 Dr. Robert H. Simpson, director of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Fla., graded Hurricane Camille as

some 70 miles it shot out winds of nearly 200 m.p.h. and raised tides as high as 30 feet. Along the Gulf Coast it

devastated everything in its swath: 19,467 homes and 709 small businesses were demolished or severely damaged.

it seized a 600, 000-gallon Gulfport oil tank and dumped it 3 ~ miles away. It tore three large cargo ships from their

moorings

and beached them. Telephone poles and 20-inch-thick pines cracked like guns as the winds snapped

them.

20 To the west of Gulfport, the town of Pass Christian was virtually wiped out. Several vacationers at the

luxurious Richelieu Apartments there held a hurricane party to watch the storm from their spectacular

vantage point

.

Richelieu Apartments were smashed apart as if by a gigantic fist, and 26 people perished.

21 Seconds after the roof blew off the Koshak house, john yelled,

kids.

implored

,

let's sing!

away.

22 Debris flew as the living-room fireplace and its chimney collapsed. With two walls in their bedroom sanctuary

beginning to disintegrate, John ordered,

the storm.

23 For an instant, John put his arm around his wife. Janis understood. Shivering from the wind and rain and fear,

clutching two children to her, she thought, Dear Lord, give me the strength to endure what I have to. She felt anger

against the hurricane. We won't let it win.

24 Pop Koshak raged silently, frustrated at not being able to do anything to fight Camille. Without reason, he

dragged a

cedar chest

and a double mattress from a bed- room into the TV room. At that moment, the wind tore out

one wall and extinguished the lantern. A second wall moved,

wavered

, Charlie Hill tried to support it, but it

toppled

on him, injuring his back. The house, shuddering and rocking, had moved 25 feet from its foundations. The world

seemed to be breaking apart.

25

lean-to

against the wind. Get the kids under

it. We can prop it up with our heads and shoulders!

26 The larger children

sprawled

on the floor, with the smaller ones in a layer on top of them, and the adults bent

over all nine. The floor tilted. The box containing the litter of kittens slid off a shelf and vanished in the wind. Spooky

flew off the top of a sliding bookcase and also disappeared. The dog cowered with eyes closed. A third wall gave way.

Water lapped across the slanting floor. John grabbed a door which was still

hinged

to one closet wall.

goes,

27 In that moment, the wind slightly diminished, and the water stopped rising. Then the water began receding.

The main thrust of Camille had passed. The Koshaks and their friends had survived.

28 With the dawn, Gulfport people started coming back to their homes. They saw human bodies -- more than

130 men, women and children died along the Mississippi coast- and parts of the beach and highway

were strewn

with

dead dogs, cats, cattle. Strips of clothing

festooned

the standing trees, and blown down power lines

coiled

like

black

spaghetti

over the roads.

29 None of the returnees moved quickly or spoke loudly; they stood shocked, trying to absorb the shattering

scenes before their eyes.

30 By this time, organizations within the area and, in effect, the entire population of the United States had come

to the aid of the devastated coast. Before dawn, the Mississippi

National Guard

and

civil-defense

units were

moving in to handle traffic, guard property, set up communications centers, help clear the debris and take the

homeless by truck and bus to refugee centers. By 10 a.m.,

the Salvation Army's

canteen trucks and Red Cross

volunteers and staffers were going wherever possible to distribute hot drinks, food, clothing and bedding.

31 From hundreds of towns and cities across the country came several million dollars in donations; household

and medical supplies streamed in by plane, train, truck and car. The federal government shipped 4,400,000 pounds

of food, moved in mobile homes, set up portable classrooms, opened offices to provide low- interest, long-term

business loans.

32 Camille, meanwhile, had raked its way northward across Mississippi, dropping more than 28 inches of rain

into West Virginia and southern Virginia, causing

rampaging

floods, huge mountain slides and 111 additional deaths

before breaking up over the Atlantic Ocean.

33 Like many other Gulfport families, the Koshaks quickly began reorganizing their lives, John divided his family

in the homes of two friends. The neighbor with her two children went to a refugee center. Charlie Hill found a room for

rent. By Tuesday, Charlie's back had improved, and he pitched in with

Seabees

in the worst volunteer work of

all--searching for bodies. Three days after the storm, he decided not to return to Las Vegas, but to

and help rebuild the community.

34 Near the end of the first week, a friend offered the Koshaks his apartment, and the family was reunited. The

children appeared to suffer no psychological damage from their experience; they were still awed by the

incomprehensible

power of the hurricane, but enjoyed describing what they had seen and heard on that frightful

night, Janis had just one delayed reaction. A few nights after the hurricane, she awoke suddenly at 2 a.m. She quietly

got up and went outside. Looking up at the sky and, without knowing she was going to do it, she began to cry softly.

35 Meanwhile, John, Pop and Charlie were picking through the

wreckage

of the home. It could have been

depressing, but it wasn't: each salvaged item represented a little victory over the

wrath

of the storm. The dog and cat

suddenly appeared at the scene, alive and hungry.

36 But the

blues

did occasionally

afflict

all the adults. Once, in a low mood, John said to his parents,

you here so that we would all be together, so you could enjoy the children, and look what happened.

37 His father, who had made up his mind to start a

welding

shop when living was normal again, said,

cry about what's gone. We' II just start all over.

38

was before.

39 Later, Grandmother Koshak

reflected

:

it. When I think of that, I realize we lost nothing important.

(from Rhetoric and Literature by P

. Joseph Canavan)

NOTES

1. Joseph p. Blank: The writer published

2. Hurricane Camille: In the United States hurricanes are named alphabetically and given the names of people like

Hurricane Camille, Hurricane Betsy, and so on; whereas in China Typhoons are given serial numbers like Typhoon

No. 1, Typhoon No. 2 and so on.

3. The Salvation Army: A Protestant religious body devoted to the conversion of, and social work among the poor,

and characterized by use of military titles, uniforms, etc. It was founded in 1878 by

worldwide in operation.

4. Red Cross: an international organization ( in full International Red Cross), founded in 1864 with headquarters and

branches in all countries signatory to the Geneva Convention, for the relief of suffering in time of war or disaster

Marrakech

George Orwell

1 As the corpse went past the flies left the restaurant table in a cloud and rushed after it, but they came back a few

minutes later.

2 The little crowd of mourners -- all men and boys, no women-- threaded their way across the market place

between the piles of

pomegranates

and the taxis and the camels, walling a short chant over and over again. What

really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of rag

and carried on a rough wooden

bier

on the shoulders of four friends. When the friends get to the burying- ground they

hack an oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which

is like broken brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The burying-ground is merely a huge

waste of

hummocky

earth, like a derelict building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where his

own relatives are buried.

3 When you walk through a town like this -- two hundred thousand inhabitants of whom at least twenty thousand

own literally nothing except the rags they stand up in-- when you see how the people live, and still more how easily

they die, it is always difficult to believe that you are

walking among human beings. All colonial empires are in reality

founded upon this fact. The people have brown faces-- besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same

flesh as your self? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of

undifferentiated

brown stuff, about as

individual as bees or

coral insects

? They rise out of the earth

，

they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they

sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And even the graves

themselves soon fade back into the soil. Sometimes, out for a walk as you break your way through the prickly pear,

you notice that it is rather

bumpy

underfoot, and only a certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking

over skeletons.

4 I was feeding one of the

gazelles

in the public gardens.

5 Gazelles are almost the only animals that look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly look

at their hindquarters without thinking of a

mint

sauce. The gazelle I was feeding seemed to know that this thought

was in my mind, for though it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not like me. It nibbled

nibbled

rapidly at the bread, then lowered its head and tried to

butt

me, then took another nibble and then butted again.

Probably its idea was that if it could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in mid- air.

6 An Arab

navvy

working on the path nearby lowered his heavy hoe and

sidled

slowly towards us. He looked

from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had

never seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in French:

7 I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret place under his rags. This man is an employee of

the

municipality.

8 When you go through the Jewish Quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were probably

like. Under their Moorish

Moorish

rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain restricted areas, and after

centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good

deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in

unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.

9 In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in

dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits crosslegged at a prehistoric

lathe

, turning chairlegs at

lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to

a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg is

warped

out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already

starting on the simpler parts of the job.

10 I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly,

from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers with flowing grey

beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the booths heard a rumour

of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole

packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a

cigarette as a more or less impossible luxury.

11 As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for

agriculture. Fruitsellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather- workers, tailors, water-carriers, beggars,

porters -- whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen thousand of them,

all living in the space of a few acres. A good job Hitlet wasn't here. Perhaps he was on his way, however. You hear

the usual dark rumours about Jews, not only from the Arabs but from the poorer Europeans.

12

mon vieux

, they took my job away from me and gave it to a Jew. The Jews! They' re the real

rulers of this country, you know. They‘ve got all the money. They control the banks, finance

-- everything.

13

14

15 In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old women used to be burned for

witchcraft

when

they could not even work enough magic to get themselves a square meal.

square meal

16 All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and the more important the work they do, the less

visible they are. Still, a white skin is always fairly

conspicuous

. In northern Europe, when you see a labourer

ploughing a field, you probably give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of Gibraltar or east of

Suez, the chances are that you don't even see him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape one's

eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm tree and the

distant mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He is the same colour as the earth, and a

great deal less interesting to look at.

17 It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one

would think of running cheap trips to the

Distressed Areas

. But where the human beings have brown skins their

poverty is simply not noticed. What does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange grove or a job in Government

service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm trees,

Foreign Legionnaires

, brass trays, and

bandits

. One

could probably live there for years without noticing that for nine-tenths of the people the reality of life is an endless

back-breaking struggle to wring a little food out of an

eroded

soil.

18 Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than a hare can live on it. Huge areas which were

once covered with forest have turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly like broken-up brick.

Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated, with frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of women,

bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their

hands, and the peasant gathering

lucerne

for

fodder

pulls it up stalk by stalk instead of reaping it, thus saving an

inch or two on each stalk. The plough is a wretched wooden thing, so frail that one can easily carry it on one's

shoulder, and fitted underneath with a rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four inches. This is as

much as the strength of the animals is equal to. It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey

yoked

together. Two

donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other hand two cows would cost a little more to feed. The

peasants possess no narrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in different directions, finally leaving it

in rough

furrows

, after which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong patches to conserve water.

Except for a day or two after the rare rainstorms there is never enough water. A long the edges of the fields channels

are hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty feet to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.

19 Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road outside my house, each carrying a load of

firewood. All of them are mummified with age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. It seems to be generally the case

in primitive communities that the women, when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children. One day

poor creature who could not have been more than four feet tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped

her and put a five-sou

sou

piece ( a little more than a

farthing

into her hand. She answered with a shrill wail, almost

a scream, which was partly gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of view, by taking any notice

of her, I seemed almost to be violating a law of nature. She accept- ed her status as an old woman, that is to say as a

beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on

donkeys, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the baggage.

20 But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at about the same time

of day, the file of old women had

hobbled

past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered

themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing -- that was how I saw it. It

was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood

drew my attention to the human being beneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth- coloured bodies,

bodies reduced to bones and

leathery

skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five

minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was

infuriated

by it. There is no

question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St. Bernard dog, it

carries a load which in the British Army would be considered too much for a fifteen- hands mule, and very often its

packsaddle is not taken off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing

creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either

bridle

or

halter

. After a dozen years of

devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its

guts

out before it is cold.

21 This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas-- on the whole -- the plight of the human beings does not.

I am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be

sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old

woman under her load of sticks.

22 As the

storks

flew northward the Negroes were marching southward -- a long, dusty column,

infantry

,

screw-gun

batteries

, and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding up the road with a clumping of

boots and a clatter of iron wheels.

23 They were

Senegalese

, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black that sometimes it is difficult to see

whereabouts on their necks the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in

reach-me-down

khaki uniforms,

their feet squashed into boots that looked like blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes too

small. It was very hot and the men had marched a long way. They slumped under the weight of their packs and the

curiously sensitive black faces were glistening with sweat.

24 As they went past, a tall, very young Negro turned and caught my eye. But the look he gave me was not in

the least the kind of look you might expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not

sullen

, not even inquisitive. It was the

shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which actually is a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This wretched boy, who is

a French citizen and has therefore been dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch

syphilis

in

garrison

towns,

actually has feelings of reverence before a white skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and

he still believes it.

25 But there is one thought which every white man (and in this connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls

himself a socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past.

people? How long before they turn their guns in the other direction?

26 It was curious really. Every white man there had this thought stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it,

so had the other onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating

chargers

and the white

N. C. Os

marching in the

ranks. It was a kind of secret which we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't know it. And really

it was like watching a flock of cattle to see the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing peacefully up

the road, while the great white birds drifted over them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of Paper.

(from Reading for Rhetoric, by Caroline Shrodes,

Clifford A. Josephson, and James R. Wilson)

NOTES

1. Orwell: George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair (1903-50), an English writer who at one time served

with the Indian Imperial Police in Burma. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, an experience he recorded in Homage

to

Catalonia.

His

novels

include

Down

and

Out

in

Paris

and

London

;

Burmese

Days

;

Coming

up

for

Air

;

A

Clergyman'

s

Daughter

;

Keep

the

Aspidistra

Flying;

Animal

Farm;

and

1984.

The

last

two

novels

vilify

socialist

society and communism. Among his well known essays are: Shooting an Elephant A Hanging Marrakech and

Politics and the English Language.

2. Moorish: Moors, mixed Arabs and Berbers, and inhabitants of Morocco. They set up a Moorish empire from the

end of the 8th century to the 12th century: by 12th century the empire included North Africa to the borders of Egypt,

as well as Mohammedan Spain.

3. Mon vieux: a French phrase meaning,

4. Distressed Area: area where there is widespread unemployment, poverty, etc., a slum area.

5. Foreign Legionnaires: France organized a foreign legion shortly after the conquest of Algiers in 1830, enlisting

recruits who were not French subjects. Spain had a foreign legion, up till the revolution in Morocco, and Holland in

the Dutch East Indies.

6. fifteen-hands: unit of measurement, especially for the height of horses; a hand, the breadth of the human palm, is

now usually taken to be 4 inches.

3 Pub Talk and the King' s English

Henry Fairlie

Conversation is the most sociable of all human activities. And it is an activity only of humans. However

intricate

the

ways in which animals communicate with each other, they do not

indulge in

anything that deserves the name of

conversation.

2 The charm of conversation is that it does not really start from anywhere, and no one has any idea where it will

go as it

meanders

or leaps and sparkles or just glows. The enemy of good conversation is the person who has

argument is not to convince. There is no winning in conversation. In fact, the best conversationalists are those who

are prepared to lose. Suddenly they see the moment for one of their best

anecdotes

, but in a flash the conversation

has moved on and the opportunity is lost. They are ready to let it go.

3 Perhaps it is because of my up-bringing in English pubs that I think bar conversation has a charm of its own.

Bar friends are not deeply involved in each other's lives. They are companions, not intimates. The fact that their

marriages may be on the rooks, or that their love affairs have been broken or even that they got out of bed on the

wrong side is simply not a concern. They are like the musketeers of

Dumas

who, although they lived side by side

with each other, did not

delve into

,each other's lives or the recesses of their thoughts and feelings.

4 It was on such an occasion the other evening, as the conversation moved desultorily here and there, from the

most commonplace to thoughts of

Jupiter

, without any focus and with no need for one, that suddenly the

alchemy

of

conversation took place, and all at once there was a focus. I do not remember what made one of our companions say

it--she clearly had not come into the bar to say it, it was not something that was pressing on her mind-- but her remark

fell quite naturally into the talk.

5

language which one should not properly use.

6 The glow of the conversation burst into flames. There were affirmations and protests and denials, and of

course the promise, made in all such conversation, that we would look it up on the morning. That would settle it; but

conversation does not need to be settled; it could still go ignorantly on.

7 It was an Australian who had given her such a definition of

tart

remarks about what one could expect from the descendants of

convicts

. We had traveled in five minutes to

Australia. Of course, there would be resistance to the King's English in such a society. There is always resistance in

the lower classes to any attempt by an upper class to lay down rules for

8 Look at the language barrier between the

Saxon churls

and their

Norman

conquerors. The conversation

had swung from Australian convicts of the 19th century to the English peasants of the 12th century. Who was right,

who was wrong, did not matter. The conversation was on wings.

9 Someone took one of the best-known of examples, which is still always worth the reconsidering. When we

talk of meat on our tables we use French words; when we speak of the animals from which the meat comes we use

Anglo-Saxon words. It is a pig in its

sty

; it is pork (porc) on the table. They are cattle in the fields, but we sit down to

beef (boeuf). Chickens become poultry (poulet), and a calf becomes veal (veau). Even if our menus were not wirtten

in French out of snobbery, the English we used in them would still be Norman English. What all this tells us is of a

deep class

rift

in the culture of England after the Norman conquest.

10 The Saxon peasants who tilled the land and reared the animals could not afford the meat, which went to

Norman tables. The peasants were allowed to eat the rabbits that

scampered

over their fields and, since that meat

was cheap, the Norman lords of course turned up their noses at it. So rabbit is still rabbit on our tables, and not

changed into some

rendering

of lapin.

11 As we listen today to the arguments about bilingual education, we ought to think ourselves back into the

shoes of the Saxon peasant. The new ruling class had built a cultural barrier against him by building their French

against his own language. There must have been a great deal of cultural humiliation felt by the English when they

revolted under Saxon leaders like Hereward the Wake.

become French. And here in America now, 900 years later, we are still the heirs to it.

12 So the next morning, the conversation over, one looked it up. The phrase came into use some time in the

16th century.

in 1602, Dekker wrote of someone,

the confirmation that it was in general use. He uses it once, when Mistress Quickly in

says of her master coming home in a rage,

abusing

of God's patience and the King's English,

and it rings true.

13 One could have expected that it would be about then that the phrase would be coined. After five centuries of

growth, o1f tussling with the French of the Normans and the

Angevins and the Plantagenets

and at last absorbing

it, the conquered in the end conquering the conqueror. English had come royally into its own.

14 There was a King's (or Queen' s) English to be proud of. The

Elizabethans

blew on it as on a dandelion

clock

, and its seeds multiplied, and floated to the ends of the earth.

what would now be regarded as racial discrimination.

15 Yet there had been something in the remark of the Australian. The phrase has always been used a little

pejoratively

and even

facetiously

by the lower classes. One feels that even Mistress Quickly--a servant--is saying

that Dr. Caius--her master--will lose his control and speak with the vigor of ordinary folk. If the King's English is

should be spoke.

16 There is always a great danger, as Carlyle put it, that

themselves a reality, but only representations of it, and the King's English, like the Anglo-French of the Normans, is a

class representation of reality. Perhaps it is worth trying to speak it, but it should not be laid down as an

edict

, and

made immune to change from below.

17 I have an unending love affair with dictionaries-Auden once said that all a writer needs is a pen, plenty of

paper and

of

common sense

. The King's English is a model

—

a rich and instructive one--but it ought not to be an

ultimatum

.

18 So we may return to my beginning. Even with the most educated and the most literate, the King's English

slips and slides in conversation. There is no worse conversationalist than the one who punctuates his words as he

speaks as if he were writing, or even who tries to use words as if he were composing a piece of prose for print. When

E. M. Forster writes of

the sinister

corridor of our age,

terror in the image. But if E. M. Forster sat in our living room and said,

sinister corridor of our age,

19 Great authors are constantly being asked by foolish people to talk as they write. Other people may celebrate

the lofty conversations in which the great minds are supposed to have indulged in the great salons of 18th century

Paris, but one suspects that the great minds were gossiping and judging the quality of the food and the wine. Henault,

then the great president of the First Chamber of the

Paris Parlement

, complained bitterly of the

the salons of Mme. Deffand, and went on to observe that the only difference between her cook and the supreme chef,

Brinvilliers , lay in their intentions.

20 The one place not to have dictionaries is in a sit ting room or at a dining table. Look the thing up the next

morning, but not in the middle of the conversation. Other wise one will bind the conversation, one will not let it flow

freely here and there. There would have been no conversation the other evening if we had been able to settle at one

the meaning of

Conquest.

21 And there would have been nothing to think about the next morning. Perhaps above all, one would not have

been engaged by interest in the musketeer who raised the subject, wondering more about her. The bother about

teaching

chimpanzees

how to talk is that they will probably try to talk sense and so ruin all conversation.

(from The Washington Post (

华盛顿邮报

), May 6, 1979)

NOTES

1. Fairlie: Henry Fairlie (1924--) is a contributing editor to The New Republic as well as a contributor to other journals.

He is author of: The Kennedy Promise The Life of Politics and The Spoiled Child of the Western World. 2. The

Washington Post: an influential and highly respected U.S. newspaper with a national distribution 3. pub: contracted

from

4. musketeers of Dumas: characters created by the French novelist, Alexandre Dumas (1802--1870) in his novel The

Three Musketeers

5. Jupiter: referring perhaps to the planet Jupiter and the information about it gathered by a U.S. space probe

6. descendants of convicts: in 1788 a penal settlement was established at Botany Bay, Australia by Britain. British

convicts,

sentenced

to

long

term

imprisonment,

were

often

transported

to

this

penal

settlement.

Regular

settlers

arrived in Australia about 1829.

7. Saxon churls: a farm laborer or peasant in early England; a term used pejoratively by the Norman conquerors to

mean an ill-bred, ignorant English peasant

8. Norman conquerors: the Normans, under William I, Duke of Normandy (former territory of N. France) conquered

England after defeating Harold, the English king, at the Battle of Hastings (1066).

9. lapin: French word for

rd the Wake: Anglo-Saxon patriot and rebel leader. He rose up against the Norman conquerors but was

defeated and slain (1071).

: Thomas Nash (1567--1601), English satirist. Very little is known of his life .Although his first publications

appeared

in

1589,it

was

not

until

Pierce

Penniless

His

Supplication

to

the

Devil

(1592),a

bitter

satire

on

contemporary

society

,that

his

natural

and

vigorous

style

was

fully

developed

.His

other

publications

include:

Summer' s Last Will and Testament; The Unfortunate Traveler; and The Isle of Dogs.

: Thomas Dekker (1572.'? --16327), English dramatist and pamphleteer. Little is known of his life except

that he frequently suffered from poverty and served several prison terms for debt. Publications: The Shoe- maker' s

Holiday The Seven Deadly Sins of London The Gull' s Hand- book; etc.

13...here

will

be

an

old

abusing:

here

means

plentiful

from

Shakespeare's

Merry

Wives

of

Windsor

ns and Plantagenets: names of ruling Norman dynasties in England (1154--1399), sprung from Geoffrey,

Count of Anjou (former province of W. France)

ethans: people, especially writers, of the time of Queen Elizabeth I of England (1533--1603)

16.(dandelion) clock: the downy fruiting head of the common dandelion

: W.H. Auden (1907--73), British-born poet, educated at Oxford. During the Depression of the 1930' s he

was deeply affected by Marxism. His works of that period include Poems (1930) and The Orators (1932), prose and

poetry, bitter and witty, on the impending collapse of British middle-class ways and a coming revolution. Auden went

to

the

U.S.

in

1939

and

became

an

American

citizen

in

1946.

In

the

1940's

he

moved

away

from

Marxism

and

adopted a Christian existential view.

18. Forster: Edward Morgan Forster (1879--1970), English author, one of the most important British novelists of the

20th century. Forster's fiction, conservative in form, is in the English tradition of the novel of manners. He explores

the emotional and sensual deficiencies of the English middle class, developing his themes by means of irony, wit,

and symbolism. Some of his well known novels are: Where Angels Fear to Tread The Longest Journey A Room

with a View Howard' s End and A Passage to India.

19. Henault: Jean-Francois Henault (? --1770), president of the Paris Parlement, and lover of Mme Deffand

20. Paris Parlement: the

divided into several chambers.

21.

Mme.

Deffand:

Deffand,

Marie

De

Vichy- Chamrond,

Marquisse

Du

(1679--1780),

a

leading

figure

in

French

society, famous for her letters to the Duchesse de Choiseul, to Voltaire and to Horace Walpole. She was married at

21 to her kinsman, Jean Baptiste de la lande, Marquis du Deffand, from whom she separated in 1722. She later

became the mistress of the regent, Philippe, duc d' Orleans. She also lived on intimate terms with Jean- Francois

Henault, president of the Parlement of Paris till his death in 1770.

Inaugural Address

(January 20, 1961)

John F

. Kennedy

1 We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom, symbolizing an end as well as a beginning,

signifying renewal as well as change. For I have sworn before you and Almighty God the same

solemn oath

our

forebears

prescribed

nearly a century and three-quarters ago.

2 The world is very different now. For man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human

poverty and all forms of human life. And yet the same revolutionary belief for which our forebears fought is still at

issue around the globe, the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand

of God.

3 We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and

place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans, born in this century,

tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage, and unwilling to witness or

permit the slow

undoing

of these human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are

committed today at home and around the world.

4 Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or i11, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any

hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

5 This much we pledge--and more.

6 To those old allies whose cultural and spiritual origins we share, we pledge the loyalty of faithful friends. United,

there is little we cannot do in a host of co-operative

ventures

. Divided, there is little we can do, for we dare not meet

a powerful challenge at

odds

and split

asunder

.

7 To those new states whom we welcome to the ranks of the free, we pledge our word that one form of colonial

control shall not have passed away merely to be replaced by a far more iron tyranny. We shall not always expect to

find them supporting our view. But we shall always hope to find them strongly supporting their own freedom, and to

remember that, in the past, those who foolishly sought power by riding the back of the tiger ended up inside.

8 To those peoples in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we

pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required, not because the Communists

may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right. If a free society cannot help the many who

are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich.

9 To our sister republics south of our border, we offer a special pledge: to convert our good words into good

deeds, in a new

alliance

for progress, to assist free men and free governments in casting off the chains of poverty.

But this peaceful revolution of hope cannot become the

prey

of hostile powers. Let all our neighbors know that we

shall join with them to oppose aggression or

subversion

anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know

that this hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.

10 To that world assembly of

sovereign

states, the United Nations, our last best hope in an age where the

instruments of war have far outpaced the instruments of peace, we renew our pledge of support: to prevent it from

becoming merely a forum for

invective

, to strengthen its shield of the new and the weak, and to enlarge the area in

which its

writ

may run.

11 Finally, to those nations who would make themselves our

adversary

, we offer not a pledge but a request:

that both sides begin anew the quest for peace, before the dark powers of destruction unleashed by science

engulf

all humanity in planned or accidental self- destruction.

12 We dare not tempt them with weakness. For only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be

certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.

13 But neither can two great and powerful groups of nations take comfort from our present course--both sides

overburdened by the cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet

both racing to

alter

that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind's final war.

14 So let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that

civility

is not a sign of weakness, and sincerity is

always

subject to

proof. Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.

15 Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of

belaboring

those problems which divide us.

16 Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control of

arms and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.

17 Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars,

conquer the deserts, eradicate disease,

tap

the ocean depths and encourage the arts and commerce.

18 Let both sides unite to heed in all corners of the earth the command of

Isaiah

to

burdens...(and) let the oppressed go free

19 And if a

beachhead

of co-operation may push back the jungle of suspicion, let both sides join in creating a

new

endeavor

, not a new balance of power, but a new world of law, where the strong are just and the weak secure

and the peace preserved.

20 All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days,

nor in the life of this Administration, nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin.

21 In your hands, my fellow citizens, more than mine, will rest the final success or failure of our course. Since

this country was founded, each generation of Americans has been summoned to give

testimony

to its national

loyalty. The graves of young Americans who answered the call to service surround the globe.

22 Now the trumpet summons us again-- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle,

though embattled we are; but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out,

hope, patient in

tribulation

,

itself.

23 Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can

assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in the historic effort?

24 In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its

hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would

exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to

this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.

25 And so, my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

26 My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the

freedom of man.

27 Finally, whether you are citizens of America or citizens of the world, ask of us here the same high standards

of strength and sacrifice which we ask of you. With a good

conscience

our only sure reward, with history the final

judge of our deeds, let us go forth to lead the land we love, asking His blessing and His help, but knowing that here

on earth God's work must truly be our own.

(from A Treasury of the World's Great Speeches, 1965)

NOTES

1. inaugural address: since 1937, Inauguration Day has been changed to Jan. 20. On this day every four years the

newly elected president of the United States faces the people for the first time, takes the presidential oath of office

and delivers his inaugural address.

2. solemn oath: the presidential oath, traditionally administered by the Chief Justice, is prescribed in Article II, section

1 of the Constitution of the United States. The oath runs as follows:

execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend

the Constitution of the United States.

3. The belief that the rights of man.., hand of God: refers to a passage in the American Declaration of Independence:

certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

4. command of Isaiah: one of the greatest Hebrew prophets whose writings are extant (late 8th century B. C. )

venerated

by rabbis as

2nd only to Moses. The

Book

of Isaiah, a

book in

the

Old

Testament of the

Bible

of the

Christian,

is

believed

to be

a work of

two

authors

of

different

periods;

chapters

1--39

relate

to

the

history of

the

Israelites; chapters 40--66 foretell the coming of the Messiah. The quotation in the text is taken from chapter 58,

verse 6:

let the oppressed go free, and that ye break every yoke?

Love is a Fallacy

by Max Shulman

Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute

—

I was all of these. My brain was as

powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a scalpel

. And

—

think of it!

—

I only eighteen.

It

is

not

often

that

one

so

young has

such

a giant

intellect.

Take,

for example, Petey

Bellows,

my

roommate

at

the

university.

Same

age,

same

background,

but

dumb

as

an

ox.

A

nice

enough

fellow,

you

understand,

but

nothing

upstairs.

Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept

up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender oneself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it

—

this, to me, is

the acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey.

One

afternoon

I

found

Petey

lying

on

his

bed

with

an

expression

of

such

distress

on

his

face

that

I

immediately

diagnosed appendicitis. “Don?t move,” I said, “Don?t take a laxative. I?ll get a doctor.”

“Raccoon,” he mumbled thickly.

“Raccoon?” I said, pausing in my flight.

“I want a raccoon coat,” he wailed.

I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. “Why do you want a raccoon coat?”

“I

should

have

known

it,”

he

cried,

pounding

his

temples.

“I

should

have

known

they?d

come

back

when

the

Charleston came back. Like a fool I spent all my money for textbooks, and now I can?t get a raccoon coat.”

“Can you mean,” I said incredulously, “that people are actually wearing raccoon coats again?”

“All the Big Men on Campus are wearing them. Where?ve you been?”

“In the library,” I said, naming a place not frequented by Big Men on Campus.

He leaped from the bed and paced the room. “I?ve got to have a raccoon coat,” he said passionately. “I?ve got to!”

“Petey, why? Look at it rationally. Raccoon coats are unsanitary. They shed. They smell bad. They weigh too much.

They?re unsightly. They—”

“You don?t understand,” he interrupted impatiently. “It?s the thing to do. Don?t you want to be in the swim?”

“No,” I said truthfully.

“Well, I do,” he declared. “I?d give anything for a raccoon coat. Anything!”

My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear. “Anything?” I asked, looking at him narrowly.

“Anything,” he affirmed in ringing tones.

I stroked my chin thoughtfully. It so happened that I knew where to get my hands on a raccoon coat. My father had had

one in his undergraduate days; it lay now in a trunk in the attic back home. It also happened that Petey had something I wanted.

He didn?t

have

it exactly, but at least he had first rights on it. I refer to his girl, Polly Espy.

I had long coveted Polly Espy. Let me emphasize that my desire for this young woman was not emotional in nature.

She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions,

but I was not one to let

my heart rule my head.

I wanted Polly for a

shrewdly calculated, entirely cerebral reason.

I was a freshman in law school. In a few years I would be out in practice. I was well aware of the importance of the

right

kind

of

wife

in

furt

hering

a

lawyer?s

career.

The

successful

lawyers

I

had

observed

were,

almost

without

exception,

married to beautiful, gracious, intelligent women. With one omission, Polly fitted these specifications perfectly.

Beautiful she was. She was not yet of pin-up proportions, but I felt that time would supply the lack. She already had the

makings.

Gracious she was. By gracious I mean full of graces. She had an erectness of carriage, an ease of bearing, a poise that

clearly indicated the best of breeding. At table her manners were exquisite. I had seen her at the Kozy Kampus Korner eating

the

specialty

of

the

house

—

a

sandwich

that

contained

scraps

of

pot

roast,

gravy,

chopped

nuts,

and

a

dipper

of

sauerkr aut

—

without even getting her fingers moist.

Intelligent she was not. In fact, she veered in the opposite direction. But I believed that under my guidance she would

smarten up. At any rate, it was worth a try. It is, after all, easier to make a beautiful dumb girl smart than to make an ugly smart

girl beautiful.

“Petey,” I said, “are you in love with Polly Espy?”

“I think she?s a keen kid,” he replied, “but I don?t know if you?d call it love. Why?”

“Do you,” I asked, “have any kind of formal arrangement with her? I mean are you going steady or anything like that?”

“No. We see each other quite a bit, but we both have other dates. Why?”

“Is there,” I asked, “any other man for whom she has a particular fondness?”

“Not that I know of. Why?”

I nodded with satisfaction. “In other words, if you were out of the picture, the field would be open. Is that right?”

“I guess so. What are you getting at?”

“Nothing , nothing,” I said innocently, and took my suitcase out the closet.

“Where are you going?” asked Petey.

“Home for weekend.” I threw a few things into the bag.

“Listen,” he said, clutching my arm eagerly, “while you?re home, you couldn?t get some money from your old man,

could you, and lend it to me so I can buy a raccoon coat?”

“I may do better than that,” I said with a mysterious wink and closed my bag and left.

“Look,” I said to Petey when I got back Monday morning. I threw open the suitcase and revealed the huge, hairy, gamy

object that my father had worn in his Stutz Bearcat in 1925.

“Holy Toledo!” said Petey reverently. He plunged his hands into the raccoon coat and then his face. “Holy Toledo!” he

repeated fifteen or twenty times.

“Would you like it?” I asked.

“Oh yes!” he cried, clutching the greasy pelt to him. Then a canny look came into his eyes. “What do you want for it?”

“Your girl.” I said, mincing no words.

“Polly?” he said in a horrified whisper. “You want Polly?”

“That?s right.”

He flung the coat from him. “Never,” he said stoutly.

I shrugged. “Okay. If you don?t want to be in the swim, I guess it?s your business.”

I sat down in a chair and pretended to read a book, but out of the corner of my eye I kept watching Petey. He was a torn

man.

First

he

looked

at

the

coat

with

the

expression

of

a

waif

at

a

bakery

window.

Then

he

turned

away

and

set

his

jaw

resolutely. Then he looked back at the coat, with even more longing in his face. Then he turned away, but with not so much

resolution this time. Back and forth his head swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning. Finally he didn?t turn away at all;

he

just stood and stared with mad lust at the coat.

“It isn?t as

though I was in love with Polly,” he said thickly. “Or going steady or anything like that.”

“That?s right,” I murmured.

“What?s Polly to me, or me to Polly?”

“Not a thing,” said I.

“It?s just been a casual kick—just a few laughs, that?s all.”

“Try on the coat,” said I.

He complied. The coat bunched high over his ears and dropped all the way down to his shoe tops. He looked like a

mound of dead raccoons. “Fits fine,” he said happily.

I rose from my chair. “Is it a deal?” I asked, extending my hand.

He swall

owed. “It?s a deal,” he said and shook my hand.

I had my first date with Polly the following evening. This was in the nature of a survey; I wanted to find out just how

much work I had to do to get her mind up to the standard I required. I took her

first to dinner. “Gee, that was a delish dinner,”

she said as we left the restaurant. Then I took her to a movie. “Gee, that was a marvy movie,” she said as we left the theatr

e.

And then I took her home. “Gee, I had a sensaysh time,” she said as she bade

me good night.

I

went

back

to

my

room

with

a

heavy

heart.

I

had

gravely

underestimated

the

size

of

my

task.

This

girl?s

lack

of

information was terrifying. Nor would it be enough merely to supply her with information. First she had to be taught to

think

.

This loomed as a project of no small dimensions, and at first I was tempted to give her back to Petey. But then I got to thinking

about her abundant physical charms and about the way she entered a room and the way she handled a knife and fork, and I

decided to make an effort.

I went about it, as in all things, systematically. I gave her a course in logic. It happened that I, as a law student, was

taking a course in logic myself, so I had all the facts at my fingertips. “Poll?,” I said to her when I picked he

r up on our next

date, “tonight we are going over to the Knoll and talk.”

“Oo, terrif,” she replied. One thing I will say for this girl: you would go far to find another so agreeable.

We went to the Knoll, the campus trysting place, and we sat down under an old oak, and she looked at me expectantly.

“What are we going to talk about?” she asked.

“Logic.”

She thought this over for a minute and decided she liked it. “Magnif,” she said.

“Logic,” I said, clearing my throat, “is the science of thinking. Before we

can think correctly, we must first learn to

recognize the common fallacies of logic. These we will take up tonight.”

“Wow

-

dow!” she cried, clapping her hands delightedly.

I winced, but went bravely on. “First let us examine the fallacy called Dicto Simpliciter.”

“By all means,” she urged, batting her lashes eagerly.

“Dicto

Simpliciter

means

an

argument

based

on

an

unqualified

generalization.

For

example:

Exercise

is

good.

Therefore everybody should exercise.”

“I agree,” said Polly earnestly. “I mean exercise is wonderful. I mean it builds the body and everything.”

“Polly,” I said gently, “the argument is a fallacy.

Exercise is good

is an unqualified generalization. For instance, if you

have heart disease, exercise is bad, not good. Many people are ordered by their doctors

not

to exercise. You must

qualify

the

generalization. You must say exercise is

usually

good, or exercise is good

for most people

. Otherwise you have committed a

Dicto Simpliciter. Do you see?”

“No,” she confessed. “But this is marvy. Do more! Do more!”

“It will be better if you stop tugging at my sleeve,” I told her, and when she desisted, I continued. “Next we take up a

fallacy

called

Hasty

Generalization.

Listen

carefully:

You

can?t

speak

French.

Petey

Bellows

can?t

speak

French.

I

must

th

erefore conclude that nobody at the University of Minnesota can speak French.”

“Really?” said Polly, amazed. “

Nobody?

”

I hid my exasperation. “Polly, it’s a fallacy. The generalization is reached too hastily. There are too few instances to

support such a c

onclusion.”

“Know any more fallacies?” she asked breathlessly. “This is more fun than dancing even.”

I

fought

off

a

wave

of

despair.

I

was

getting

nowhere

with

this

girl,

absolutely

nowhere.

Still,

I

am

nothing

if

not

persistent. I continued. “Next comes Post Hoc. Listen to this: Let?s not take Bill on our picnic. Every time we take him out with

us, it rains.”

“I know somebody just like that,” she exclaimed. “A girl back home—

Eula Becker, her name is. It never fails. Every

single time we take her on a picnic

—”

“Polly,” I said sharply, “it?s a fallacy. Eula Becker doesn?t

cause

the rain. She has no connection with the rain. You are

guilty of Post Hoc if you blame Eula Becker.”

“I’ll never do it again,” she promised contritely. “Are you mad at me?”

I sighed. “No, Polly, I?m not mad.”

“Then tell me some more fallacies.”

“All right. Let?s try Contradictory Premises.”

“Yes, let?s,” she chirped, blinking her eyes happily.

I frowned, but plunged ahead. “Here?s an example of Contradictory Premises: If God can do anyt

hing, can He make a

stone so heavy that He won?t be able to lift it?”

“Of course,” she replied promptly.

“But if He can do anything, He can lift the stone,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” she said thoughtfully. “Well, then I guess He can?t make the stone.”

“But He

can do anything,” I reminded her.

She scratched her pretty, empty head. “I?m all confused,” she admitted.

“Of course you are. Because when the premises of an argument contradict each other, there can be no argument. If

there is an irresistible force, there can be no immovable object. If there is an immovable object, there can be no irresistible force.

Get it?”

“Tell me more of this keen stuff,” she said eagerly.

I consulted my watch. “I think we?d better call it a night. I?ll take you home now, and you go over all the things you?ve

learned. We?ll have another session tomorrow night.”

I deposited her at the girls? dormitory, where she assured me that she had had a perfectly terrif evening, and I went

glumly

home

to

my

room.

Petey

lay

snoring

in

his

bed,

the

raccoon coat

huddled

like

a

great

hairy

beast

at

his

feet.

For

a

moment I considered waking him and telling him that he could have his girl back. It seemed clear that my project was doomed

to failure. The girl simply had a logic-proof head.

But then I reconsidered. I had wasted one evening; I might as well waste another. Who knew? Maybe somewhere in the

extinct crater of her mind a few members still smoldered. Maybe somehow I could fan them into flame. Admittedly it was not a

prospect fraught with hope, but I decided to give it one more try.

Seated under the oak the next evening I said, “Our first fallacy tonight is called Ad Misericordiam.”

She quivered with delight.

“Listen closely,” I said. “A man applies for a job. When the boss asks him what hi

s qualifications are, he replies that he

has a wife and six children at home, the wife is a helpless cripple, the children have nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, no shoes

on their feet, there are no beds in the house, no coal in the cellar, and winter is

coming.”

A tear rolled down each of Polly?s pink cheeks. “Oh, this is awful, awful,” she sobbed.

“Yes, it?s awful,” I agreed, “but it?s no argument. The man never answered the boss?s question about his qualifications.

Instead he appealed to the boss?s sympathy. He committed the fallacy of Ad Misericordiam. Do you understand?”

“Have you got a handkerchief?” she blubbered.

I handed her a handkerchief and tried to keep from screaming while she wiped her eyes. “Next,” I said in a carefully

controlled

tone,

“we

will

discuss

False

Analogy.

Here

is

an example:

Students

should

be

allowed

to

look at

their

textbooks

during

examinations.

After all,

surgeons

have

X-rays

to

guide

them

during

an

operation,

lawyers

have

briefs

to

guide

them

during

a

trial,

carpenters

have

blueprints

to

guide

them

when

they

are

building

a

house.

Why,

then,

shouldn?t

students

be

allowed to look at their textbooks during an examination?”

“There now,” she said enthusiastically, “is the most marvy idea I?ve heard in years.”

“Polly,” I said testily, “the argument is all wrong. Doctors, lawyers, and carpenters aren?t taking a test to see how much

they have learned, but students are. The situations are altogether different, and you can?t make an analogy between them.”

“I still think it?s a good idea,” said Polly.

“Nuts,” I muttered. Doggedly I pressed on. “Next we?ll try Hypothesis Contrary to Fact.”

“Sounds yummy,” was Polly?s reaction.

“Listen: If Madame Curie had not happened to leave a photographic plate in a drawer with a chunk of pitchblende,

the

world today would not know about radium.”

“True, true,” said Polly, nodding her head “Did you see the movie? Oh, it just knocked me out. That Walter Pidgeon is

so dreamy. I mean he fractures me.”

“If

you

can

forget

Mr.

Pidgeon

for

a

moment,”

I

said

coldly,

“I

would

like

to

point

out

that

statement

is

a

fallacy.

Maybe

Madame

Curie

would

have

discovered

radium

at

some

later

date.

Maybe

somebody

else

would

have

discovered

it.

Maybe

any

number

of

things

would

have

happened.

You

can?t

start

with

a

hypothesis

that

is

not

true

and

then

draw

any

supportable conclusions from it.”

“They ought to put Walter Pidgeon in more pictures,” said Polly, “I hardly ever see him any more.”

One more chance, I decided. But just one more. There is a limit to what flesh and blood

can bear. “The next fallacy is

called Poisoning the Well.”

“How cute!” she gurgled.

“Two men are having a debate. The first one gets up and says, ?My opponent is a notorious liar. You can?t believe a

word that he is going to say.? ... Now, Polly, think. Think hard. What?s wrong?”

I watched her closely as she knit her creamy brow in concentration. Suddenly a glimmer of intelligence

—

the first I had

seen

—came into her eyes. “It?s not fair,” she said with indignation. “It?s not a bit fair. What chance has the

second man got if

the first man calls him a liar before he even begins talking?”

“Right!”

I

cried

exultantly.

“One

hundred

per

cent

right.

It?s

not

fair.

The

first

man

has

poisoned

the

well

before

anybody could drink from it. He has hamstrung his opponent

before he could even start ... Polly, I?m proud of you.”

“Pshaws,” she murmured, blushing with pleasure.

“You see, my dear, these things aren?t so hard. All you have to do is concentrate. Think—

examine

—

evaluate. Come

now, let?s review everything we have learned.”

“Fire away,” she said with an airy wave of her hand.

Heartened by the knowledge that Polly was not altogether a cretin, I began a long, patient review of all I had told her.

Over and over and over again I cited instances, pointed out flaws, kept hammering away without letup. It was like digging a

tunnel. At first, everything was work, sweat, and darkness. I had no idea when I would reach the light, or even if I would. But I

persisted. I pounded and clawed and scraped, and finally I was rewarded. I saw a chink of light. And then the chink got bigger

and the sun came pouring in and all was bright.

Five grueling nights with this took, but it was worth it. I had made a logician out of Polly; I had taught her to think. My

job was done. She was worthy of me, at last. She was a fit wife for me, a proper hostess for my many mansions, a suitable

mother for my well-heeled children.

It

must not be thought that

I was without love for this

girl. Quite the contrary. Just as Pygmalion loved the perfect

woman he had fashioned, so I loved mine. I decided to acquaint her with my feelings at our very next meeting. The time had

come to change our relationship from academic to romantic.

“Polly,” I said when next we sat beneath our oak, “tonight we will not discuss fallacies.”

“Aw, gee,” she said, disappointed.

“My

dear,”

I

said,

favoring

her

with

a

smile,

“we

have

now

spent

five

evenings

together.

We

have

gotten

along

splendidly. It is clear that we are well matched.”

“Hasty Generalization,” said Polly brightly.

“I beg your

pardon,” said I.

“Hasty Generalization,” she repeated. “How can you say that we are well matched on the basis of only five dates?”

I

chuckled

with

amusement.

The

dear

child

had

learned

her

lessons

well.

“My

dear,”

I

said,

patting

her

hand

in

a

tolerant ma

nner, “five dates is plenty. After all, you don?t have to eat a whole cake to know that it?s good.”

“False Analogy,” said Polly promptly. “I?m not a cake. I?m a girl.”

I

chuckled

with

somewhat

less

amusement.

The

dear

child

had

learned

her

lessons

perhaps

too

well.

I

decided

to

change tactics. Obviously the best approach was a simple, strong, direct declaration of love. I paused for a moment while my

massive brain chose the proper word. Then I began:

“Polly, I love you. You are the whole world to me, the mo

on and the stars and the constellations of outer space. Please,

my darling, say that you will go steady with me, for if you will not, life will be meaningless. I will languish. I will refuse my

meals. I will wander the face of the earth, a shambling, hollow-

eyed hulk.”

There, I thought, folding my arms, that ought to do it.

“Ad Misericordiam,” said Polly.

I ground my teeth. I was not Pygmalion; I was Frankenstein, and my monster had me by the throat. Frantically I fought

back the tide of panic surging through me; at all costs I had to keep cool.

“Well, Polly,” I said, forcing a smile, “you certainly have learned your fallacies.”

“You?re darn right,” she said with a vigorous nod.

“And who taught them to you, Polly?”

“You did.”

“That?s right. So you do owe me something, don?t you, my dear? If I hadn?t come along you never would have learned

about fallacies.”

“Hypothesis Contrary to Fact,” she said instantly.

I dashed perspiration from my brow. “Polly,” I croaked, “you mustn?t take all these things so literally.

I mean this is

just classroom stuff. You know that the things you learn in school don?t have anything to do with life.”

“Dicto Simpliciter,” she said, wagging her finger at me playfully.

That did it. I leaped to my feet, bellowing like a bull. “Will you or will you not go steady with me?”

“I will not,” she replied.

“Why not?” I demanded.

“Because this afternoon I promised Petey Bellows that I would go steady with him.”

I reeled back, overcome with the infamy of it. After he promised, after he made a deal,

after he shook my hand! “The

rat!” I shrieked, kicking up great chunks of turf. “You can?t go with him, Polly. He?s a liar. He?s a cheat. He?s a rat.”

“Poisoning the Well ,” said Polly, “and stop shouting. I think shouting must be a fallacy too.”

With an

immense effort of will, I modulated my voice. “All right,” I said. “You?re a logician. Let?s look at this thing

logically. How could you choose Petey Bellows over me? Look at me

—

a brilliant student, a tremendous intellectual, a man

with an assured future. Look at Petey

—a knothead, a jitterbug, a guy who?ll never know where his next meal is coming from.

Can you give me one logical reason why you should go steady with Petey Bellows?”

“I certainly can,” declared Polly. “He?s got a raccoon coat.”

DISAPPEARING THR0UGH THE SKYLIGHT

Osborne Bennet Hardison Jr.

1 Science is committed to the universal. A sign of this is that the more successful a science becomes, the broader

the agreement about its basic concepts: there is not a separate Chinese or American or Soviet thermodynamics, for

example; there is simply

thermodynamics

For several decades of the twentieth century there was a Western and a

Soviet

genetics

, the latter associated with Lysenko's theory that environmental stress can produce genetic

mutations

. Today Lysenko's theory is

discredited

, and there is now only one genetics.

2 As the corollary of science, technology also exhibits the

universalizing

tendency. This is why the spread of

technology makes the world look ever more

homogeneous

. Architectural styles, dress styles, musical styles--even

eating styles--tend increasingly to be world styles. The world looks more homogeneous because it is more

homogeneous. Children who grow up in this world therefore experience it as a sameness rather than a

diversity

,

and because their identities are shaped by this sameness, their sense of differences among cultures and individuals

diminishes. As buildings become more alike, the people who inhabit the buildings become more alike. The result is

described precisely in a phrase that is already familiar.

3 The automobile illustrates the Point With great clarity. A technological

innovation

like

streamlining

or

all-welded body construction may be rejected initially, but if it is important to the efficiency or economics of

automobiles, it will reappear in different ways until it is not only accepted but universally regarded as an

财富

.

Today's automobile is no longer unique to a given company or even to a given national culture, its basic features are

found, with variations, in automobiles in general, no matter who makes them.

4 A few years ago

the Ford Motor Company

came up with the Fiesta, which it called the

Advertisements showed it surrounded by the flags of all nations. Ford explained that the

cylinder block

was made in

England, the

carburetor

in Ireland, the

transmission

in France, the wheels in Belgium, and so forth.

5 The Fiesta appears to have sunk Without a trace. But the idea of a world car was inevitable. It was the

automotive equivalent of the International Style. Ten years after the Fiesta, all of the large automakers were

international. Americans had Plants in Europe, Asia, and South America, and Europeans and Japanese had plants in

America and South America, and in the Soviet Union Fiat

Fiat

(= Fabbrica Italiana Automobile Torino ) workers

refreshed themselves with Pepsi-Cola). In the fullness of time international automakers will have plants in Egypt and

India and the People's Republic of China.

6 As in architecture, so in automaking. In a given cost range, the same technology tends to produce the same

solutions. The visual evidence for this is as obvious for cars as for buildings. Today, if you choose models in the

same price range, you will be

hard put

at 500 paces to tell one

make

from another. In other words, the specifically

American traits that lingered in American automobiles in the 1960s --traits that linked American cars to American

history--are disappearing. Even the

Volkswagen Beetle

has disappeared and has taken with it the visible evidence

of the history of streamlining that extends from D'Arcy Thompson to Carl Breer to Ferdinand Porsche.

7 If man creates machines, machines in turn shape their creators. As the automobile is universalized, it

universalizes those who use it. Like the World Car he drives, modern man is becoming universal. No longer quite an

individual, no longer quite the product of a unique geography and culture, he moves from one climate-controlled

shopping mall to another, from one airport to the next, from one Holiday Inn to its successor three hundred miles

down the road; but somehow his location never changes. He is

cosmopolitann

. The price he Pays is that he no

longer has a home in the traditional sense of the word. The benefit is that he begins to suspect home in the traditional

sense is another name for limitations, and that home in the modern sense is everywhere and always surrounded by

neighbors.

8 The universalizing

imperative

of technology is irresistible. Barring the

catastrophe

of nuclear war, it will

continue to shape both modern culture and the consciousness of those who inhabit that culture.

9 This brings us to art and history again. Reminiscing on the early work of Francis Picabia and Marcel Duchamp,

Madame Gabrielle Buffet-Picabia wrote of the discovery of the machine aesthetic in 1949:

when every artist thought he owed it to himself to turn his back on the

Eiffel Tower

, as a protest against the

architectural

blasphemy

with which it filled the sky.... The discovery and

rehabilitation

of ... machines soon

generated propositions which evaded all tradition, above all, a mobile, extra human

plasticity

which was absolutely

new....‖

10 Art is, in one definition, simply an effort to name the real world. Are machines

surface? Is the real world that easy to find? Science has shown the in

substantiality

of the world. It has thus

undermined

an article of faith: the thingliness of things. At the same time, it has produced images of orders of reality

underlying the thingliness of things. Are images of cells or of

molecules

or of

galaxies

more or less real than images

of machines? Science has also produced images that are pure artifacts. Are images of

self-squared dragons

more

or less real than images of molecules?

11 The skepticism of modern science about the thingliness of things implies a new appreciation of the humanity

of art entirely consistent with Kandinsky's observation in On the Spiritual in Art that beautiful art

need, which springs from the soul.

things seen from a middle distance but

because it is a form of perception rather than a content.

12 The disappearance of history is thus a liberation--what Madame Buffet-Picabia refers to as the discovery of

liberation through play--in painting in the playfulness of Picasso and Joan Miro and in poetry in the nonsense of

Dada

and the mock heroics of a poem like Wallace Stevens's

13 The playfulness of the modern aesthetic is, finally, its most striking--and also its most serious and, by

corollary, its most disturbing-- feature. The playfulness imitates the playfulness of science that produces

game

theory

and

virtual particles

and black holes and that, by introducing human growth genes into cows, forces

students of ethics to reexamine the definition of

cannibalism

. The importance of play in the modern aesthetic should

not come as a surprise. It is announced in every city in the developed world by the fantastic and playful buildings of

postmodernism and neo-modernism and by the fantastic

juxtapositions

of architectural styles that typify

collage

city

and urban

adhocism

.

14 Today modern culture includes the geometries of the International Style, the fantasies of

facadism

, and the

gamesmanship of

theme parks and museum villages

. It pretends at times to be static but it is really dynamic. Its

buildings move and sway and reflect dreamy visions of everything that is going on around them. It surrounds its

citizens with the linear sculpture of pipelines and interstate highways and high-tension lines and the delicate

virtuosities

of the surfaces of the Chrysler Airflow and the Boeing 747 and the lacy weavings of circuits etched on

silicon, as well as with the brutal assertiveness of oil tankers and bulldozers and the Tinkertoy complications of

trusses

and geodesic

domes

and lunar landers. It abounds in images and sounds and values utterly different from

those of the world of natural things seen from a middle distance.

15 It is a human world, but one that is human in ways no one expected. The image it reveals is not the worn and

battered face that stares from Leonardo's self-portrait much less the one that stares, bleary and uninspired, every

morning from the bathroom mirror. These are the faces of history. It is, rather, the image of an eternally playful and

eternally youthful power that makes order whether order is there or not and that having made one order is quite

capable of putting it aside and creating an entirely different or the way a child might build one structure from a set of

blocks and then without malice and purely in the spirit of play demolish it and begin again. It is an image of the power

that made humanity possible in the first place.

16 The banks of the nineteenth century tended to be neoclassic structures of

marble

or

granite

faced with

ponderous rows of columns. They made a statement

history. Your money is safe in our vaults.

17 Today's banks are airy structures of steel and glass, or they are store-fronts with slot- machinelike terminals,

or trailers parked on the lots of suburban shopping malls.

18 The vaults have been replaced by magnetic tapes. In a computer, money is sequences of digital signals

endlessly recorded, erased, processed, and reprocessed, and endlessly modified by other computers. The

statement of modern banks is

we exist as an airy medium in which your transactions are completed and your wealth increased.

19 That, perhaps, establishes the logical limit of the modern aesthetic. If so, the limit is a long way ahead, but it

can be made out, just barely, through the haze over the road. As surely as nature is being swallowed up by the mind,

the banks, you might say, are disappearing through their own skylights.

(from Disappearing Through The Skylight )

NOTES

1.

Hardison:

Osborne

Bennet

Hardison

Jr.

was

born

in

San

Diego,

California

in

1928.

He

was

educated

at

the

University of North Carolina and the University of Wisconsin. He has taught at Princeton and the University of North

Carolina. He is the author of Lyrics and Elegies (1958), The Enduring Monument (1962), English Literary Criticism:

The Renaissance (1964), Toward Freedom and Dignity: The Humanities and the Idea of Humanity (1973), Entering

the Maze: Identity and Change in Modern Culture (1981) and Disappearing Through the Skylight (1980).

2. Ford Motor Company: one of the largest car manufacturing companies of America

3.

International

Style:

as

its

name

indicates,

an

architectural

style

easily

reproduced

and

accepted

by

countries

throughout the world. These structures use simple geometric forms of straight lines, squares, rectangles, etc., in their

designs. It is often criticized as a rubber-stamp method of design. These structures are meant to be simple, practical

and cost-effective.

4.

Fiat:

the

biggest

Italian

car

manufacturing

company.

Fiat

is

an

acronym

of

the

Italian

name,

Fabbrica

Italiana

Automobile Torina.

5. Pepsi- Cola: a brand name of an American soft drink. It is a strong competitor of another well-known American soft

drink, Coca-Cola.

6. Volkswagen Beetle: model name of a car designed and manufactured by the German car manufacturing company,

Volkswagen

7.D'Arcy Thompson: D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson (1860-1948) placed biology on a mathematical foundation. In his

book On Growth and Form. Thompson invented the term Airflow to describe the curvature imposed by water on the

body of a fish, The airflow or streamling influenced the future designing of cars and airplanes to increase their speed

and reduce air friction. 8. Carl Breer: auto-designer, who designed the Chrysler Airflow of 1934.

9. Ferdinand Porshe: auto- designer of the original Volkswagen

10. Holiday Inn: name adopted by a hotel chain

11.

Picabia:

Francis

Picabia

(1878-1953).

French

painter.

After

working

in

an

impressionist

style,

Picabia

was

influenced by Cubism and later was one of the original exponents of Dada in Europe and the United States.

p: Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968), French painter. Duchamp is noted for his cubist-futurist painting Nude

Descending a Staircase, depicting continuous action with a series of overlapping figures. In 1915 he was a cofounder

of a Dada group in New York.

13. Madame Gabrille Buffet-Picabia: perhaps wife of Francis Picabia

14. Eiffel Tower: a tower of iron framework in Paris, designed by A.G

. Eiffel and erected in the Champ- de-Mars for the

Paris exposition of 1889

15. self-squared dragons: a picture of a four-dimensional dragon produced by computer technique

16. Kandinsky: Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), Russian abstract painter and theorist. He is usually regarded as the

originator of abstract art. In 1910 he wrote an important theoretical study, Concerning the Spiritual in Art.

17. Picasso: Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Spanish painter and sculptor, who worked in France. His landmark painting

Guernica is an impassioned allegorical condemnation of facism and war.

18. Miro: Joan Miro (1893-1983), Spanish surrealist painter. After studying in Barcelona, Miro went to Paris in 1919.

In

the

1920s

he

came

into

contact

with

cubism

and

surrealism.

His

work

has

been

characterized

as

psychic

automatism, an expression of the subconscious in free form.

19. Dada: a movement in art and literature based on deliberate irrationality and negation of traditional artistic values;

also the art and literature produced by this movement

20. Stevens: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet, educated at Harvard and the New York University Law

School. A master of exquisite verse, Stevens was specifically concerned with creating some shape of order in the

21. game theory: a

mathematical theory of transactions developed by John Von Neumann. He called this theory,

which has important applications in economic, diplomacy, and national defense,

are serious, however, the games are often so intricate and their rules so strange that the game becomes overtly

playful.

22. virtual particles: particles that serve all practical purposes though they do not exist in reality

23. black hole: A star in the last phases of gravitational collapse is often referred to as a

cannot

escape

the

black

hole

but

is

turned

back

by

the

enormous

pull

of

gravitation.

Therefore

it

can

never

be

observed directly. 24. lunar lander: a vehicle designed to land on the surface of the moon

25. collage city: Collage City (1975) by Colin Rowe. In it he calls for a city that is a rich mixture of styles. It also

implies the preservation of many bits and pieces of history. collage: an artistic composition made of various materials

(as paper, cloth or wood) glued on a picture surface

26. adhocism: This is a key term used by Charles Jencks in his book. The Language of Post-Modern Architecture

(1977). The ad hoc city is intended to avoid the horrors of the totally planned city. The ad hoc city clearly shows a

fondness for clashing styles and queer postmodern buildings as well as fantastic architectural complexes.

27.

facadism:

It

is

a

form

of

mosaic

architecture.

In

mosaic

architecture

bits

and

pieces

of

older

buildings

are

combined

with

bits

and

pieces

of

modern

buildings.

In

facadism

fronts

of

nineteenth-century

buildings

may

be

propped up while entirely new buildings are created behind them and often beside and above them.

28. theme parks and museum villages: Such places try to reproduce history certain themes through architectural

complexes. For example, Disneyland Anaheim, California, tries to reproduce the main street of a typical nineteenth

centutry American town, but everything is stage set and nothing is real.

29. Chrysler Airflow: a car model manufactured by the Chrysler Corporation of America

30. Boeing 747: an airplane model manufactured by the Boeing Company of America

31.

Tinkertoy:

a

trademark

for

a

toy

set

of

wooden

dowels,

joints,

wheels

etc.,

used

by

children

to

assemble

structures 32. Crystal Palace: building designed by Sir Joseph Paxton and erected in Hyde Park, London, for the

great exhibition in 1851. In 1854 it was removed to Sydenham, where, until its damage by fire in 1936, it housed a

museum of sculpture, pictures, and architecture and was used for concerts. In 1941 it demolition was completed

because it served as a guide to enemy bombing planes. The building was constructed of iron, glass, and laminated

wood

One

of

the

most

significant

examples

of

19th

century proto-modern

architec

ture, it

was

widely

imitated

in

Europe and America.

The Libido for the Ugly

H. L. Mencken

1 On a Winter day some years ago, coming out of

Pittsburgh

on one of the expresses of the

Pennsylvania

Railroad,

I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland county. It was familiar ground; boy

and man, I had been through it often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its

appalling

desolation. Here

was the very heart of industrial America, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and

pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth--and here was a scene so dreadfully

hideous

, so

intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole

aspiration

of man to a

macabre

and depressing

joke

. Here

was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination--and here were human habitations so abominable that

they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.

2 I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and

agonizing

ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight. From East Liberty to Greensburg, a

distance of twenty-five miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye. Some

were so bad, and they were among the most

pretentious

--churches, stores, warehouses, and the like--that they

were down-right startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away. A few linger in

memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer-window on the side of a

bare

leprous

hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another

forlorn

town, a steel stadium like a

huge rattrap somewhere further down the line. But most of all I recall the general effect--of hideousness without a

break. There was not a single decent house within eyerange from the Pittsburgh to the Greensburg yards. There was

not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby.

3 The country itself is not uncomely, despite the grime of the endless mills. It is, in form, a narrow river valley,

with deep gullies running up into the hills. It is thickly settled, but not: noticeably overcrowded. There is still plenty of

room for building, even in the larger towns, and there are very few solid blocks. Nearly every house, big and little, has

space on all four sides. Obviously, if there were architects of any professional sense or dignity in the region, they

would have perfected a chalet to hug the hillsides--a

chalet

with a high-pitched roof, to throw off the heavy Winter

snows, but still essentially a low and clinging building, wider than it was tall. But what have they done? They have

taken as their model a brick set on end. This they have converted into a thing of

dingy clapboards

with a narrow,

low-pitched roof. And the whole they have set upon thin,

preposterous

brick

piers

. By the hundreds and thousands

these abominable houses cover the bare hillsides, like gravestones in some gigantic and decaying cemetery. On

their deep sides they are three, four and even five stories high; on their low sides they bury themselves swinishly in

the mud. Not a fifth of them are

perpendicular

. They lean this way and that, hanging on to their bases

precariously

. And one and all they are streaked in grime, with dead and

eczematous

patches of paint peeping

through the streaks.

4 Now and then there is a house of brick. But what brick! When it is new it is the color of a fried egg. When it has

taken on the

patina

of the mills it is the color of an egg long past all hope or caring. Was it necessary to adopt that

shocking color? No more than it was necessary to set all of the houses on end. Red brick, even in a steel town, ages

with some dignity. Let it become downright black, and it is still

sightly

, especially if its trimmings are of white stone,

with soot in the depths and the high spots washed by the rain. But in Westmoreland they prefer that

uremic

yellow,

and so they have the most

loathsome

towns and villages ever seen by mortal eye.

5 I award this championship only after laborious research and incessant prayer. I have seen, I believe, all of the

most unlovely towns of the world; they are all to be found in the United States. I have seen the mill towns of

decomposing New England and the desert towns of Utah, Arizona and Texas. I am familiar with the back streets of

Newark, Brooklyn and Chicago, and have made scientific explorations to Camden, N. J. and Newport News, Va.

Safe in a

Pullman

, I have whirled through the g1oomy,

Godforsaken

villages of Iowa and Kansas, and the

malarious

tidewater hamlets of Georgia. I have been to Bridgeport, Conn., and to Los Angeles. But nowhere on this

earth, at home or abroad, have I seen anything to compare to the villages that huddle aloha the line of the

Pennsylvania from the Pittsburgh yards to Greensburg. They are incomparable in color, and they are incomparable

in design. It is as if some titanic and

aberrant genius

, uncompromisingly

inimical

to man, had devoted all the

ingenuity of Hell to the making of them. They show

grotesqueries

of ugliness that,

in retrospect

,become almost

diabolical

.One cannot imagine mere human beings concocting such dreadful things, and one can scarcely imagine

human beings bearing life in them.

6 Are they so frightful because the valley is full of foreigners --dull, insensate brutes, with no love of beauty in

them? Then why didn't these foreigners set up similar abominations in the countries that they came from? You will, in

fact, find nothing of the sort in Europe--save perhaps in the more

putrid

parts of England. There is scarcely an ugly

village on the whole Continent. The peasants, however poor, somehow manage to make themselves graceful and

charming habitations, even in Spain. But in the American village and small town the pull is always toward ugliness,

and in that Westmoreland valley it has been yielded to with an eagerness bordering upon passion. It is incredible that

mere ignorance should have achieved such masterpieces of horror.

7 On certain levels of the American race, indeed, there seems to be a positive

libido

for the ugly, as on other

and less Christian levels there is a libido for the beautiful. It is impossible to put down the wallpaper that defaces the

average American home of the lower middle class to mere

inadvertence

, or to the

obscene humor

of the

manufacturers. Such ghastly designs, it must be obvious, give a genuine delight to a certain type of mind. They meet,

in some unfathomable way, its obscure and unintelligible demands. The taste for them is as enigmatical and yet as

common as the taste for dogmatic

theology

and the poetry of Edgar A Guest.

8 Thus I suspect (though confessedly without knowing) that the vast majority of the honest folk of Westmoreland

county, and especially the 100% Americans among them, actually admire the houses they live in, and are proud of

them. For the same money they could get vastly better ones, but they prefer what they have got. Certainly there was

no pressure upon the Veterans of Foreign Wars to choose the dreadful edifice that bears their banner, for there are

plenty of vacant buildings along the trackside, and some of them are appreciably better. They might, in- deed, have

built a better one of their own. But they chose that clapboarded horror with their eyes open, and having chosen it,

they let it mellow into its present shocking depravity. They like it as it is: beside it, the

Parthenon

would no doubt

offend them. In precisely the same way the authors of the rat-trap stadium that I have mentioned made a deliberate

choice: After painfully designing and erecting it, they made it perfect in their own sight by putting a completely

impossible

penthouse

painted a staring yellow, on top of it. The effect is that of a fat woman with a black eye. It is

that of a

Presbyterian

grinning. But they like it.

9 Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to

make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty

as it hates truth. The

etiology

of this madness deserves a great deal more study than it has got. There must be

causes behind it; it arises and flourishes in obedience to biological laws, and not as a mere act of God. What,

precisely, are the terms of those laws? And why do they run stronger in America than elsewhere? Let some honest

Privat Dozent

in

pathological sociology

apply himself to the problem.

(from Reading for Rhetoric by Caroline Shrodes,

Clifford A, Josephson, James R. Wilson )

NOTES

1. the Veterans of Foreign Wars: generally abbreviated to VFW, an organization created by the merger in 1914 of

three societies of United States overseas veterans that were founded after the Spanish-American War of 1899. With

its

membership

vastly increased after World

War

Ⅰ

and World

War

Ⅱ

, the

organization

became a

major national

veterans' society.

2.

Guest:

Edgar

Albert

Guest

(1881--1959),

English-born

newspaper poet, whose

daily

poem

in

the

Detroit

Free

Press

was

widely

syndicated

and

extremely

popular

with

the

people

he

called

'folks'

for

its

homely,

saccharine

morality

3. Parthenon: a beautiful doric temple built in honor of the virgin (Parthenos) goddess Athena on the Acropolis in

Athens around 5th century B. C.

4. Presbysterian: a form of church government by presbyters developed by John Calvin and other reformers during

the

16th-century

Protestant

Reformation

and

used

with

variations

by

Reformed

and

Presbyterian

churches

throughout the world. According to Calvin's theory of church government, the church is a community or body in which

Christ only is head and members are equal under him. All who hold office do so by election of the people whose

representatives they are.

Mencken assumes that Presbyterians are puritanical, sombrefaced people who never smile or laugh. Hence people

are shocked by the unexpected and incongruous sight of a Presbyterian grinning.

The Worker as Creator or Machine

Erich Fromm

1 Unless man exploits others, he has to work in order to live. However primitive and simple his method of work may

be, by the very fact of production, he has risen above the animal kingdom; rightly has he been defined as

that produces.

inescapable

necessity for man. Work is also his liberator from nature, his

creator as a social and independent being. In the process of work, that is, the molding and changing of nature

outside of himself, man molds and changes himself. He emerges from nature by mastering her; he develops his

powers of co-operation, of reason, his sense of beauty. He separates himself from nature, from the original unity with

her, but at the same time unites himself with her again as her master and builder. The more his work develops, the

more his individuality develops. In molding nature and re-creating her, he learns to make use of his powers,

increasing his skill and creativeness. Whether we think of the beautiful paintings in the caves of Southern France, the

ornaments on weapons among primitive people, the statues and temples of Greece, the

cathedrals

of the Middle

Ages, the chairs and tables made by skilled craftsmen, or the cultivation of flowers, trees or corn by peasants--all are

expressions of the creative transformation of nature by man's reason and skill.

2 In Western history, craftsmanship, especially as it developed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,

constitutes one of the peaks in the evolution of creative work. Work was not only a useful activity, but one which

carried with it a profound satisfaction. The main features of craftsmanship have been very

lucidly

expressed by C. W.

Mills.

ulterior

motive in work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation. The

details of dally work are meaningful because they are not detached in the worker's mind from the product of the work.

The worker is free to control his own working action. The craftsman is thus able to learn from his work; and to use

and develop his capacities and skills in its prosecution. There is no split of work and play, or work and culture. The

craftsman' s way of

livelihood

determines and

infuses

his entire mode of living.

3 3 With the collapse of the medieval structure, and the beginning of the modern mode of production, the

meaning and function of work changed fundamentally, especially in the

Protestant

countries. Man, being afraid of his

newly won freedom, was obsessed by the need to subdue his doubts and fears by developing a feverish activity. The

out-come of this activity, success or failure, decided his salvation, indicating whether he was among the saved or the

lost souls. Work, instead of being an activity satisfying in itself and pleasurable, became a duty and an

obsession

.

The more it was possible to gain riches by work, the more it became a pure means to the aim of wealth and success.

Work became, in Max Weber's terms, the chief factor in a system of

asceticism

,

sense of aloneness and isolation.

4 However, work in this sense existed only for the upper and middle classes, those who could amass some

capital and employ the work of others. For the vast majority of those who had only their physical energy to sell, work

became nothing but forced labor. The worker in the eighteenth or nineteenth century who had to work sixteen hours if

he did not want to starve was not doing it because he served the Lord in this way, nor because his success would

show that he was among the

means of exploiting it. The first centuries of the modern era find the meaning of work divided into that of duty among

the middle class, and that of forced labor among those without property.

5 The religious attitude toward work as a duty, which was still so prevalent in the nineteenth century, has been

changing considerably in the last decades. Modern man does not know what to do with himself, how to spend his

lifetime meaningfully, and he is driven to work in order to avoid an unbearable boredom. But work has ceased to be a

moral and religious

obligation

in the sense of the middle class attitude of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Something new has emerged. Ever-increasing production, the drive to make bigger and better things, have become

aims in themselves, new ideals. Work has become

alienated

from the working person.

6 What happens to the industrial worker? He spends his best energy for seven or eight hours a day in producing

isolated function in a complicated and highly organized process of production, and is never confronted with

product as a whole, at least not as a producer, but only as a consumer, provided he has the money to buy

product in a store. He is concerned neither with the whole product in its physical aspects nor with its wider economic

and social aspects. He is put in a certain place, has to carry out a certain task, but does not participate in the

organization or management of the work. He is not interested nor does he know why one produces this, instead of

another commodity--what relation it has to the needs of society as a whole. The shoes, the cars, the electric bulbs,

are produced by

agent. The machine, instead of being in his service to do work for him which once had to be performed by sheer

physical energy, has become his master. Instead of the machine being the substitute for human energy, man has

become a substitute for the machine. His work can be defined as the performance of acts which cannot yet be

performedby machines.

7 Work is a means of getting money, not in itself a meaningful human activity. P. Drucker, observing workers in

the automobile industry, expresses this idea very

succinctly

meaning of the job is in the pay check, not in anything connected with the work or the product. Work appears as

something unnatural, a disagreeable, meaningless and

stultifying

condition of getting the pay check, devoid of

dignity as well as of importance. No wonder that this

puts a premium on

slovenly

work, on

slowdowns

, and on

other tricks to get the same pay check with less work. No wonder that this results in an unhappy and discontented

worker-- because a pay check is not enough to base one's self-respect on.

8 This relationship of the worker to his work is an outcome of the whole social organization of which he is a part.

Being

piece of work he is doing, and has little interest except the one of bringing home enough money to support himself

and his family. Nothing more is expected of him, or wanted from him. He is part of the equipment hired by capital,

and his role and function are determined by this quality of being a piece of equipment. In recent decades, increasing

attention has been paid to the psychology of the worker, and to his attitude toward his work, to the

of industry

underlying

attitude; there is a human being spending most

of his lifetime at work, and what should be discussed is the

human problem of industry.

9 Most investigations in the field of industrial psychology are concerned with the question of how the productivity

of the individual worker can be increased, and how he can be made to work with less friction; psychology has lent its

services to

it is well oiled. While Taylor was primarily concerned with a better organization of the technical use of the worker's

physical powers, most industrial psychologists are mainly concerned with the manipulation of the worker's

psyche

The underlying idea can be

formulated

like this: if he works better when he is happy, then let us make him happy,

secure, satisfied, or anything else, provided it raises his output and diminishes friction. In the name of

relations,

a completely alienated person; even happiness and human with the public. Thus, for instance, according to Time

magazine, one of the best-known American

psychiatrists

said to a group of fifteen hundred Supermarket

executives:

pay off

in cold

dollars and cents to management, if we could put some of these general principles of values, human relationships,

really into practice.

alienated

automatons

one speaks of happiness and means the perfect

routinization

which has driven out the last

doubt and all

spontaneity

10 The alienated and profoundly unsatisfactory character of work results in two reactions: one, the ideal of

complete laziness; the other a deep- seated, though often unconscious hostility toward work and everything and

everybody connected with it.

11 It is not difficult to recognize the widespread longing for the state of complete laziness and passivity. Our

advertising appeals to it even more than to sex, There are, of course, many useful and labor saving

gadgets

. But

this usefulness often serves only as a

rationalization

for the appeal to complete passivity and receptivity. A package

of

breakfast cereal

is being advertised as

the most distinctly different toaster in the world! Everything is done for you with this new toaster. You need not even

bother to lower the bread. Power-action, through a unique electric motor, gently takes the bread right out of your

fingers!

more of the old drudgery.

company, who have retired at the age of sixty, and spend their life in the complete

bliss

of having nothing to do

except just travel.

12 Radio and television exhibit another element of this yearning for laziness: the idea of

by pushing a button, or turning a knob on my machine, I have the power to produce music, speeches, ball games,

and on the television set, to command events of the world to appear before my eyes. The pleasure of driving cars

certainly rests partly upon this same satisfaction of the wish for push-button power. By the effortless pushing of a

button, a powerful machine is set in motion; little skill and effort are needed to make the driver feel that he is the ruler

of space.

13 But there is far more serious and deep-seated reaction to the meaninglessness and boredom of work. It is a

hostility toward work which is much less conscious than our craving for laziness and inactivity. Many a businessman

feels himself the prisoner of his business and the commodities he sells; he has a feeling of

fraudulency

about his

product and a secret contempt for it. He hates his customers, who force him to put up a show in order to sell. He

hates his competitors because they are a threat; his employees as well as his superiors, because he is in a constant

competitive fight with them. Most important of all, he hates himself, because he sees his life passing by, without

making any sense beyond the momentary

intoxication

of success. Of course, this hate and contempt for others and

for oneself, and for the very things one produces, is mainly unconscious, and only occasionally comes up to

awareness in a fleeting thought, which is sufficiently disturbing to be set aside as quickly as possible.

(from A Rhetorical Reader, Invention and Design,

by Forrest D. Burt and E. Cleve Want)

NOTES

1. Fromm: Erich Fromm (1900- 1980), German-born psychoanalyst, has taught at universities in the United States

and

Mexico.

Among

his many

books

are:

Psychoanalysis

and Religion

;

Marx'

s Concept

of

Man

;

Escape

from

Freedom The Sane Society; and The Crisis of Psychoanalysis.

2. beautiful paintings in the caves of Southern France: referring to paintings and engravings on the rock face in the

caves in France and Spain made by primitive man during the old stone age around 50,000 to 100,000 B. C.

3. C. W. Mills: author of White Collar ( 1951 ), from which this quotation is taken.

4. Protestant countries: referring to Germany, Switzerland, Scandinavia, the Netherlands, the British Isles and Early

America 5. Weber: Max Weber (1864- 1920), German sociologist, economist, and political writer. On the origin of

capitalism in the West, his famous theory was as follows: Calvinism, Anabaptism, and their various combinations

consider that man's economic success, achieved by an industrious life, proves that he is a chosen child of God.

These

religions

thus

provide

an

impulse

to

build

up

capital

and

to

develop

a

capitalistic

society,

as

occurred

especially in the United States.

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

URSULA LE GUIN

1 WITH a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas,

bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with

red roofs and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and

public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave

master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In other streets the music

beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance.

Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows' crossing flights over the music and the singing.

All the processions wound towards the north side of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green

Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their

restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with

streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were

vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and

west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The air of morning was so clear that the snow still

crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky.

There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the race course snap and flutter now and then. In the

silence of the broad green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer

and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together

and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells.

2 joyous! How is one to tell about joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas?

3 They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any

more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions.

Given a description such as this one tends to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded

by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not

use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society, but I suspect

that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock

exohan6e, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet

shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad

habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is

intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible

boredom of pain. If you can't lick 'em, join 'em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn you about the

people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children-though their children were, in fact, were

mature, intelli6ent, passionate adults whose delight, to embrace violence is to lose hold of everything else. We have

almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell lives were

not wretched? O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my

words like a city-in a fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it

as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how

about technology? I think that there would be no oars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the

fact that the people of Omelas are happy ess is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary,

what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, however

—

that of the

unnecessary but undestructive, that of comfort, luxury, exuberance, etc.--they could perfectly well have central

heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating

light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesn't matter. As you

like it. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt .But what else should there be? I thought at first there were

no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of