-
The Pleasure of Learning by Gilbert Highet
2008
年
04
月
15
日
星期二
05:32
As
most
schools
are
set
up
today,
learning
is
compulsory.
It
is
an
even worse, a
Must, enforced by regular hours and rigid
discipline. And
the
young
sneer
at
the
Oughts
and
resist
the
Musts
with
all
their
energy.
The
feeling
often
lasts
through
a
lifetime.
For
too
many
of
us,
learning
appears to be a
surrender of our own will to external direction, a
sort
of enslavement.
今天，
学校教育已成了一项义务。
它是“必需”的，
甚
至是“必须”的，
要靠固
定的课时和严格的纪律来维持，这很糟
糕。学生们对“必需”的课业嗤之以鼻，
并竭尽全力对抗那些“必须”进行的学习。
这种态度可能持续一生。
对我们中间
太多人
而言，学习似乎是要我们的自由意志屈从于外来导向，简直与奴役无异。
This
is
a
mistake.
Learning
is
a
natural
pleasure,
inborn
and
instinctive,
one of the
essential pleasures of the human race. Watch a
small child,
at
an
age
too
young
to
have
had
any
mental
habits
implanted
by
training.
Some
delightful
films
made
by
the
late
Dr.
Arnold
Gesell
of
Yale
University
show
little
creatures
who
can
barely
talk
investigating
problems
with
all
the
zeal
and
excitement
of
explorers,
making
discoveries
with
the
passion
and
absorption of dedicated scientists. At the end of
each successful
investigation, there
comes over each tiny face an expression of pure
heartfelt pleasure.
这种看法是错误的
。
学习是一种天生的乐趣，
它与生俱来、
属于人的本能，
是人
最基本的快乐之一。
看看那些尚未从后天训练中获取任何心理定势的幼儿吧。
已
故耶鲁大学博士阿诺德
.
吉赛尔（
Ar
nold
Gesell
）摄制了一组有趣的影片，它们
显示：
尚无语言能力的幼儿会像探险家一样热切、
兴奋地研究问题，
如科学家一
般热情、
专注地寻求发现。
一旦探究成功，
孩子们的小脸上就呈现出
满心欢喜的
表情。
When
Archimedes
discovered
the
principle
of
specific
gravity
by
observing
his
own displacement of water in a bathtub, he leaped
out with delight,
shouting,
instinct which prompted his outburst,
and the rapture of its
gratification,
are possessed by all children.
当阿基米德从观察
自己身体在浴缸中排水的现象中悟出比重原理后，
他兴奋地跳
出
浴缸，
高喊“我发现了，
我发现了！
”
导致他欣喜若狂的这种本性存在于所有
孩子身上。
But
if
the
pleasure
of
learning
is
universal,
why
are
there
so
many
dull,
incurious
people
in
the
world?
It
is
because
they
were
made
dull,
by
bad
teaching, by isolation, by surrender to
routine; sometimes, too, by the
pressure of hard work and poverty; or
by the toxin of riches, with all
their
ephemeral
and
trivial
delights.
With
luck,
resolution
and
guidance,
however, the human
mind can survive not only poverty but even wealth.
但是，
如果说学习的乐趣是带有普遍性的，
那为什么还有那么多人麻木迟钝、
对
任何东西都不抱好奇心
？这是因为，
他们接受了糟糕的教育、
处在孤陋寡闻的状
态、
向一成不变的日常生活妥协了，
也许还为
劳役和贫穷所困，
或在金钱的毒害
下耽于声色，
因此变得既麻木又迟钝。
然而，
只要有适当的机会、<
/p>
坚定的决心和
明确的方向，
作为人之本性
的学习的乐趣完全可以保持下来，
而不管生活富足与
否。
This pleasure is
not confined to learning from textbooks, which are
too
often tedious. But it does include
learning from books. Sometimes, when
I
stand
in
a
big library
like
the
Library
of
Congress,
or
Butler
Library
at
Columbia,
and
gaze
round
me
at
the
millions
of
books,
I
feel
a
sober,
earnest
delight
hard
to
convey
except
by
a
metaphor. These
are
not
lumps
of
lifeless
paper,
but
minds
alive
on
the
shelves.
From
each
of
them
goes
out its
own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound
conveyed by
electric
waves
beyond
the
range
of
our
hearing;
and
just
as
the
touch
of
button
on
our
stereo
will
fill
the
room
with
music,
so
by
opening
one
of
these volumes, one can call into range
a voice far distant in time and
space,
and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to
heart.
学习的乐趣并不仅仅来自书本，
读书常是枯燥的
活。
但学习应当包括读书。
当我
站在一
个大图书馆里，比如美国国会图书馆或哥伦比亚大学巴特勒图书馆
（
Butler
Library
at
< br>Columbia
），环视周围的几百万册藏书时，心头会涌上一
种神圣而强烈的欣喜感，
这种感情只能用比喻来表达。
这些书并非毫无生气的字
纸堆，
而是活在架上的心灵。
它们有自己的话语，
如同电波传送的声音那样不为
人所觉；
只要打开一本书，
就如按下音响设备的电钮能让音乐
充满房间那样，
你
能听见从遥远时空传来的话语，让那颗心灵对
着你娓娓道来。
But, far
beyond books, learning means keeping the mind open
and active
to receive all kinds of
experience. One of the best-informed men I ever
knew was a cowboy who rarely read a
newspaper and never a book but who
had
ridden
many
thousands
of
miles
through
one
of
the
western
states.
He
knew
his
state
as
thoroughly
as
a
surgeon
knows
the
human
body.
He
loved
it, and understood it.
Not a mountain, not a canyon which had not much
to
tell
him;
not
a
change
in
the
weather
that
he
could
not
interpret.
And
so,
among
the
pleasures
of
learning,
we
should
include
travel:
travel
with
an
open
mind,
an
alert
eye
and
a
wish
to
understand
other
peoples,
other
places, rather than looking in them for
a mirror image of oneself. If I
were a
young man today I resolve to see-no, to learn all
the 50 states
before I was 35.
< br>除了读书以外，
学习还包括保持心灵的开放与活跃，
让它
能接受各种经验。
我认
识一名极为博识的牛仔，
他很少看报，
也从不读书，
但已在西部的一个州骑马穿
行了数千英里。
他极为熟悉自己所在的州，
如同外科医生极为熟悉人体一般。
他
爱那个州，
并真正了解她。
对于他来说，
那儿每座山脉、
每道峡谷都有许多可谈，
而任何细小的天气变化都休想逃过他的感知
。所以，学习的乐趣应当包括旅行
——带着开放的心态、
敏锐的
眼睛和渴望了解他人或异地的心情上路，
而不是指
望从他人或异
地中找到自己的影子。如果现在还年轻，我会下决心在
35
岁之
前
走遍——不，是学遍——全美五十个州。
Learning also means
learning to practice, or at least to appreciate,
an
art. Every new art you learn appears
like a new window on the universe;
it
is like acquiring a new sense. Because I was born
and brought up in
Glasgow, Scotland, a
hideous 19th century industrial city, I did not
understand
the
slightest
thing
about
architecture
until
I
was
in
my
20s.
Since then, I have learned a little
about the art, and it has been a
constant delight. In my mind I have a
permanent album containing bright
pictures of the Blue Mosque in
Istanbul, the little church of St. John
Nepomuk
in
Munich,
the
exquisite
acropolis
of
Lindos
standing
high
above
the shining Rhodian
sea.
学习的概念还应当包含对艺术的学习，
至少是对艺术
欣赏的学习。
你所学的每门
新艺术都是一扇通往世界的新窗口，
它能带给你新的感受。
我出生并成长在苏格
兰的格拉斯哥，
那是一个破败不堪的
19
< br>世纪工业城市，
因此我在
20
岁
前压根儿
就不懂建筑。
但自那以后，
我
学了一点建筑艺术，
并让它成为我持久的乐趣之一。
在我的脑海
里，永远保留着伊士坦布尔蓝色清真寺（
Blue Mosque
）、慕尼黑内
波穆克圣约翰教堂（
the church
of St. John Nepomuk
）以及罗德海边林德斯卫
城（
acropolis of
Lindos
）的清晰影像。
Crafts,
too,
are
well
worth
exploring.
A
friend
of
mine
took
up
bookbinding
because his
doctor ordered him to do something that would give
him
relaxation
and
activity
without
tension.
It
was
a
difficult
challenge
at
first, but he gradually learned to
square off the paper and the boards,
sew the pages, fasten on the backstrip,
and maintain precision and
neatness
throughout.
手工艺也是值得学习的。
我有个朋
友学了书本装订，
因为医生告诫他做些什么以
获得放松和运动。
这件活儿一开始对他来说可不容易，
可他慢慢学会了如何摞齐<
/p>
纸张、怎样缝订页面、如何固定封皮以及怎样在整个过程中保持精准划一。
Within
a
few
years,
this
initially
rather
dull
hobby
had
led
him
into
fresh
fields of enjoyment.
He began to collect fine books from the past five
centuries;
he
developed
an
interest
in
printing;
eventually,
he
started
a
private
press
and
had
the
joy
of
producing
his
own
elegant
books.
Many
other
crafts
there
are,
and
most
of
them
contain
one
essential
pleasure:
the pleasure of making something that
will last.
几年之内，
这件起初显得乏味无比的活
儿给他带来了新鲜乐趣。
他开始收集过去
五个世纪间的好书；<
/p>
他开始对印刷发生兴趣；
最后他开了一家出版社，
开始享受
自行出版精美图书的乐趣。
值得学习的手工艺
很多，
它们大都包含一个基本的乐
趣：你所做的东西可以延续许
久。
As for
reading books, this contains two different
delights. One is the
pleasure of
apprehending the unexpected, such as when one
meets a new
author
who
has
a
new
vision
of
the
world.
The
other
pleasure
is
of
deepening
one's
knowledge
of
a
special
field.
One
might
enjoy
reading
about
the
Civil
War,
and
then
be
drawn
to
a
particularly
moving
part
of
it-the
underground
railway, say, which carried escaping
slaves northward to freedom. One
would
then be impelled to visit the chief way stations
along the route,
reconstructing the
lives of those resolute organizers and thankful
fugitives.
而读书包含两种不同的乐趣。
一种是邂逅新知，
比如从陌生作者那儿获得对于世
界的新看法。
另一种是加深自己在特定领域内的知识。
你要是
爱读关于南北战争
的书，
那么你可能受到吸引去游览当时的某些
地方——比如地下铁路，
它们曾将
逃亡的黑奴们输送到自由的北
方。你甚至还会有兴趣看看这条铁路上的主要车
站，探究那些坚毅的组织者和心存感激的
逃亡者的生活。
Tradition
says
that
Ptolemy,
the
great
astronomer
of
the
Greek
and
Roman
world,
worked peacefully in his observatory under the
clear skies of
northern
Egypt
for
40
years.
Many
and
great
were
his
explorations
of
the
starry universe. For
instance, he described astronomical refraction in
a way that was not improved for over
1000 years. Ptolemy wrote just one
poem, but it expressed his whole life:
据说，
古希腊和古罗马时期伟大的天文学家托勒密曾在埃及北部
他的观测台里默
默工作长达
40
年。他
对星空的研究硕果累累。例如，他对天文折射现象的描述
在
10
00
多年里无人能够超越。托勒密一生只写过一首诗，但这首诗代表了他整
个的一生：
Mortal I know I am, short-lived; and
yet, whenever
I watch the multitude of
swirling stars,
then I no longer tread
this earth, but rise to feast
with God,
and enjoy the food of the immortals.
自知生命短暂
但吾遥望星汉
即得神明召唤
飞抵不灭圣餐
Learning extends our lives (as Ptolemy
said) into new dimensions. It is
cumulative.
Instead
of
diminishing
in
time,
like
health
and
strength,
its
returns go on increasing, provided...
正如托勒密所言，
学习能帮我们把生命扩展到新的维度。
这种扩展效应可以累积。
它不会象健康或气力那样随时光流逝而消亡，
其回报历久弥厚，只要??
Provided that you aim, throughout your
life, as you continue learning,
to
integrate
your
thought,
to
make
it
harmonious.
If
you
happen
to
be
an
engineer
and also enjoy singing in a glee club, connect
these two
activities. They unite in
you; they are not in conflict. Both choral
singing
and
engineering
are
examples
of
the
architectonic
ability
of
man:
of
his
power
to
make
a
large
plan
and
to
convey
it
clearly
to
others.
Both
are
esthetic
and
depend
much
on
symmetry.
Think
about
them
not
as
though
they
were dissociated, but as though each were one
aspect of a single
unity. You will do
them better, and be happier.
只要你在持续一生的学
习过程中始终注意整合与调和自己的思想。
假如你是一名
工程师
，
且喜欢参加合唱团的演唱，
那么不妨把这两种活动联系起来。
它们相互
并不抵触，能够在你身上得到统一。合唱与工程活动都
体现了人类的建构能力
——设计宏大计划，
并将其清楚无误地传
达至他人。
两种活动都要求美感和匀称
性。
别把它们看作是毫不相关的，
要把它们看成同一整体的不同侧面。
< br>这样，
你
就能在两件事上都干得更出色、更快乐。
This is hard
advice to give to young students. They are
explosive,
exploratory and
insurrectionary. Instead of intergrating their
lives,
they
would
rather
seek
outward,
and
even
try
to
move
in
opposite
directions
simultaneously. <
/p>
年轻学生也许很难听得进这些建议。
他们热爱争论，
喜好刨根问底，
倾向于反叛
不羁。
< br>与整合自己的生活相比，
他们更愿意尝试新鲜事物，
甚至
试图同时朝相反
的方向前进。
Much unhappiness has been suffered by
those people who have never
recognized
that it is as necessary to make themselves into
whole and
harmonious personalities as
to keep themselves clean, healthy and
financially solvent.
Wholeness of the mind and spirit is not
a quality conferred by nature,
or
by
God.
It
is like
health,
virtue
and
knowledge.
Man
has
the
capacity
to attain it; but to achieve it depends
on his own efforts. It needs a
long,
deliberate
effort
of
the
mind
and
the
emotions,
and
even
the
body.
有些人从未意识到，
圆满
、
和谐的人格与整洁、
健康的身体和稳健的财务状况同
样重要，
因而他们郁郁寡欢。
心灵与精神的圆满
并非与生俱来的，
也不是上帝赐
给的。它和健康、美德、知识一
样，要靠后天培养获得。人有能力达到它，但这
取决于自身努力。达到这种圆满需要思想
、情感甚至肉体付出长期不懈的努力。
During
our
earthly
life,
the
body
gradually
dies;
even
the
emotions
become
duller.
But
the
mind
in
most
of
us
continues
to
live,
and
even
grows
more
lively
and
active,
enjoys
itself
more,
works
and
plays
with
more
expansion
and delight.
随着我们年纪的增长，
身体渐趋衰弱，
情感也会日
益迟钝。
但大部分人的心灵在
持续成长着，越来越活跃，越来越
快乐，越来越开放。
Many
people
have
played
themselves
to
death,
or
eaten
and
drunk
themselves
to death. Nobody
has ever thought himself to death. The chief
danger
confronting us is not age. It is
laziness, sloth, routine,
stupidity,--
forcing
their
way
in
like
wind
through
the
shutters,
seeping
into the cellar like swamp water.
许多人在玩乐中度过一生，
许多人在吃喝中度过一生，
但少有人在思考中度过一
生。年龄并非主要问题。懒惰、松散、墨守成规、麻木迟钝
才是——它们悄悄地
侵入我们，就象寒风透过布帘、泽水洇入地窖。
Many who avoid learning,
or abandon it, find that life is drained dry.
They spend 30 years in a club chair
looking glumly out at the sand and
the
ocean;
on
a
porch
swing
waiting
for
somebody
to
drive
down
the
road.
But that is not how to live.
许多人在逃避或放弃学习之后觉得生活枯燥乏味。他们花上
30
年的时间，坐在
俱乐部的椅子上郁闷地看着大海和沙滩，或歇在门廊的秋千里等谁路过
好搭便
车。生活本不该如此。
No learner has ever run short of
subjects to explore. The pleasures of
learning are indeed pleasures. In fact,
the word should be changed. The
true
name
is
happiness.
You
can
live
longest
and
best
and
most
rewardingly
by attaining and preserving the
happiness of learning.
好学者永远有主题可攻。学习的乐趣
名副其实。事实上，这个字眼可以改一改。
我们应该称其为“幸福”。
< br>寻找并保持学习的幸福吧，
你将因此活得更快乐、
更
充实、更长寿。
[* Condensed from Gilbert Highet,The
Immortal Profession]
节选自吉尔伯特·海厄特（美）《永远的职业》
??coping with santa
claus
On the Shoulders of a Hero
My father went
into intensive care, his heart not working right.
As word
went out , each of his six
grown childrent sped toward Venice Hospital in
Florida, where he lay attached to
various that night ,we stood
around
him with our mother ,hold his hands and speaking
close to his face as
he strained
against some powerful force that kept on pulling
him away.
we said.
A breath left his body
under our hands , and we turned to watch the
numbers on the machines.
Then we made an involuntary ,
collective groan ,
and he was gone .He
was 75 years old.
With his passing ,I was abruptly
stripped of any illusions about my own
immortality : no longer might I comfort
myself with rhe thought that he was in
line ahead of me. I was newly alone and
vulnerable and,more than ever,
responsible for my life.
Then I remembered one
morning when I was five years old. After a
snowstorm, Dad carried me on his
shoulds for the mile from our apartment into
town. As he marched bravely through the
snowdrifts, I put my hands around
his
head to hold on, inadvertently covering his eyes
with my mittens.
see,
way
with
me on his back through a strange
,magical landscape of untrodden
snow.
He had returned recently from World War
Ⅱ，
and this ride would
become my first experience with him to
take hold as a genuine ,lasting
memory.
As he was buried ,other memories
flooded in, and I found myself trying to
put my feelings about him into
perspective. How much
of a father,
really , had
he been? Why hadn't
I grieved more over losing him? Had I
ever forgiven him
for his
shortcomings
？
From my teenage years onward , I had
expected a great deal of
encouragement
from my dad, but it seldom came. I told him, after
senior year
of high school, that I
wanted to become an actor. He launched into a
speech
about the instability of such a
career :
tin cup on the
corner.
One
time ,after we had argued over
my
decision to take acting lessons in
New
York, he stormed up to my room. I met him at the
doorway. We stood
toe-toe, and I held
up my fist and glared at him trembling, and said
the issue
was settled unless he wanted
to fight. The red fury drained from his face, and
he turned, shoulders slumped, to walk
away. A rite of passage had taken place
in a second, leaving me on my own
without his resistance.
But his general air of caution
continued. After I did become a professional
actor, he came to see me in a Broadway
show and later remarked,
it would be
wise to have something else to fall back
on.
I fell
back, so to speak, on newspaper work, only to quit
when my first book
was published
.
to apply to a
corporation.
for as long as possible, he
fell silent.
As the years went by, his expressions
of doubt in response to my unspoken
pleas for a father's blind faith became
predictable. And I came to realize that
my father's warnings were his way of
relating to me. In earlier years I had
thought he didn't care, but I came to
understand that he was offering what he
could.
I also realized that he had even
inspired me--not by words, but by what he
had done. He had come home from a
terrifying war to raise six kids in a house
with a yard. He had returned, with so
many other men of those in his care and
to give them a future.
He spent two decades
in advertising and longer in real estate,
meanwhile
always taking us on vacations
and sending us through college. By providing a
foundation, he enabled his
children to feel strong enough to go
their individual
ways, As we scattered,
he wrote frequent letters and planned our
reunions.
Just two weeks before he died,my father
held a birthday celebration for
Mom. We
flew from our seperate homes to Florida and,
during our stay, joined
him on a
fishing trip. Dad did not look well.
We had no idea then how
perilous his condition had become. As I look
back, it's clear that he had
deliberately kept all of that hidden from us to
aviod
spoiling our fun.
The morning we were to
leave Florida, he pulled me aside and pointed to a
mysterious box about three feet long
and two feet deep. Inside, to my
astronishment, were hundreds of
clippings relating to almost everything I had
done in my life.
We hugged each other,
not knowing it would be fot the last time, but my
father must have sensed that he would
not be around much longer.
Lifting the heavy box, I suddenly
understood that no matter how negative
his words had seemed, nothing could
erase his concrete act of filling the box,
piece by piece, ever since I left him.
All that time, it turned out, he had been
there--sharing my life.
Then came word that he
was dying and then came the
months of
thinking
about him. Now a full year and
a half have gone by without him, and I miss him
beyond words. What
I miss
most,ironically, is that time long ago when I was
a
boy trusting his father to carry him
blindly through life and to protect him. The
security lay in simply knowing he was
there.
One
day I found myself walking along with my own son,
Benjamin, who
was five years old. When
I lifted him onto my shoulders, he reached his
hands
around my head so they covered my
eyes.
fingers maintained their grip. I
walked on in the sudden darkness, groping,
feeling his weight above me, the way my
father had done for me when I was
the
same age. I felt, then, the first surge of hot
tears since Dad died, and found
myself
becoming a new blind hero in the strange,magical
land of father, where
the journey
always begins, in hope and uncertainty, over
again.
Not Poor, Just Broke
Dick Gregory
Like a lot of black kids, we never
would have made it without our Momma. When there
was no
fatback to go with the
be
ans, no socks to go with the shoes,
no hope to go with tomorrow, she’d
smile and say: ‖We ain’t poor, we’re
just broke.‖ Poor is a state of mind you never
grow out of,
but being broke is just a
temporary condition. She always had a big smile,
even when her legs and
feet swelled
from high blood pressure and she collapsed across
the table with diabetes. You have
to
smile twenty-four hours a day, Momma would say. If
you walk through life showing the
aggravation you’re gone through, people
will feel sorry for you, and they’ll never respect
you.
So you
laugh, so you smile. Once a month the big gray
relief truck would pull up in front of our
house and Momma would flash that big
smile and stretch out her hands: ―Who else you
know in
this neighborhood gets this
ki
nd of service?‖ And we could all feel
proud when the neighbors,
folks who
weren’t on relief, folks who had Daddies in their
houses, would come by the back porch
for some of those hundred pounds of
potatoes, for some sugar and flour and salty fish.
We’d sta
nd
out there on the
back porch and hand out the food like we were in
charge of helping poor people,
and then
we’d take the food they brought us in
return.
And Momma came home
one hot summer day and found we’d been evicted,
thrown out into the
streetcar zone with
all our orangecrate chairs and secondhand lamps.
She flashed that big smile
and dried
our tears and bought some penny Kool-Aid. We stood
out there and sold drinks to
thirsty
people coming off the streetcar, and we thought
nobody knew we were kicked
out
—
figured
they
thought we wanted to be there. And Momma went off
to talk the landlord into letting us back
in on credit.
But I wonder about my Momma sometimes,
and all the other black mothers who got up at 6
a.m.
to go to the white man’s house
with sac
ks over their shoes because it
was so wet and cold. I
wonder how they
made it. They worked very hard for the man, they
made his breakfast and they
scrubbed
his floors and they diapered his babies. They
didn’t have too much time for us.
I wonder about my Mo
mma, who
walked out of a white woman’s clean house at
midnight and
came back to her own where
the lights had been out for three months, and the
pipes were frozen
and the wind came in
through the cracks. She’d have to make deals with
the rats: leave some fo
od
out for them so they wouldn’t gnaw on
the doors or bite the babies. The roaches, they
were just
like part of the
family.
I
wonder how she felt telling those white kids she
took care of to brush their teeth after they ate,
to
wash their hands after
the
y peed. She could never tell her own
kids because there wasn’t soap or
water
back home.
I wonder how my
Momma felt when we came home from school with a
list of vitamins and pills
and cod
liver oil the school nurse said we had to have.
Momma would cry all night, and then go
out and spend most of the rent money
for pills. A week later, the white man would come
for his
eighteen dollars rent and Momma
would plead with him to wait until tomorrow. She
had lost her
pocketbook. The relief
check was coming. The wh
ite folk had
some money for her. Tomorrow, I’d
be
hiding in the coal closet because there was only
supposed to be two kids in the flat, and I could
bear the rent man curse my Momma and
call her a liar.
I wonder
how Momma stayed so good and beautiful in her soul
when she worked seven days a
week on
swollen legs and feet, how she kept teaching us to
smile and laugh when the house was
dark
and cold and she never knew when one of her hungry
kids was going to ask about Daddy.
I
wonder how she kept from teaching us hate when the
social worker came around. She was a
nasty bitch with a pinched face who
said, ―We have reason to suspect you are working,
Miss
Gregory, and you can be sure I’m
going to check on you. We don’t stand for welfare
cheaters.‖
Momma, a welf
are cheater. A
criminal who couldn’t stand to see her kids go
hungry, or grow up
in slums and end up
mugging people in dark corners. I guess the system
didn’t want her to get off
relief, the
way it kept sending social workers around to be
sure Momma wasn’t
trying to make
things better.
I remember how that social worker would
poke around the house, wrinkling her nose at the
coal
dust on the chilly linoleum floor,
shaking her head at the bugs crawling over the
dirty dishes in the
sink. My Momma
would have to stand there and make like she was
too lazy to keep her own
house clean.
She could never let on that she spent all day
cleaning another woman’s house for two
dollars and carfare. She would have to
follow that nasty bitch around those drafty three
rooms,
k
eeping her fingers
crossed that the telephone hidden in the closet
wouldn’t ring. Welfare cases
weren’t
supposed to have telephones.
But Momma figured that
some day the Gregory kids were going to get off
North Taylor Street and
into a world
where they would have to compete with kids who
grew up with telephones in their
houses. She didn’t want us to be at a
disadvantage. She couldn’t explain that to social
worker. And
she couldn’t explain that
while she was out
spoon
-
feeding somebody
else’s kids, she was
worrying about her
own kids, that she could rest her mind by picking
up the telephone and calling
us
—
to find out if
we had bread for our baloney or baloney for our
bread, to see if any of us had
gotten
run over by the streetcar while we played in the
gutter
, to make sure the house hadn’t
burnt
down from the papers and
magazines we stuffed in the stove when the coal
ran out.
Around the world
in 20 days
Around the World in 20 Days
Bertrand:
In
many
people’s
eyes,
a
round
-the-world
balloon
flight
was
the
last
great
challenge in aviation.
The winter of 1998-99 was time of high anxiety.
Five other teams
were preparing to
launch in various parts of the world. This would
be my third, and last,
attempt
underwritten
by
the
Breitling
watch
company.
The
weather
was
terrible,
and
February was drawing to a close.
Normally the end of the month marked the end of
the
season
for
ballooning
attempts.
I
was
in
despair.
But
early
on
February
24,
1999,
the
telephone rang. It was Luc Trullemans,
one of our meteorologists.
“Bertrand,
there’s
a
really
good
slot
coming
on
the
first
of
March!”
he
exclaimed.
Trullemans
and
fellow
meteorologist
Pierre
Eckert
felt
sure
we
could
swing
the
balloon
around
the
edge
of
a
big
depression
forming
over
the
Mediterranean
by
flying
counterclockwi
se―going
down
over
France
and
Spain.
Then
we
would
be
carried
eastward over
Africa.
Brian Jones, my British co-
pilot, and I knew if the weather turned, we would
fail. But if we
waited for next year,
somebody else might succeed in the interim.
A balloon piloted by
British tycoon Richard Branson hand gone down in
the Pacific, but
one sponsored by
Britain’s Cable & Wireless and piloted by Andy
Elson and Colin Prescot
had already
been aloft for seven days. On Sunday, February 28,
we struggled to make the
crucial
decision: carry on or not? Brian and I knew this
was our last chance for 1999. Alan
Noble, our flight director, and Don
Cameron, head of the firm that built the balloon,
were
far from being positive. “From the
weather maps,” they said, “we don’t see
how
you can
get around the
world.”
“You get them up
there,” argued Luc, “and I’ll get them around.”
Following meteorological
assurances, Alan said, “I think we can go.” We put
it to a vote of
the
whole
team,
and
the
show
of
hands
to
take
off
was
unanimous.
By
five
the
next
morning, Brian and I were both wide
awake. After years of preparation and dashed
hopes,
the moment was upon us.
The launch teams had
started inflation at 3 a.m. on March 1. The
balloon was designed to
function with a
combination of hot air and helium. During the day
the sun heats the helium,
causing it to
expand and make the balloon climb. At night
propane is burned to heat the
gas,
maintaining the balloon’s lift.
Our meteorologists would
work out the trajectories, then we
would travel along with the
moving weather all the way around the
world.
As down broke, the
wind began to blow and gust. Since any strong wind
might damage
the envelope and dash the
gondola against the ground, we knew we had to take
off soon.
At
8
a.m.,
Brian
and
I
climbed
in
and
closed
the
rear
hatch.
High
above us
the
Mylar
envelope
was
crackling.
Hair-raising
noises
started
to
emanate
from
the
gondola.
Supplies and
equipment kept tumbling onto the floor.
Unable to risk disaster any
longer, Alan waited for one more big bounce and
severed the
restraining rope with his
Swiss Army knife.
As we rose
into the sky, he thousands who had assembled were
screaming. Church bells
were ringing. A
fire engine’s siren was wailing. This enthusiasm
seemed to propel us into
the sky.
Brian: My first task was to be carried
out atop the gondola, so before takeoff I climbed
out
through the top hatch and sat. a
heavy double railing ringed the area, and we took
off with
such a jerk, I hat to cling
tight to it.
Bertrand and I
were both amazed by the speed at which we went up.
The balloon finally
stopped climbing at
1,000 feet when we hit an inversion layer―the
level at which cold air
close to the
ground meets warmer air above. It acts like an
invisible barrier.
Bertrand
called out, “One bag of sand!” I started pouring
33 pounds of ballast down a tube
that
sent the sand clear of the capsule.
A
moment
later
he
shouted,
“Look
out,
I’m
going
to
burn!” The
propane
jets
and
blue
flames
roared
six
feet
up,
warming
the
helium.
We
started
to
climb
again.
I
scrambled
back into the
gondola, and we sealed the hatch. We were on our
way.
Bertrand: By sunset our first
problems set in. the pilot lights on the burners
began to act
erratically, and every few
seconds we had to manually ignite the burners.
More
worrisome
was
the
fact
that
we
thought
we
were
using
far
too
much
propane
to
maintain our height. It looked as
though our chances of making it were perilously
slim. But
the first pair of fuel tanks
held out until the evening of day two, exceeding
our expectations.
And that was a huge
encouragement.
As we
entered Moroccan airspace, I was rewarded by one
of the most magnificent sights.
I had
ever seen: an absolutely incredible view of the
Atlas Mountains with a full moon. We
had been told how boring it would be to
fly over the Sahara, but on the next day the views
that unfolded were fabulous. For me,
the desert was alive. The light was alive, and the
sand was alive, full of different
colors, different shapes, like the bottom of the
sea. I spent
hours staring at the
desert, feeling its strangeness.
Brian:
Early in the morning of March 4 the plan called
for releasing our four empty auxiliary
tanks. That mea
nt an
EVA―extravehicular activity―to cut them free. We
also wanted to
get
rid
of
the
ice
that
had
formed
from
riding
in
the
freezing
high
altitudes.
As
we
descended to 10,000 feet, our
adrenaline was flowing.
When
we
opened
the hatch
and
climbed
out,
we
found
icicles
that
were
ten
feet
long
dangling from the envelope’s skirt.
While I concentrated on fixing the faulty ignition
system,
Bertrand
went
about
attacking
the
icicles
with
a
fire
ax.
He
commented
that
it
was
probably
the first time that ice had rained on the Sahara
in several thousand years.
With Bertrand holding one of my ankles,
I reached out and freed one of the empty tanks.
We watched it tumbling all the way to
the ground. A puff of sand marked where it slammed
into the desert. If it buried itself, I
thought, it might lie there for a couple of
millennia before
some archeologist dug
it up.
By then we had finished our
counterclockwise swing and were at last heading
east, just as
our
meteorologists
had
predicted.
The
air
was
warm;
the
sky
cloudless.
Below
us
stretched sand and rock
as far as the eye could see.
Bertrand:
We
were
over
Yemen
and
two
days
from
the
Indian
subcontinent
when
an
astonishing message came
in from our ground crew: “The cable & Wireless
control room
says their balloon is
landing 70 miles off the coast of Japan. The
balloon iced up. Search
and rescue are
with them.” Now we were the only ones in the race.
I
was desperate
to pass on the news to Brian, and when he finally
stuck his head out of
the sleeping bunk
hours later, I said,
“I’ve got the most
incredible news.”
He
instantly said, “Andy’s down.”
Meanwhile I spoke to Luc, who confirmed
that our position was perfect for enter China at
the right point. We had guaranteed them
we would keep south of 26 degrees latitude. If
we found ourselves straying north of
the limit, we would come down.
Brian:
Heading
for
Myanmar
(formerly
Burma),
we
found
we
were
gradually
creeping
north
toward
the
26th
parallel.
This
kept
us
on
tenterhooks.
But
back
in
Geneva
our
weathermen were telling
us we had to go right up almost to the boundary.
Once there, the
wind would take us due
east.
On the way we had the following
exchange with a Myanmar air controller.
Tower: “What is your
departure point and destination?”
Me: “Departure point, Switzerland.
Destination, northern Africa.”
Tower:
(after
several
seconds of
silence)
“If
you’re
going
from
Switzerland
to
northern
Africa, what in
hell are you doing in Myanmar?”
Shortly before down on the morning of
March 10 we arrived at the Chinese border. The
Chinese
h
ad
seen
us
coming
and
sent
the
message:
“Your
balloon’s
heading
for
the
prohibited zone. It must
land.”
Bertrand: It was
amazing. We skimmed across a 1,300-mile-long
corridor straight as an
arrow
, with the 26th
parallel never more than 30 miles away. Our
meteorologists had sent
us on a
swirling trajectory of 8,100 miles, then through
the eye of a needle.
By March 11 we
were heading out over the Pacific. Faced by 8,000
miles of water, I felt as
if I had
stepped onto the edge of the abyss.
I picked up my pen
and
wrote: “This is exactly my definition of
adventure, a point at which
you hat to
dig inside yourself to find the courage to deal
with what may lie ahead.”
On
Saturday, March 13, we were still over the
Pacific. Our meteorologists said our speed
would
improve
from
our
miserable
35
knots
to
100
knots
once
we
climbed
into
the
jet
stream. By Tuesday it
would increase to 120.
Our propane
reserves seemed perilously small. We had already
burned two-thirds of our
fuel
and
yet
covered
only
half our
course.
everything
depended
on our
weathermen:
If
they were right, we had a chance. If
they were wrong, we were doomed.
Brian:
Like Bertrand, I was thoroughly on edge over the
Pacific. After seven days above
the
water, we at last made the coast of Mexico. Later
that night, lying there, I found it had
to breath. And it was not until
I got up that I realized something
was seriously
wrong. I
found Bertrand in the pilot’s seat,
slumped against the bulkhead, gasping. He crawled
into
the bunk wearing an oxygen mask.
Our symptoms were not those of hypoxia,
and the instruments monitoring the CO2 levels
had
not
signaled
any
alarm.
But
despite
this,
we
felt
that
we
were
slowing
being
asphyxiated.
People
on
the
ground
started
telephoning
doctors
in
a
frantic
search
for
clues
to what could be wrong with us. I was also wearing
my oxygen mask, and after a few
minutes
of breathing pure oxygen, my head cleared. I
thought, I Screw the instruments,
and
changed
both
the
CO2
and
the
carbon
filters.
The
symptoms
gradually
began
to
disappear.
We crossed Mexico in a day and were
soon out over the Caribbean. Reporting to
air
-traffic
control in
Kingston, Jamaica, I heard a female controller
with a delicious voice ask what
we were
doing.
“We took off from
Switzerland,” I answered. “We’re hoping
to
get around the
world.”
“You guys sure are
taking a chance!” she said.
She was right. Our fuel was critically
short, and nobody was sure if we had enough to get
across the Atlantic. Alan Nobel
suggested we make our decision over Puerto Rico.
Bertrand: By March 18 it was time to
decide. With cameras from all over the world
focused
on
him,
Alan
got
on
the
phone
with
us.
When
we
had
run
through
the
agreed
-upon
formalities, Alan said, “I think you
can go for it.”
“Bertrand!”
cried Brian. “Tell him we’re going.”
“We’re not going to quit,” I told Alan.
“Even if we ditch in
mid
-
Atlantic, we go for
it.”
Our weathermen guided
us into the middle of the jet stream, and our
speed increased as
we
shot
out
over
the
Atlantic.
But
cursing
at
15,000
feet,
the
cold
was
intense
and
our
heaters had failed. The
temperature inside was 28.4 F, and our water
supply froze.
On March 20
came good news. Our navigation computer told us we
had made landfall.
We had crossed the
Atlantic, and at 6:15 GMT, or Greenwich Mean Time,
when the sun
came over the horizon, I
again saw the desert I had loved so much 20 days
earlier. Now
the finish line was only
300 miles away, about three hours’
time.
When
we
crossed the
line
at 9:54 GMT,
Brian
and
I
stood up
and
embraced,
slapping
each other on the
back and shouting, “We’ve done it!
We’ve done it.”
The next
morning,
after the
longest
flight
in
distance and
duration
ever
made
by a
free
balloon, we landed in
the Egyptian desert. Brian sent this fax: “The
Eagle has landed. All
okay. Bloody
good.” Our tr
ip round the world, and
into history
, was done.
My Mother’s
Dream for Me
Gordon Parks
The full meaning of my
mother’s death had settled over me before they
lowered her into the grave.
They buried
her at two-thirty in the afternoon; now, at
nightfall, our big family was starting to
break up. Once there had been fifteen
of us and, at sixteen, I was the youngest. There
was never
much money, so now my older
brothers and sisters were scraping up enough for
my coach ticket
north. I would live in
St. Paul, Minnesota, with my sister Maggie Lee, as
my mother had requested
a few minutes
before she died.
Our
parents had filled us with love and a staunch
Methodist religion. We were poor, though I did
not know it at the time, the rich soil
surrounding our clapboard house had yielded the
food for the
family. And the love of
this family had eased the burden of being black.
But there were segregated
schools and
warnings to avoid white neighborhoods after dark.
I always had to sit in the peanut
gallery (the Neg
ro section)
at the movies. We weren’t allowed to drink a soda
in the drugstore in
town. I was stoned
and beaten and called ―nigger,‖ ―black boy,‖
―darky,‖ ―shine.‖ These
indignities
came so often I began to accept them as normal.
Yet I always fought back. Now I
considered lucky to be alive; three of
my closed friends had already died of senseless
brutality,
and I was lucky that I
hadn’t killed someone myself. Until the very day
that I left Fort Scott on
that train
for the north, there had been a fair chance of
being shot or perhaps beaten to death. I
could easily have been the victim of
mistaken identity, of a sudden act of terror by
hate-filled
white men, or, for that
matter, I could have been a lot of killing in the
border states of Kansas,
Oklahoma and
Missouri, more than I cared to remember.
I was nine years old when
the Tulsa riots took place in 1921. Whites had
invaded the Negro
neighborhood, which
turned out to be an armed camp. Many white Tulsans
were killed, and
rumors had it that the
flight would spread into Kansas and beyond. About
this time, a grown
cousin of mine
decided to go south to work in a mill. My mother,
knowing his hot temper, pleaded
with
him not to go, but he caught a freight going
south. Months passed and we had no word of him.
Then one day his name flashed across
the nation as one of the most-wanted men in the
country.
He had killed a white mill
hand who spat in his face and called him ―nigger‖.
He killed another
man while fleeing the
scene and shot another on the viaduct between
Kansas City, Missouri, and
Kansas City,
Kansas.
I asked Momma
questions she couldn’t possibly answer. Would they
catch him? Would he be
lynched? Where
did she think he was hiding? How long did she
think he could hold out? She
knew what
all the rest of us knew, that he would come back
to our house if it was possible.
He came one night. It was storming, and
I lay in the dark of my room, listening to the
rain pound
the roof. Suddenly, the
window next to my bed slid up, and my cousin, wet
and cautious,
scrambled through the
opening. I started to yell as he landed on my bed,
but he quickly covered
my mouth with
his hand, whispered his name, and cautioned me
into silence. I got out of bed and
followed him. He went straight to
Momma’s room, kneeled down and shook her awake.
―Momma
Parks,‖ he whispered, ―it’s me,
it’s me. Wake up.‖ And she awoke easily and put
her hand on his
head. ―My Lord, son,‖
she said, ―you’re in such bad trouble.‖ Then she
sat up on the side of the
bed and began
to pray over him. After she had finished, she
tried to persuade him to give himself
up. ―They’ll kill you, son. You can’t
run forever.‖ But he refused. Then, going to our
old icebox,
he filled a sack with food
and went back out my window into the cornfield.
None of us ever saw or
heard of him. And I would lie awake nights
wondering if the whites had
killed my
cousin, praying that they hadn’t. I remember the
huge sacks of peanut brittle he used to
bring me and the rides he gave me on
the back of his battered motorcycle. And my days
were full
of fantasies in which I
helped him escape imaginary white mobs.
As the train whistled
through the evening, I realized that only hours
before, during what seemed
like a
bottomless night, I had left my bed to sleep on
the floor beside my mother’s cof
fin. It
was, I
knew now, a final attempt to
destroy this fear of death.
But in spite of the memories I would
miss this Kansas land that I was leaving. The
great prairies
filled with green and
cornstalks; the flowering apple trees, the tall
elms and oaks bordering the
streams
that gurgled and the rivers that rolled quiet. The
summers of long, sleepy days for fishing,
swimming and snatching crawdads from
beneath the rocks. The endless tufts of high
clouds
billowing across the heavens.
The butterflies to chase through grass high as the
chin. The
swallow-tails, bobolinks and
robins. Nights filled with soft laughter, with
fireflies and restless
stars, and the
winding sound of the cricket rubbing dampness from
its wing. The silver of
September rain,
the orange-red-brown Octobers and Novembers, and
the whites Decembers with
the hungry
smells of hams and pork butts curing in the
smokehouses. Yet as the train sped along,
the telegraph poles whizzing toward and
past us, I had a feeling that I was escaping a
doom whic
h
had already
trapped the relatives and friends that I was
leaving behind. For, although I was
departing from this beautiful land, it
would be impossible ever to forget the fear,
hatred and
violence that Negroes had
suffered upon it.
It was
all behind me
now. By the next day,
there would be what my mother had called ―another
kind of world, one with more hope and
promising things.‖ She had said, ―Make a man of
yourself
up there. Put something into
it, and you’ll get something out of it.‖ It was
her dream f
or me. When
I
stepped onto the chilly streets of St. Paul,
Minnesota, two days later, I was determined to
fulfill
that dream.
I know
what’s
right for my son by
louise
Be scared for
your kids by al sicherman
Dear, dear friends: This isn't going to
be easy.
Nor is it going to be funny.
My
older son, Joe, of whom I was very, very proud,
and whose growing-up I've been
privileged to chronicle occasionally in
the newspaper, died last month in a fall from the
window of his seventh-floor dorm room
in Madison, Wis. He had taken LSD. He was
18 years old.
To say he had his whole
life ahead of him is unforgivably trite
–
and unbearably sad.
I
saw him a week before he died. It was my birthday,
and he spent the weekend with his
stepmother and me. He was upbeat, funny
and full of his new activities, including
fencing. He did a whole bunch of very
impressive lunges and parries for us.
The next time
I was with him, he was in a coffin.
He must not
have known how treacherous LSD can be. I never
warned him, because,
like most adults,
I had no idea it was popular again. I thought it
had stopped killing kids
20 years ago.
Besides, Joe was bright and responsible; he
wouldn't
occur to me that he might
dabble in them.
His mother had warned him
about LSD, though; she knew it was back because
Joe had
told her about a friend who had
taken it. Obviously he didn't listen to her
advice. At 18,
kids think they're
invulnerable. They're wrong.
Joey was a very sweet, very funny kid.
And even before he had anything particularly
funny to say, he had great timing. When
he was about 6, I asked him what he wanted
to be when he grew up. He paused, just
long enough, and said,
I went to the mortuary in
Milwaukee several hours before the funeral to have
a chance
to be with him. I spent most
of the time crying and saying dumb things like
have caught you
a lullaby,
but I didn't think of it until several days later.
I went ahead and did it then, but
it
was too late. It would have been too late in any
case.
Joe was not a reckless
kid. Last summer he turned down my wife's
suggestion that the
family go on a
rafting trip through the
Grand
Canyon; although he loved
amusement-
park rides, he thought that sounded too risky. So
we went sailing and
miniature golfing
instead. But he took LSD.
Apparently he figured that
wasn't as dangerous.
When he was about 7 or 8,
Joey attended a camp for asthma asked
The coffin is
always closed in traditional Jewish funerals, and
as I sat with him that
morning before
the funeral, I minded that. I felt so far from
him. I finally decided that I
had the
right to open it briefly, even if it was against
some rule. In fact, I rationalized,
Joe
probably would like my breaking the rule. So I
raised the lid.
He was in a body bag.
I'm not surprised that kids don't
listen to their parents about drugs. Adults'
standards of
risk are different from
theirs, and they know it; and they discount what
we tell them.
But we must tell them
anyway.
Joe's aunt, a teacher, says that when
you warn kids about something dangerous --
something that kills people -- they
always say,
You may name him, too.
Please.
Joe's first job was in
Manchester, N.H., where his mother had moved with
him and
his younger brother nine years
ago. He was a carryout boy in a supermarket. One
day
he came to the rescue of a clerk
faced with a customer who spoke only French and
who wanted to use Canadian money. Armed
with his two years of high-school French,
Joe stepped forward and explained,
That, he said, was when he rose to the
very pinnacle of linguistic and supermarket
expertise: ―Madame,‖ he said, with a
Gallic shrug of his shoulders,
woman
nodded and left.
Because the coffin is
always closed, nobody expected anyone to look
inside. There
were blood spatters on
the body bag.
It's entirely possible that warning
your kids won't scare them away from LSD. But
maybe it will. I wish I could tell you
how to warn them so it would work, but I can't.
This is the generation gap reduced to
its most basic: It is parents' worst fear that
something terrible will happen to their
kids; it is kids' constant struggle to be free of
the
protection of their parents.
Joe's next job was in Shorewood, Wis.,
a Milwaukee suburb, where his family moved
just before his junior year in high
school. It was a summer job as a soda jerk. He
confided to me that he worked alongside
&#%@.''; Actually, I think he enjoyed
it. He told me one day that he was
meaningful insights into the Sundae
Industry.
want a lid on that?
Traditional
Jewish funerals leave no room for the stage of
grief that psychologists call
In fact, you might say that
these funerals are brutal. I could avoid telling
you about it,
and spare us both some
pain, but I think I owe it to Joe -- and to every
parent -- to let this
be as forceful as
possible.
When the graveside prayers were over,
workmen lowered Joe's coffin into the ground
and then eased a concrete cover down
into the hole until it covered the metal burial
vault. The cover had Joe's name on it.
They pulled the green fake-grass cloth off the
pile
of dirt next to the grave, and the
rabbi and the cantor each threw a shovelful of
earth
onto the vault lid.
Then they
handed the shovel to Joe's 15-year-old brother,
David.
It occurs to me now that what I might
have done is ask Joe what kind of drugs were
around. Maybe my genuine alarm at the
reemergence of LSD would have registered
with him. I'm certainly going to be
less self-assured about how I deal with this
subject
with David. He's a wonderful
kid, too, and while I don't want to smother him, I
don't
want to assume anything, either.
I
didn't take Joe for granted; I think I encouraged
him and delighted in him and
celebrated
with him. But I certainly took his life for
granted. Parents must not do that.
We
must be scared for them. They don't know when to
be scared for themselves.
Although his
humor had become somewhat acerbic recently, Joe
remained a sweet,
thoughtful kid. When,
as I often did, I wound up apologizing to him
because a
weekend or a vacation hadn't
worked out the way I'd hoped, he always patted my
hand -- literally or figuratively
–
and let me know he loved
me anyway.
He took good care of
others, too. He spent most of his grandfather's
90th birthday
party making sure that
his stepmother had somebody to talk to besides my
ex-wife's
family.
And on that last birthday visit with me
in early October, he talked a little about his
concerns and hopes for his brother. One
of those concerns was drugs.
Then they
handed the shovel to me.
Later I
overheard my wife say that the expression on my
face when I turned away,
having
shoveled dirt onto my son's coffin, was the most
awful thing she'd ever seen.
Whenever I
thought about Joe recently, it was about college
and independence and
adulthood, and his
latest involvements: His attempt to produce an
English paper that
was more interesting
than what the instructor had asked for, the
raucous rock band he
and his friends
put together over the summer, his plans to rent a
cabin with a bunch of
kids at winter
break.
Now, suddenly, I'm no longer looking at
the moment, but instead at the whole life. And
in some automatic averaging-out, in my
mind I'm sometimes calling him
little-
boy name.
He told his mother a year
ago that he wanted his senior year in high school
to be the
best year he'd ever had, and
on the drive to Madison to start college this
fall, he told
her that, despite lots of
typical teenage domestic tension, it had been. He
said he'd
accomplished everything he'd
set out to do -- except to have a mad, passionate
affair
with a woman he didn't even
know.
She refrained from asking the obvious
question.
Then they handed the shovel to his
mother.
Even though it is only three weeks
since his death, I find that the reality of Joey
is
beginning to turn sepia. He will be
forever 18. And his life will forever stop in
1989.
That saddens me so much. It's not
just that he won't have a career, maybe get
married,
have kids, all those things we
hope might happen for a promising young person. He
won't go out for pizza anymore either,
or come into a warm house on a cold night, or
imitate Martin Short imitating
Katharine Hepburn, or scuff through piles of
leaves.
And I won't ever see him again.
Joe had been very involved in high-
school journalism. He won a statewide award for
feature writing in New Hampshire, and
he was news editor of the school paper in
Shorewood. He contributed a great deal
of that paper's humor edition in May,
including a large advertisement that
read, in part:
National Merit semifinalist,
devastatingly handsome, relatively inexpensive,
housebroken, handy with tools, easily
entertained, a gentleman in the truest sense of
the word, and I think I am extremely
funny. In fact, I think I am the funniest guy on
earth! Please call immediately.
Operators are standing by. (I am in great demand.)
Kids -- Please get permission from your
parents before calling.
Then they handed the shovel
to his stepmother.
In his sermon at David's
bar mitzvah last year, the rabbi used a phrase I'd
never heard
before. It caused me to
weep at the time; I wasn't sure why. It's come
back to
me again
and again
recently. It isn't consoling, nor even helpful.
But it is pretty, and in an odd
way it
puts events into a much larger perspective:
At one point during that
last visit, we went to a craft fair where Joe
noticed someone
selling hammered
dulcimers. He had never played one, but he'd
played the guitar for
quite a few
years, which must have helped. He picked up the
hammers and began to
fool around, and
soon he drew a small crowd with something that
sounded like sitar
music. He asked
about the price; they were expensive. I keep
finding myself thinking
that it would
be neat to get him one. I should have done it
then.
Then they handed the shovel to his only
living grandmother; it took her two tries to get
enough dirt on the shovel. Neither of
his grandfathers could bring himself to do it. But
many of Joe's friends, weeping, took a
turn.
I hope someday to be able to write
about Joe again; I probably won't be writing a
humor
column for a while. In the
meantime, I want folks to know how I think he
would have
turned out. He would have
been a mensch
–
a decent,
sincere man, the kind you're
proud to
know. He already was. Damn drugs.
A year or so ago, the four of us played
charades, a vacation tradition. Joe drew
Sun Also Rises,
between his
hands then slowly brought his head above it at one
end and traversed an
arc, grinning from
ear to ear. It took us about five seconds to get
it. Body bag or no,
that's how I want
to remember him.
The last thing I wrote
about him appeared in the newspaper the morning he
died. He
told me that he and a friend
decided one Saturday afternoon to hitchhike to a
rock
concert near Milwaukee. He
realized, he said, that now that he was away from
home, he
didn't have to ask anybody if
he could go or tell anybody that he was going. He
just
decided to do it, and he did it. I
wrote about what a heady experience that was, to
be
independent at last.
There's a fair
measure of irony in that column. We're told that
the rock concert is where
he got the
LSD, and where he took his first trip.
That trip, I
understand, went OK. This one killed him.
Although Joe apparently was with
friends most of the evening, the police said he
was
alone when he went out the window.
We'll probably never know exactly what happened
in those last minutes, but judging by
our own reading of him and by what lots of others
have told us, we're sure he wasn't
despondent. Many of his friends, including one who
spoke at his funeral, said that he was
very happy and enjoying his life in Madison.
The likeliest explanation we've heard
is that he had the hallucination that makes a
person think he can fly. In any case, a
little after 1 o'clock Sunday morning, Oct. 15,
somebody studying across the courtyard
saw a curtain open and then a body fall. Joe
didn't cry out.
I have since, many times.
anytime,anywhere
—
bu
t beware
The Internet? Bah!
Hype alert: Why cyberspace isn't, and
will never be, nirvana
After
tw
o decades online, I'm perplexed. It's
not that I haven't had a gas of a good time on the
Internet. I've met
great people and
even caught a hac
ker or tw
o.
But today, I'm uneasy about this most trendy and
oversold
community. Visionaries see a
future of telecommuting w
orkers,
interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms.
They speak of electronic
tow
n meetings and virtual communities.
Commerce and business w
ill shift from
offices
and malls to
netw
orks and modems. And the freedom
of
digital netw
orks
w
ill make government more
democratic.
Baloney. Do our
computer pundits lac
k all common sense?
The truth in no online database w
ill
replace your
daily
new
spaper, no CD-
ROM can
take the place of a competent teacher and no
computer netw
ork w
ill change
the w
ay government
w
orks.
Consider today's
online w
orld. The Usenet, a
w
orldw
ide bulletin board,
allow
s anyone to post messages across
the nation. Your w
ord gets
out, leapfrogging editors and publishers.
E
very voice can be heard cheaply and
instantly. The result? E
very
voice is heard. The cacophany more closely
resembles citizens band r
adio,
complete w
ith handles,
harras
ment, and anony
mous
thr
eats. When most everyone shouts,
few
listen. How
about electronic publishing? Try
reading a book on disc. At best, it's an
unpleasant chore: the myopic glow
of a
clunky computer replaces the friendly
pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to
the beach. Yet Nicholas
Negroponte, director of the MIT Media
Lab, predicts that w
e'll soon buy books
and new
s
papers straight over
the Intenet. Uh, sure.
What
the Inter
net hucksters w
on't
tell you is tht the Internet is one big ocean of
unedited data, w
ithout any
pretense of completeness. Lacking
editors, review
ers or critics, the
Internet has become a w
asteland of
unfiltered data. You don't
know
w
hat to ignore and
w
hat's w
orth reading. Logged
onto the World Wide Web, I
hunt for the
date of the Battle of Trafalgar. Hundreds of files
show
up, and it takes 15 minutes to
unr
avel
them
—
one's a
biography written by an eighth gr
ader,
the second is a computer game that doesn't
w
ork and the
third is an
image of a London monument. None
answ
ers my question, and my search is
periodically interrupted
by messages
like,
Won't the Internet be
useful in governing? Internet addicts clamor for
government reports. But w
hen Andy
Spano ran for county executive in
Westchester County, N.Y., he put every press
release and position paper
onto a
bulletin board. In that affluent county,
w
ith plenty of computer companies,
how
many voters logged in?
Few
er than 30. Not a good
omen.
Then there are those pushing
computers into schools. We're told that multimedia
w
ill make schoolw
ork easy
and fun. Students w
ill
happily learn from animated characters
w
hile taught by expertly tailored
softw
needs teachers
w
hen you've got computer-aided
education? Bah. These expensive toys are difficult
to use in
classrooms and require
extensive teacher training. Sure, kids love
videogames
—
but think of your
ow
n
experience: can you
recall even one educational filmstr
ip
of decades past? I'll bet you remember the
tw
o or
three great teachers
w
ho made a difference in your life.
Then there's cyberbusiness. We're
promised instant catalog
shopping
—
just point and
click for great deals.
We'll order
airline tickets over the netw
ork, make
restaurant reservations and negotiate sales
contracts. Stores
w
ill
become obselete. So how
come my local
mall does more bus
iness in an afternoon
than the entire Internet
handles in a
month? Even if there w
ere a
trustw
orthy way to send money over the
Internet
—
w
hich
there
isn't
—
the
netw
ork is missing a most essential
ingredient of capitalis
m:
salespeople.
What's missing
from this electronic w
onderland? Human
contact. Discount the faw
ning
techno-
burble about
virtual
communities. Computers and netw
orks
isolate us from one another. A netw
ork
chat line is a limp
substitute for
meeting friends over coffee. No interactive
multimedia display comes close to the excitement
of a
live concert. And w
ho'd
prefer cybersex to the real thing? While the
Internet beckons brightly, seductively
flashing an icon of
know
ledge-as-pow
er, this
nonplace lures us to surrender our time on earth.
A poor
substitute it is, this virtual
reality w
here frustration is legion and
w
here
—
in the holy
names of Education and
P
r
ogress
—
important
aspects of human interactions are
r
elentlessly devalued.
connected wireless
my own experience by karrey
My
first
awareness
of
her
was
her
hands.
I
don't
remember
how
old
I
was,
but
my
whole
being
and
existence
were
associated
with
those
hands.
Those
hands belonged to my
mom and she is blind.
I
can
remember
sitting
at
the
kitchen
table
coloring a
picture.
at
my picture, Mom. It's all finished.
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