A Selection of Simple Prose Texts [1 ed.] 9781527500426, 9781443895149

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A Selection of Simple Prose Texts

A Selection of Simple Prose Texts Edited by

Ruzbeh Babaee and Siamak Babaee

A Selection of Simple Prose Texts Edited by Ruzbeh Babaee and Siamak Babaee This book first published 2017 Cambridge Scholars Publishing Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2017 by Ruzbeh Babaee and Siamak Babaee All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-9514-8 ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-9514-9

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii Chapter One ................................................................................................. 1 What is an Author’s Style? Siamak Babaee Chapter Two ................................................................................................ 7 Amir Kabir (Reformer and Educator) Jamal M. Kashani Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 17 Shame Dick Gregory Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 27 Shooting an Elephant George Orwell Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 39 Cyrus (Founder of Human Rights) Jamal M. Kashani Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 47 Television in Modern Life John Steinbeck Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 57 Bullfighting Ernest Hemingway Chapter Eight ............................................................................................. 63 Snobbery Aldous Huxley

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Table of Contents

Chapter Nine.............................................................................................. 69 A Voyage to Lilliput Jonathan Swift Chapter Ten ............................................................................................... 75 Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson Chapter Eleven .......................................................................................... 83 University Days James Thurber Further Reading ......................................................................................... 95 Biographies of the Writers....................................................................... 107 References ............................................................................................... 115

PREFACE

This self-study textbook has been compiled and written for non-native students who are studying for a BA degree in English Literature—i.e. those using English as a Foreign Language (EFL). The book has been divided into various chapters. The first chapter is about an author’s style. The ideas discussed in chapter one are crucial to the whole book, because they are reflected in the questions raised at the end of each chapter. Teaching foreign literature is not an easy task. EFL students are like travelers who have journeyed to a foreign land and have to be prepared before they can actually enjoy their trip. First, they should understand the language of the people in that land. Second, they should have a skilled guide who can point out the main features of interest in the land. Only under these conditions can the travelers be left on their own to make discoveries and enjoy the trip in their own way. After the first chapter, students are required to read the authentic texts, which have sometimes been modified for the purpose of clarity, and to use the glossary if needed. Students should be encouraged to try to guess the meanings of unknown words from their context. Difficult words have been highlighted in the texts, and alphabetically arranged and explained in the glossary lists. This book is also designed to introduce students to a number of different kinds of writings taken from various periods in history. They have been taken from well-known authors and are meant to serve as an introduction to English-language prose. We have tried to pick out texts that are relevant to current social issues and problems in order to arouse the curiosity and interest of the students. We hope that this textbook will provide an easy and attractive introduction to the wealth of literature in English. We would greatly appreciate receiving your comments and suggestions via [email protected] or [email protected]. Ruzbeh Babaee, University of Porto, Portugal Siamak Babaee, University of Kashan, Iran

CHAPTER ONE WHAT IS AN AUTHOR’S STYLE? SIAMAK BABAEE

An author’s style is the way in which that author selects and arranges words, constructs sentences, and uses figures of speech so as to give their writing a certain flavor or personality. Style is a writer’s manner of expression. Style actually may refer to the style of a time period, a writer, or a particular work. Perhaps the best way to understand style is to think of differences in other creative forms: for instance, the difference between traditional, realistic art (Rembrandt or Van Gogh) and modern, abstract art (Picasso or Mondrian); or the difference between classical music (Beethoven) and jazz (Louis Armstrong) and country & western (Willie Nelson). All are forms of art or music, but they each use the techniques of their “trade” differently and they evoke different responses from, or have different effects on, their audiences. Style in writing is very varied: the language, sentence structures, and level of formality are quite different today from what they were fifty or a hundred years ago, just as abstract art is nothing like nineteenth-century art; and individual writers may approach their particular literary medium (say, poetry) in very different ways, just as a classical musician and a jazz musician do. In this book, we will be looking at style principally in terms of the writer and sometimes of a particular work more often than in terms of a time period. Writers generally exhibit a characteristic style throughout most of their works. Typically, three aspects make up an author’s style: sentence structure, diction, and tone.

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Chapter One

Sentence structure refers to the general pattern of sentence forms used by a writer. Some authors use a spare style composed mostly of short, simple sentences or compound sentences combined with conjunctions like “and” or “but”. Descriptions and imagery are straightforward, fairly literal, and consist usually of denotative descriptors with few metaphors or similes, leaving the reader to form his or her own impressions of the scene. The best well-known example of this style is Ernest Hemingway. “Hills Like White Elephants,” for example, begins with these sentences: The hills across the valley of the Ebro were long and white. On this side there was no shade and no trees and the station was between two lines of rails in the sun. Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies. The American and the girl with him sat at a table in the shade, outside the building. It was very hot and the express from Barcelona would come in forty minutes. It stopped at this junction for two minutes and went to Madrid.

Notice how unadorned this writing is, and that most of the sentences are brief or simple in structure. Other writers use longer, more complicated sentence structures, like complex sentences connected with semicolons or subordinating conjunctions (“although,” “because,” “since,” etc.), or sentences containing dependent and appositive clauses. Such descriptions are rich in connotation; their imagery is imaginative, full of figures of speech, and intended to deliberately shape impressions in the reader. A well-known writer using this style is William Faulkner, whose individual sentences sometimes stretch into paragraphs! Dorothy Parker provides a good illustration of this style in her opening paragraph for “The Standard of Living”: Annabel and Maggie came out of the tea room with the arrogant slow gait of the leisured, for their Saturday afternoon stretched ahead of them. They had lunched as was their wont, on sugar, starches, oils, and butter-fats. Usually they ate sandwiches of spongy new white bread greased with butter and mayonnaise, they ate thick wedges of cake lying wet beneath ice cream and whipped cream and melted chocolate gritty with nuts. As alternates, they ate patties, sweating beads of inferior oil, containing bits of bland meat bogged in pale, stiffening sauce; they ate pastries, limber under rigid icing, filled with an indeterminate yellow sweet stuff, not still solid, not yet liquid, like

What is an Author’s Style?

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salve that has been left in the sun. They chose no other sort of food, nor did they consider it. And their skin was like the petals of wood anemones, and their bellies were as flat and their flanks as lean as those of young Indian braves.

A second aspect of style is diction. Diction refers to the writer’s choice of words. Some choose to write much as if they were speaking to us, using slang and other loose speech forms, in what is termed a colloquial style (“Who’s that dude a-draggin’ by?”). Others choose an informal style that uses contractions and ordinary language but is not as loose as real speech (“Who’s that man walking by so slow?”). Still others choose a formal, rather elevated style with language not usually heard in speech—what some call highbrow (“Who is that male personage perambulating so slowly past?). The third aspect of style is tone, which is the author’s attitude toward the work, events, characters, or the reader/audience. For instance, he or she may be neutral, or amused, or saddened, or satirical in his/her attitude. Tone also refers to the emotional “feel” that a work has for the reader/audience. Tone comes mainly from the language or vocabulary chosen and the combinations of words used, and from the narrative point of view—the writer’s stance toward the work. The author may be detached from the work, giving it a serious or matter-of-fact tone. Alternatively, the author may be more involved, resulting in a humorous, ironic, satirical, playful, sad, resigned, supercilious, or other tone. In the following chapters, by reference to what you have learned about style, try to answer the questions raised in the exercise 3 of each chapter.

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Chapter One

Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

How do styles differ from each other? What are the aspects that make up an author’s style? What is a spare style? What is diction? What is the tone of a literary work?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. Picasso was a modern abstract artist. This means that his work was: a) unreasonable c) not representing objects in a realistic way

b) absurd d) concrete

2. Descriptions and imagery are straightforward. This means that they are: a) simple b) complicated c) metaphorical d) figurative 3. The denotative meaning of a word is its …………………. meaning. a) implied b) dictionary c) secondary d) metaphorical 4. An idea that makes one think of another word is called a) denotation b) illustration c) duplication d) connotation 5. The shop assistant was very supercilious. This means that he or she was: a) arrogant b) happy c) polite d) superficial

What is an Author’s Style?

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Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Are imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation characteristics in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Deliberately = intentionally Literal = concerned with the usual meaning of a word Perambulating = walking about Resigned = showing patient acceptance of something unpleasant Stance = position Straightforward = easy to understand Supercilious = scornful

CHAPTER TWO AMIR KABIR (REFORMER AND EDUCATOR) JAMAL M. KASHANI

During the second half of the 19th century Iran found itself being squeezed inexorably between the pincers of two colonial powers— England and Russia—which sought to make Iran a tool for their own devious purposes. England was anxious to protect its firm but vulnerable grip on India by using Iranian territory as a buffer zone against potential aggression. Russia schemed to gain access to the Indian Ocean. In this critical period the county was sorely in need of a strong leader who could rekindle the spirit of nationalism that had lain dormant so long. But the monarch Mohammad Shah (1834-48) was stricken with gout, and his vain and callous grand vazir, Haji Mirza Aghassi, had little interest in anything except the national treasury, which he depleted to a precariously low level and in the process brought the country to the brink of revolution. So great was his selfishness that even the prospect of civil war did not deter him from opposing the accession of the heir-apparent, Nasser-eddin. Had such a conflict broken out, it is possible that Iran as a national entity might have ceased to exist, in view of the fact that England and Russia had secretly conspired to split the spoils of Iran’s disintegrating society. Only the hand of providence seems to have kept such a catastrophe from occurring. Upon receiving the news of the death of Mohammad Shah, Mirza Taghi Khan, commander of the Azerbaijan garrison, promptly proclaimed the King’s son, Nasser-eddin, as the new monarch and accompanied him to Tehran, where he was crowned six weeks later. On the way, the 17-year-old Shah bestowed on Mirza Taghi Khan the title of Amir-e-Nezam, or commander of the armed forces. Shortly before his coronation he also named him chief minister with the title Sadr-e-Azam. Accepting the job but refusing the title, Mirza Taghi Khan became popularly known as Amir Kabir, the great minister. He replaced Haji Mirza Aghassi, who continued his intrigues until his dying day, all the while shrouding his treasonous schemes behind a veil of patriotism. Amir

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Chapter Two

Kabir dedicated his public service to bringing Iran abreast of Western science and technology. It was a task he was forced to pursue alone. Thwarted on one side by the country’s powerful conservatives and reactionaries, and openly sabotaged on the other side by the corrupt Ghajar court, Amir Kabir struggled on until his ultimate murder put an end to a career that might have rivaled that of the brilliant 11th century administrator, Nezam-ol-Molk. His father was Karbalai Ghorban, a cook on the staff of Ghajar minister Ghaem Magham. The minister, noticing the intellectual talent of young Mirza Taghi Khan, made provision for him to attend the same classes as his sons and then, when the boy completed his education, hired him as a translator in Iran’s budding diplomatic service. At the age of 22 he joined the army and rose rapidly through the ranks until he became a commander of the Azerbaijan garrison. In his official capacity he made visits to Moscow and St. Petersburg, visits that broadened his political and economic outlook and which strongly influenced the reforms he later attempted. Mirza Taghi Khan also spent five years as Iran’s envoy to Ottoman Turkey, and his performance during this time, especially as the Iranian delegate to the Erzurum Boundary Commission, was such that even Mirza Aghassi felt obliged to acknowledge his achievements. By then British and Russian exploitation of Iran was at its height, and many members of the aristocracy had morally sold themselves to the Western powers while the central government made weak protests in order to mask its importance. Working single-handedly amid such chaos, Amir Kabir could not have brought about the reforms he did if it had not been for the support of the young Shah, who gave his only sister, Ezat-od-Dowleh, to him in marriage. Together with the monarch, whom he briefed daily, Amir Kabir produced something Iran had not seen in decades: a corruption-free administration devoted to a realistic reform program that had a good chance of putting the nation on its feet again. Things proceeded well for four years, and then, with alarming suddenness, the situation reversed itself. Amir Kabir’s enemies planted suspicions in the Shah’s mind, making him apprehensive of his minister’s popularity and the speed with which he has instituting his reforms. Amir Kabir, realizing what was happening, tried to warn the monarch; but Nasser-eddin Shah was too engrossed in the pleasure of the harem to take heed.

Amir Kabir (Reformer and Educator)

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In one of the several letters to the King, Amir Kabir was blunt to the point of impertinence: “by such procrastination one cannot rule the country. I may be ill or dead and sacrificed to the dust of thy auspicious feet. But why dost thou not keep abreast of events in the city to ascertain what is happening? The artillery and ammunition that should have been sent to Astarabad: have they been dispatched? What is taking place in the provinces and among the people there? I am bed-ridden and my ailment may not be cured, but you, Sire, must not discontinue your own work and depend constantly on a person who himself is dependent on another.” Nasser-eddin was not pleased. The gulf between him and his chief minister widened until finally he refused to grant an audience for the customary daily briefing. Next morning Amir Kabir received a letter written in the King’s own hand informing him that he was being relieved of his duties for reasons of health, but that he would remain as commander of the Army. A beautiful jwele-studded sword accompanied the letter. Deciding to abandon the political arena, Amir Kabir retired to his home. Meanwhile, the monarch, who was reportedly unhappy at having had to make a decision which he regarded as forced upon him by Amir Kabir’s British-backed enemies, appointed Agha Khan Noori, a proBritish chieftain, as his new Chief Minster. The Russian envoy then promptly declared that Amir Kabir was under the protection of the Czar. His worst suspicions now aroused, Nasser-eddin Shah exiled his former minister to Kashan, where he hoped he would be out of the public eye. But Amir Kabir’s popularity remained undimmed, so that the monarch in his desperation sent an assassination squad to solve the problem once and for all. This vicious murder took place in Kashan’s Hammam of Fin in 1852. Amir Kabir’s wrists were slashed and, as he lay bleeding to death, he was brutally kicked and strangled. The greatest Iranian reformer of the 19th century fell victim to the prejudice and foreign intrigue that he had devoted his carrier to combating. Amir Kabir’s death proved to be a major setback for Iran. His political reforms quickly crumbled and his efforts to instill new levels of scholarship in Iranian education were soon forgotten. Among his more notable achievements were the establishment of a regular army supported by its own armaments factory, a reliable postal system, the country’s first national budget, and the founding of Iran’s first scientific institute, Dar-olFonoon, which provided many of the educated leaders of the constitutional movements of the early 20th century. He ordered the translation of Western technical publications into Persian, established national newspapers, built hospitals, conducted a nation-wide small-pox vaccination campaign and

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Chapter Two

took measures to preserve important archaeological sites. A degree of political security was obtained by abolishing some oppressive practices of the upper class. In an effort to build new industries, Iranians were sent to Russia for training, mines were opened, and foreign trade fostered. But in the eyes of the autocratic ruling class these reforms were threats to the feudalistic system and the security it afforded them. Amir Kabir’s death was a blow from which Iran did not recover until the overthrow of the Ghajars by Reza Shah in 1921. British author G.R. Watson, in his history of Persia, says, “It is a hopeless task to find a capable man in Persia to replace Amir Kabir at this period. This man was comparable to Nezam-ol-Molk, Bismark of Prussia, and Gladstone of Britain.” Colonel Sabil, the British minister who was partially responsible for Amir Kabir’s downfall, admitted that “he was a man of integrity who could not be bought for money.” Count Joseph Gobineau, the noted French diplomat, agreed that “Amir Kabir was the only one who accepted no bribes and it was he who eliminated it in his country during his administration.” Professor Seyed Hossein Naser notes that Amir Kabir “remains for the contemporary Persian a man of great vision who sought to serve his country during a difficult period, when potent foreign influence in Iran made autonomous action difficult.” Even Lord Curzon, writing of the Erzurum Boundary Commission, described Amir Kabir, the Iranian representative as “beyond all comparison the most interesting personage amongst the commission of Turkey, Persia, Russia and Great Britain who were then assembled at Erzurum.” In his voluminous correspondence Amir Kabir made a highly documented record of Russian and British interference in Iranian affairs. His letters revealed that few countries outside of Latin America were so unscrupulously and systematically violated as was Iran. With the most capable administrator removed from the political stage, Nasser-eddin Shah’s reign became a dismal parody of monarchical rule. During the Irano-British war English forces occupied Kharg Island, Bushehr, Khorramshahr and Ahwaz. In the peace treaty of 1857, the Shah agreed to evacuate Afghanistan and recognize its independence. Nevertheless, the king’s ego remained undeflatable throughout the whole period that his empire was falling apart around him.

Amir Kabir (Reformer and Educator)

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. What were England’s and Russia’s primary aims in Iran during the second half of the nineteenth century? 2. Why was it dangerous for Iran for Haji Mirza Aghassi to oppose the succession of the heir-apparent? 3. What prevented a civil war from breaking out? 4. How old was the new king, and what positions did he give to Amir Kabir? 5. After being deposed, how did Haji Mirza Aghassi spend his time? 6. What were the major forces opposing Amir Kabir’s reform program? 7. What were his early positions, and how successful was he in them? 8. In their relations with the Western powers, what was the behavior of the aristocracy and of the central government? 9. Whom did Amir Kabir marry, and what did this show? 10. What was Amir Kabir’s working relationship with the young shah, and how much did the two together achieve for their country? 11. What did Amir Kabir say in his letter to the king that made it impertinent? 12. How bad did personal relations become between the two men? How did the shah reduce Amir Kabir’s responsibilities? 13. How did the shah interpret the fact that the czar supported Amir Kabir? 14. How, where, and when was Amir Kabir assassinated? 15. Why may we say that Amir Kabir was “ahead of his time” in his aims and programs for Iran? 16. On Amir Kabir’s death, what happened to his governmental and educational reforms? 17. How did he deal with the upper class? 18. Why did this help to bring about his downfall? 19. In what way do Amir Kabir’s many letters show that Iran was, in many ways, like Latin America? 20. How did the foreign powers take advantage of the weakness of the Iranian government after Amir Kabir’s death? 21. What effect did Iran’s loss of power have on the Shah’s opinion of himself?

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Chapter Two

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. Iran found itself being squeezed inexorably between the pincers of two colonial powers. This means that it was squeezed: a) harshly b) inevitably c) relentlessly d) painfully 2. England and Russia sought to make Iran a tool for their own devious purposes. Their purposes were: a) tricky b) winding c) evil d) changeable 3. Iran was sorely in need of a strong leader who could rekindle the Spirit of nationalism. Its need was: a) injured b) great c) definite d) painful 4. Haji Mirza Aghassi depleted the national treasury to a precariously low level. This means he did what with the treasury? a) stole b) lowered c) reduced d) emptied 5. Haji Mirza’s selfishness brought Iran to the brink of revolution. “Brink” here means: a) danger b) possibility c) reality d) edge 6. Only the hand of Providence seems to have kept such a catastrophe from occurring. Providence here symbolizes: a) chance b) God c) good fortune d) prudence 7. Until his dying day, Haji Mirza shrouded his treasonous schemes behind a veil of patriotism. “Shrouded” here denotes: a) buried b) secreted c) pretended d) hid

Amir Kabir (Reformer and Educator)

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8. Amir Kabir dedicated his public service to bringing Iran abreast of Western science and technology. What was its position with respect to Western science? a) aware of b) educated in c) on a level with d) in the middle of 9. Amir Kabir was thwarted by conservatives and reactionaries, and sabotaged by the corrupt Ghajar court. This means that his enemies: a) obstructed b) attacked c) persecuted d) frustrated 10. Ghaem Magham made provision for Amir Kabir to attend the same classes as his sons. This means that he: a) gave supplies to b) arranged payment to c) ordered d) enabled 11. Amir Kabir rose rapidly through the ranks until he became commander of the Azarbaijan Garrison. “Ranks” here means: a) soldiers b) military grades c) lines of soldiers d) high positions 12. He spent five years as Iran’s envoy to Ottoman Turkey. This means that he was its: a) speaker b) representative c) messenger d) negotiator 13. The central government made weak protests about the influence of Western powers in order to mask its impotence. What did it do with its impotence? a) pretend b) disguise c) overcome d) falsify 14. Amir Kabir’s reform program had a good chance of putting Iran on its feet again. This means that Iran would thereby be: a) upright b) independent c) in good condition d) healthy

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Chapter Two

15. The shah became apprehensive of his minister’s popularity. This means that he showed: a) fear b) suspicion c) jealousy d) anxiety 16. In a letter to the king, Amir Kabir was blunt to the point of impertinence. This means that he was: a) plain-spoken b) indelicate c) rough d) uncivilized 17. The gulf between Amir Kabir and the King widened. “Gulf” here means: a) valley b) body of water c) division d) separation 18. Amir Kabir’s death proved to be a major setback for Iran. This means that it was: a) an injury b) disastrous c) a retirement d) a reversal 19. Amir Kabir established a regular army with its own armaments factory. What kind of factory was this? a) munitions b) military c) bullets d) explosives 20. Nasser-eddin Shah’s reign became a dismal parody of monarchical rule. This means that it was a: a) weak imitation b) comedy c) similarity d) shadow 21. Foreign trade was fostered. This means that trade was: a) unlimited b) taken care of c) tended carefully d) promoted 22. Colonel Sabil admitted that Amir Kabir “was a man of integrity who could not be bought for money.” This means that Amir Kabir showed: a) uprightness b) honesty c) incorruptibility d) completeness

Amir Kabir (Reformer and Educator)

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23. Professor Nasr has written that during Amir Kabir’s life, “potent foreign influence in Iran made autonomous action difficult.” The desired action was: a) automatic b) independent c) reforming d) powerful 24. Few countries outside Latin America were so unscrupulously and systematically violated as was Iran. The manner of Iran’s violation was: a) organized b) thorough c) methodical d) immoral

Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Glossary

Abreast = aware of; on the same level as Accession = reaching a position (such as a throne) Apprehensive = uneasy; worried Arena = scene of competition or struggle Armaments = munitions Autocratic = with unlimited power Autonomous = independent Bed-ridden = confined to one’s bed Blunt = plain; outspoken Brief = instruct; keep informed Brink = edge Budding = beginning to develop

Budget = estimate of income and expenditure Buffer zone = protective or neutral area Callous = unfeeling; insensitive Capacity = position Catastrophe = disaster Coronation = ceremony of crowning a ruler Curb = to limit; restrain Dedicate = devote Deplete = drain; use up; empty Devious = not straightforward Dismal = miserable Dormant = inactive; sleeping Ego = individual’s perception of oneself

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Chapter Two

Entity = something with an independent existence Evacuate = get out of; leave Exploit = use selfishly for one’s own reasons Foster = promote; encourage Garrison = military force stationed in a town Gout = a painful disease Grant an audience = give a formal interview Gulf = division Heir-apparent = next in line to the throne Impertinence = absence of proper respect Inexorably = relentlessly; unyieldingly Integrity = uprightness; incorruptibility Parody = imitation Personage = important person Precariously = dangerously Procrastination = delaying action; putting things off Providence = God

Ranks = different military grades Reactionary = opponent of progress or reform Rekindle = relight; revitalize Sabotage = hinder an opponent’s activity Setback = reverse; check to progress Shroud = hide; conceal Sorely = greatly; severely Spoils = plunder; loot Squad = small group of people working together Studded = ornamented with something inset Take heed of = listen or pay attention to Thwarted = frustrated; held back Undeflatable = incapable of being made smaller/controlled Voluminous = great in quantity or amount Vulnerable = not protected against attack

CHAPTER THREE SHAME DICK GREGORY

I never learned hate at home, or shame. I had to go to school for that. I was about seven years old when I got my first big lesson. I was in love with a little girl named Helene Tucker, a light-complected little girl with pigtails and nice manners. She was always clean and she was smart in school. I think I went to school then mostly to look at her. I brushed my hair and even got me a little old handkerchief. It was a lady’s handkerchief, but I didn’t want Helene to see me wipe my nose on my hand. The pipes were frozen again, there was no water in the house, but I washed my socks and shirt every night. I’d get a pot, and go over to Mister Ben’s grocery store, and stick my pot down into his soda machine. Scoop out some chopped ice. By evening the ice melted to water for washing. I got sick a lot that winter because the fire would go out at night before the clothes were dry. In the morning I’d put them on, wet or dry, because they were the only clothes I had. Everybody’s got a Helene Tucker, a symbol of everything you want. I loved her for her goodness, her cleanness, her popularity. She’d walk down my street and my brothers and sisters would yell. “Here comes Helene,” and I’d rub my tennis sneakers on the back of my pants and wish my hair wasn’t so nappy and the white folks’ shirt fit me better. I’d run out on the street. If I knew my place and didn’t come too close, she’d wink at me and say hello. That was a good feeling. Sometimes I’d follow her all the way home, and shovel the snow off her walk and try to make friends with her Momma and her aunts. I’d drop money on her stoop late at night on my way back from shining shoes in the taverns. And she had a Daddy, and he had a good job. He was a paper hanger. I guess I would have gotten over Helene by summertime, but something happened in that classroom that made her face hang in front of me for the next twenty-two years. When I played the drums in high school

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Chapter Three

it was for Helene and when I broke track records in college it was for Helene and when I started standing behind microphones and heard applause I wished Helene could hear it, too. It wasn’t until I was twenty-nine years old and married and making money that I finally got her out of my system. Helene was sitting in that classroom when I learned to be ashamed of myself. It was on a Thursday. I was sitting in the back of the room, in a seat with a chalk circle drawn around it. The idiot’s seat, the troublemaker’s seat. The teacher thought I was stupid. Couldn’t spell, couldn’t read, and couldn’t do arithmetic. Just stupid. Teachers were never interested in finding out that you couldn’t concentrate because you were so hungry, because you hadn’t had any breakfast. All you could think about was noontime, would it ever come? Maybe you could sneak into the cloakroom and steal a bite of some kid’s lunch out of a coat pocket. A bite of something. Paste. You can’t really make a meal of paste, or put it on bread for a sandwich, but sometimes I’d scoop a few spoonfuls out of the paste jar in the back of the room. Pregnant people get strange tastes. I was pregnant with poverty. Pregnant with dirt and pregnant with smells that made people turn away, pregnant with cold and pregnant with shoes that were never bought for me. Pregnant with five other people in my bed and no daddy in the next room, and pregnant with hunger. Paste doesn’t taste too bad when you’re hungry. The teacher thought I was a troublemaker. All she saw from the front of the room was a little black boy who squirmed in his idiot’s seat and made noises and poked the kids around him. I guess she couldn’t see a kid who made noises because he wanted someone to know he was there. It was on a Thursday, the day before the Negro payday. The eagle always flew on Friday. The teacher was asking each student how much his father would give to the Community Chest. On Friday night, each kid would get the money from his father, and on Monday he would bring it to the school. I decided I was going to buy me a daddy right then. I had money in my pocket from shining shoes and selling papers, and whatever Helene Tucker pledged for her daddy I was going to top it. And I’d hand the money right in. I wasn’t going to wait until Monday to buy me a Daddy.

Shame

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I was shaking, scared to death. The teacher opened her book and started calling out names alphabetically. “Helene Tucker?” “My daddy said he’d give two dollars and fifty cents.” “That’s very nice, Helene. Very, very nice indeed.” That made me feel pretty good. It wouldn’t take too much to top that. I had almost three dollars in dimes and quarters in my pocket. I stuck my hand in my pocket and held onto the money, waiting for her to call my name. But the teacher closed her book after she called everybody else in the class. I stood up and raise my hand. “What is it now?” “You forgot me.” She turned toward the blackboard. “I don’t have time to be playing with you, Richard.” “My Daddy said he’d …” “Sit down, Richard, you’re disturbing class.” “My Daddy said he’d give … fifteen dollars.” She turned around and looked mad. “We are collecting this money for you and your kind, Richard Gregory. If your Daddy can give fifteen dollars you have no business being on relief.” “I got it right now, I got it right now, my Daddy gave it to me to turn it today, my Daddy said …” “And furthermore,” she said, looking right at me, her nostrils getting big and her lips getting thin and her eyes opening wide, “we know you don’t have a Daddy.” Helene Tucker turned around, her eyes full of tears. She felt sorry for me. Then I couldn’t see her too well because I was crying, too. “Sit down, Richard.”

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And I always thought the teacher kind of liked me. She always picked me to wash the blackboard on Friday, after school. That was a big thrill, it made me feel important. If I didn’t wash it, come Monday the school might not function right. “Where are you going, Richard?” I walked out of school that day, and for a long time I didn’t go back very often. There was shame there. Now there was shame everywhere. It seemed like the whole world had been inside that classroom, everyone had heard what the teacher had said, and everyone had turned around and felt sorry for me. There was shame in going to the Worthy Boys Annual Christmas Dinner for you and your kind, because everybody knew what a worthy boy was. Why couldn’t they just call it the Boys Annual Dinner, why’d they have to give it a name? There was shame in wearing the brown and orange and white plaid mackinaw the welfare gave to 31000 boys. Why’d it have to be the same for everybody so when you walked down the street the people could see you were on relief? It was a nice warm mackinaw and it had a hood, and my Momma beat me and called me a little rat when she found out I stuffed it in the bottom of a pail full of garbage way over on Cottage Street. There was shame in running over to Mister Ben’s at the end of the day and asking for his rotten peaches, there was shame in asking Mrs. Simmons for a spoonful of sugar, there was shame in running out to meet the relief truck. I hated that truck, full of food for you and your kind. I ran into the house and hid when it came. And then I started to sneak through alleys, to take the long way home so the people going into White’s Eat Shop wouldn’t see me. Yeah, the whole world heard the teacher that day, we all know you don’t have a Daddy. It lasted for a while, this kind of numbness. I spent a lot of time feeling sorry for myself. And then one day I met this wino in a restaurant. I’d been out hustling all day, shining shoes, selling newspapers, and I had goo-gobs of money in my pocket. Bought me a bowl of chili for fifteen cents, and a cheeseburger for fifteen cents, and a Pepsi for five cents, and a piece of chocolate cake for ten cents. That was a good meal. I was eating when this old wino came in. I love winos because they never hurt anyone but themselves.

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The old wino sat down at the counter and ordered twenty-six cents worth of food. He ate it like he really enjoyed it. When the owner, Mister Williams, asked him to pay the check, the old wino didn’t lie or go through his pocket like he suddenly found a hole. He just said: “don’t have no money.” The owner yelled: “why in hell you come in here and eat my food if you don’t have no money? That food cost me money.” Mister Williams jumped over the counter and knocked the wino off his stool and beat him over the head with a pop bottle. Then he stepped back and watched the wino bleed. Then he kicked him. And he kicked him again. I looked at the wino with blood all over his face and I went over. “Leave him alone, Minster Williams. I’ll pay the twenty-six cents.” The wino got up, slowly, pulling himself up to the stool, then up to the counter, holding on for a minute until his legs stopped shaking so bad. He looked at me with pure hate. “Keep your twenty-six cents. You don’t have to pay, not now. I just finished paying for it.” He started to walk out, and as he passed me, he reached down and touched my shoulder. “Thanks, sonny, but it’s too late now. Why didn’t you pay it before?” I was pretty sick about that. I waited too long to help another man.

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. What does the narrator mean by “I was about seven years old when I got my first big lesson”? 2. How/why did the narrator provide water? 3. What does “everybody’s got a Helene Tucker” mean? 4. What does “the white folks’ shirt fit me better” mean? 5. How old is the narrator while writing this story? 6. What does “got her out of my system” mean? 7. What is “the idiot’s seat”? 8. What is it that the teachers cannot understand about their students? 9. Why was noontime important for the narrator? 10. What was the teacher’s opinion about the narrator? 11. What is meant by the writer in saying “the eagle always flew on Friday”? 12. What does “I decided I was going to buy me a daddy right then” mean? 13. What happened during calling the names for charity? 14. What was the narrator’s reaction to being ignored by the teacher? 15. What was the narrator’s reaction before and after the classroom event? 16. What was Helene’s reaction toward the teacher’s behavior? 17. Why did wino look at the narrator with pure hate?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. I’d get a pot, and go over to Mister Ben’s grocery store, and stick my pot down into his soda machine. What would the narrator do with the pot? a) remember b) push c) thrust d) both b and c 2. Scoop out some chopped ice. What would the narrator do with the ice? a) dig b) remove c) pick up

d) all of the above

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3. I’d rub my tennis sneakers on the back of my pants and wish my hair wasn’t so nappy and the white folks’ shirt fit me better. “Nappy” here means: a) shaggy b) fuzzy c) nice d) both a and b 4. If I knew my place and didn’t come too close, she’d wink at me and say hello. What would Helene do to the narrator? a) kick b) ridicule c) signal d) fall 5. I’d drop money on her stoop late at night. “Stoop” here means: a) small platform b) face c) anger

d) edge

6. He was a paper hanger. Which job is this? a) artist b) worker

d) wall decorator

c) driller

7. I guess I would have gotten over Helene by summertime. “Gotten over” here means: a) recovered from b) attained c) remembered d) came together 8. I broke track records in college. “Track” here means: a) road b) racing c) mark

d) pieces of music

9. Maybe you could sneak into the cloakroom and steal a bite of some kid’s lunch out of a coat pocket. “Sneak” here means: a) cringe b) cower c) slink d) all of the above 10. All she saw from the front of the room was a little black boy who squirmed in his idiot’s seat. What did the “little black boy” do? a) pushed b) felt c) lifted d) moved 11. He made noises and poked the kids around him. What did he do to the kids? a) hit b) turned c) pushed d) both a and c

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12. Whatever Helene Tucker pledged for her daddy I was going to top it. “Pledged” here means: a) guaranteed b) enjoyed c) wanted d) showed 13. If your Daddy can give fifteen dollars you have no business being on relief. “Relief” here denotes: a) lurk b) receiving government funds c) place d) alone 14. That was a big thrill, it made me feel important. “Thrill” here refers to: a) design b) excitement c) evidence

d) quality

15. Running over to Mister Ben’s at the end of the day and asking for his rotten peaches. In what condition were the peaches? a) decomposed b) decayed c) fresh d) both a and b 16. I’d been out hustling all day. What had the narrator been doing? a) frauding b) shoving c) jostling

d) both b and c

Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

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Glossary Alleys = narrow roads or paths between buildings, or paths in a park or garden—especially with trees or bushes on both sides Chopped = cut; divided; sliced Cloak = (archaic) cape, shawl; cloakroom (idiomatic) room where (modern-day) coats are hung up Dime = a US or Canadian coin which has the value of ten cents Get over = shake off; survive Go through = examine; investigate; look; search Mackinaw = a short coat or jacket Nappy = fuzzy; shaggy Pledged = assured; guaranteed Poked = pushed; tamper; stabbed; hit; prodded Pop = soda, fizzy drink Scoop out = remove; pick up; empty; dig out Sneak = to go somewhere secretly Stoop = small platform, typically at the door of a house Stuff = compress; fill; cram; stow Tavern = a place where alcohol is sold and drunk Thrill = excitement; joy Wino = a person, especially a homeless person, who drinks too much wine or other alcoholic drink Yell = roar; scream; whoop; howl; cry; screech

CHAPTER FOUR SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT GEORGE ORWELL

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people—the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so. When a nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field and the referee (another Burman) looked the other way, the crowd yelled with hideous laughter. This happened more than once. In the end, the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance, got badly on my nerves. The young Buddhist priests were the worst of all. There were several thousands of them in the town and none of them seemed to have anything to do except stand on street corners and jeer at Europeans. All this was perplexing and upsetting. For at that time I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better. Theoretically—and secretly, of course—I was all for the Burmese and all against their oppressors, the British. As for the job I was doing, I hated it more bitterly than I can perhaps make clear. In a job like that you see the dirty work of Empire at close quarters. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts, the scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos—all these oppressed me with an intolerable sense of guilt. But I could get nothing into perspective. I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East. I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger

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empires that are going to supplant it. All I knew was that I was stuck between my hatred of the empire I served and my rage against the evilspirited little beasts who tried to make my job impossible. With one part of my mind I thought of the British Raj1 as an unbreakable tyranny, as something clamped down, in saecula saeculorum,2 upon the will of prostrate peoples; with another part I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty. One day something happened which in a roundabout way was enlightening. It was a tiny incident in itself, but it gave me a better glimpse than I had had before of the real nature of imperialism—the real motives for which despotic governments act. Early one morning the sub-inspector at a police station the other end of the town rang me up on the phone and said that an elephant was ravaging the bazaar. Would I please come and do something about it? I did not know what I could do, I wanted to see what was happening and I got on to a pony and started out. I took my rifle, an old .44 Winchester and much too small to kill an elephant, but I thought the noise might be useful in terrorem. Various Burmans stopped me on the way and told me about the elephant’s doings. It was not, of course, a wild elephant, but a tame one which had gone “must.”3 It had been chained up, as tame elephants always are when their attack of “must” is due, but on the previous night it had broken its chain and escaped. Its mahout, the only person who could manage it when it was in that state, had set out in pursuit, but had taken the wrong direction and was now twelve hours’ journey away, and in the morning the elephant had suddenly reappeared in the town. The Burmese population had no weapons and was quite helpless against it. It had already destroyed somebody’s bamboo hut, killed a cow and raided some fruit-stalls and devoured the stock; also it had met the municipal rubbish van and, when the driver jumped out and took to his heels, had turned the van over and inflicted violence upon it. The Burmese sub-inspector and some Indian constables were waiting for me in the quarter where the elephant had been seen. It was 1. The imperial government of British India 2. For ever and ever. 3. Gone into sexual heat.

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a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf, winding all over a steep hillside. I remember that it was a cloudy, stuffy morning at the beginning of the rains. We began questioning the people as to where the elephant had gone and, as usual, failed to get any definite information. That is invariably the case in the East; a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes. Some of the people said that the elephant had gone in one direction, some said that he had gone in another, some professed not even to have heard of any elephant. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies, when we heard yells a little distance away. There was a loud, scandalized cry of “Go away, child! Go away this instant!” and an old woman with a switch in her hand came round the corner of a hut, violently shooing away a crowd of naked children. Some more women followed, clicking their tongues and exclaiming; evidently there was something that the children ought not to have seen. I rounded the hut and saw a man’s dead body sprawling in the mud. He was an Indian, a black Dravidian coolie, almost naked, and he could not have been dead many minutes. The people said that the elephant had come suddenly upon him round the corner of the hut, caught him with its trunk, put its foot on his back and ground him into the earth. This was the rainy season and the ground was soft, and his face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long. He was lying on his belly with arms crucified and head sharply twisted to one side. His face was coated with mud, the eyes wide open, the teeth bared and grinning with an expression of unendurable agony. (Never tell me, by the way, that the dead look peaceful. Most of the corpses I have seen looked devilish.) The friction of the great beast’s foot had stripped the skin from his back as neatly as one skins a rabbit. As soon as I saw the dead man I sent an orderly to a friend’s house nearby to borrow an elephant rifle. I had already sent back the pony, not wanting it to go mad with fright and throw me if it smelt the elephant. The orderly came back in a few minutes with a rifle and five cartridges, and meanwhile some Burmans had arrived and told us that the elephant was in the paddy fields below, only a few hundred yards away. As I started forward practically the whole population of the quarter flocked out of the houses and followed me. They had seen the rifle and were all shouting excitedly that I was going to shoot the elephant. They had not shown much interest in the elephant when he was merely ravaging their homes, but it was different now that he was going to be shot. It was a bit of fun to them, as it would be to an English crowd; besides they wanted the meat. It made me vaguely uneasy. I had no intention of shooting the

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elephant—I had merely sent for the rifle to defend myself if necessary—and it is always unnerving to have a crowd following you. I marched down the hill, looking and feeling a fool, with the rifle over my shoulder and an ever-growing army of people jostling at my heels. At the bottom, when you got away from the huts, there was a metalled road and beyond that a miry waste of paddy fields a thousand yards across, not yet ploughed but soggy from the first rains and dotted with coarse grass. The elephant was standing eight yards from the road, his left side towards us. He took not the slightest notice of the crowd’s approach. He was tearing up bunches of grass, beating them against his knees to clean them and stuffing them into his mouth. I had halted on the road. As soon as I saw the elephant I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot him. It is a serious matter to shoot a working elephant—it is comparable to destroying a huge and costly piece of machinery—and obviously one ought not to do it if it can possibly be avoided. And at that distance, peacefully eating, the elephant looked no more dangerous than a cow. I thought then and I think now that his attack of “must” was already passing off; in which case he would merely wander harmlessly about until the mahout came back and caught him. Moreover, I did not in the least want to shoot him. I decided that I would watch him for a little while to make sure that he did not turn savage again, and then go home. But at that moment I glanced round at the crowed that had followed me. It was an immense crowed, two thousand at the least and growing every minute. It blocked the road for a long distance on either side. I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes—faces all happy and excited over this bit of fun, all certain that the elephant was going to be shot. They were watching me as they would watch a conjurer about to perform a trick. They did not like me, but with the magical rifle in my hands I was momentarily worth watching. And suddenly I realized that I should have to shoot the elephant after all. The people expected it of me and I had got to do it; I could feel their two thousand wills pressing me forward, irresistibly. And it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East. Here was I, the white man with his gun, standing in front of the unarmed native crowd—seemingly the leading actor of the piece; but in reality I was only an absurd puppet pushed to and fro by the will of those yellow faces behind. I perceived in this moment that when the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys. He

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becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. For it is the condition of his rule that he shall spend his life in trying to impress the “natives” and so in every crisis he has got to do what the “natives” expect of him. He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it. I had got to shoot the elephant. I had committed myself to doing it when I sent for the rifle. A sahib has got to act like a sahib; he has got to appear resolute, to know his own mind and do definite things. To come all that way, rifle in hand, with two thousand people marching at my heels, and then to trail feebly away, having done nothing—no, that was impossible. The crowed would laugh at me. And my whole life, every white man’s life in the East, was one long struggle not to be laughed at. But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have. It seemed to me that it would be murder to shoot him. At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals, but I had never shot an elephant and never wanted to. (Somehow it always seems worse to kill a large animal.) Besides, there was the beast’s owner to be considered. Alive, the elephant was worth at least a hundred pounds; dead, he would only be worth the value of his tusks, five pounds, possibly. But I had got to act quickly. I turned to some experienced-looking Burmans who had been there when we arrived, and asked them how the elephant had been behaving. They all said the same thing: he took no notice of you if you left him alone, but he might charge if you went too close to him. It was perfectly clear to me what I ought to do. I ought to walk up to within, say, twenty-five yards of the elephant and test his behavior. If he charged, I could shoot; if he took no notice of me, it would be safe to leave him until the mahout came back. But also I knew that I was going to do no such thing. I was a poor shot with a rifle and the ground was soft mud into which one would sink at every step. If the elephant charged and I missed him, I should have about as much chance as a toad under a steam-roller. But even then I was not thinking particularly of my own skin, only of the watchful yellow faces behind. For at that moment, with the crowd watching me, I was not afraid in the ordinary sense, as I would have been if I had been alone. A white man mustn’t be frightened in front of “natives”; and so, in general, he isn’t frightened. The sole thought in my mind was that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on and reduced to a grinning corpse like that Indian up the hill. And if that happened it was quite probable that some of them would laugh. That would never do. There was only one

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alternative. I shoved the cartridges into the magazine and lay down on the road to get a better aim. The crowed grew very still and a deep, low, happy sigh, as of people who see the theatre curtain go up at last, breathed from innumerable throats. They were going to have their bit of fun after all. The rifle was a beautiful German thing with cross-hair sights. I did not then know that in shooting an elephant one would shoot to cut an imaginary bar running from ear-hole to ear-hole. I ought, therefore, as the elephant was sideways on, to have aimed straight at his ear-hole; actually I aimed several inches in front of this, thinking the brain would be further forward. When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick— one never does when a shot goes home—but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time—it might have been five seconds, I dare say—he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skywards like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay. I got up. The Burmans were already racing past me across the mud. It was obvious that the elephant would never rise again, but he was not dead. He was breathing very rhythmically with long rattling gasps, his great mound of a side painfully rising and falling. His mouth was wide open—I could see far down into caverns of pale pink throat. I waited a long time for him to die, but his breathing did not weaken. Finally I

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fired my two remaining shots into the spot where I thought his heart must be. The thick blood welled out of him like red velvet, but still he did not die. His body did not even jerk when the shots hit him, the tortured breathing continued without a pause. He was dying, very slowly and in great agony, but in some world remote from me where not even a bullet could damage him further. I felt that I had got to put an end to that dreadful noise. It seemed dreadful to see the great beast lying there, powerless to move and yet powerless to die, and not even to be able to finish him. I sent back for my small rifle and poured shot after shot into his heart and down his throat. They seemed to make no impression. The tortured gasps continued as steadily as the ticking of a clock. In the end I could not stand it any longer and went away. I heard later that it took him half an hour to die. Burmans were bringing dahs1 and baskets even before I left, and I was told they had stripped his body almost to the bones by the afternoon. Afterwards, of course, there were endless discussions about the shooting of the elephant. The owner was furious, but he was only an Indian and could do nothing. Besides, legally I had done the right thing, for a mad elephant has to be killed, like a mad dog, if its owner fails to control it. Among the Europeans opinion was divided. The older men said I was right, the younger men said it was a damn shame to shoot an elephant for killing a coolie, because an elephant was worth more than any damn Coringhee2 coolie. And afterwards I was very glad that the coolie had been killed; it put me legally in the right and it gave me a sufficient pretext for shooting the elephant. I often wondered whether any of the others grasped that I had done it solely to avoid looking a fool.

1. Butcher knives. 2 Refers to (mainly Telugu-speaking) immigrants from southern India.

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. What does the word “this” in the second line refer to? 2. What happened when a nimble Burman tripped the narrator up on the football field? 3. How did the narrator feel towards the young Buddhist priests? 4. What happened in the town that was enlightening? 5. What did the elephant do in the town? 6. How, according to the narrator, do people treat a story in the East? 7. Why does the writer say, “I knew with perfect certainty that I ought not to shoot the elephant”? Does he stand by what he says? 8. Why did the narrator shoot the elephant? Account for the motives that led him to shoot. Are they personal motives, circumstantial motives, social motives, or political motives? 9. What happened when the narrator pulled the trigger? 10. What was the reaction of the owner and the other Europeans towards the shooting of the elephant? 11. What does “the insults hooted after me when I was at a safe distance” mean? 12. “And the sooner I chucked up my job and got out of it the better.” Why does the narrator say this? 13. “When their attack of ‘must’ is due.” Can you elaborate on the word “must”? 14. Who was now twelve hours’ journey away? 15. Whose face had scored a trench a foot deep and a couple of yards long? 16. “I looked at the sea of yellow faces above the garish clothes.” Whose are the yellow faces? 17. “I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man’s dominion in the East.” What does the narrator mean? 18. “When the white man turns tyrant it is his own freedom that he destroys.” Can you elaborate? 19. “He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib.” Who is “he”? 20. “At that age I was not squeamish about killing animals.” What does the writer mean?

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Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. But in reality I was only an absurd puppet. What kind of puppet? a) powerful b) ridiculous c) alone

d) nice

2. The wretched prisoners huddling in the stinking cages of the lock-ups, and the grey, cowed faces of the long-term convicts could be seen everywhere. “Cowed” faces are: a) dark b) beautiful c) light d) scared 3. I thought that the greatest joy in the world would be to drive a bayonet into a Buddhist priest’s guts. “Drive” here means: a) hit b) turn c) push d) diminish 4. He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib. By “dummy,” the writer means that the person is: a) wet

b) not real

c) stupid

d) both b and c

5. The scarred buttocks of the men who had been flogged with bamboos. “Flogged” here means: a) whipped b) relaxed c) fixed d) chained 6. It was an immense crowed. The crowd was: a) gigantic b) colossal

c) enormous

7. That is invariably the case in the East. “Invariably” here means: a) unfortunately b) unfriendly c) unwisely

d) all of the above

d) unchangeably

8. I had almost made up my mind that the whole story was a pack of lies. By “made up my mind,” the writer means that he had: a) resolved b) decided c) declared d) both a and b

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9. A nimble Burman tripped me up on the football field. What was the Burman like? a) active

b) quick

c) ready

10. All this was perplexing and upsetting. “Perplexing” here means: a) confusing b) relaxing c) puzzling

d) all of the above

d) both a and c

11. In the end, the sneering yellow faces of young men that met me everywhere, the insults hooted after me ... The yellow faces were: a) shining b) smiling c) snuffing d) struggling 12. It was a very poor quarter, a labyrinth of squalid bamboo huts, thatched with palm-leaf, winding all over a steep hillside. The bamboo huts were: a) bright b) nasty c) dirty d) both b and c

Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Lower = lower lying portion of a country Made up my mind = decided Metalled = (of a road) made of broken stones Nimble = quick No one had the guts to raise a riot = no one dared to revolt against the government.

Orderly = army officer’s attendant Perceived = became aware of Perplexing = confusing Perspective = view Posing = pretending Preoccupied = thinking or worrying about something too much

Shooting an Elephant

Quarters = living places; lodgings Ravaging = damaging Remnant = the remains of something Resolute = determined Roundabout = indirect Scarred = wounded Seemingly = apparently Shoved = pushed Shrunken = having become smaller Sneering = smiling mockingly Soggy = very wet Squalid = dirty Squeamish = easily disgusted Still less = and certainly not Stock = supply Stricken = affected by something

37

Stripped = took off Stuffing = pushing Stuffy = without fresh air; stale Supplant = replace Thatched = roofed in a plantbased material Think out = consider Trail = a path through the countryside, often made or used for a particular purpose Trampled on = crushed Tripped up = caused to fall down Unnerving = making someone feel less confident and slightly frightened Yelled = shouted or made a loud noise

CHAPTER FIVE CYRUS (FOUNDER OF HUMAN RIGHTS) JAMAL M. KASHANI

No man throughout history can parallel the achievements of Cyrus the Achaemenid. His is a story full of triumphs and adversity, a story of a rare genius and a superb leader of men, who cheated death countless times. From a humble beginning, he built an empire beyond the dreams of Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander of Macedon, Julius Caesar or the ruthless Jenghiz Khan. It was an empire beyond the vision of any conqueror who came before or after him, built on tolerance and justice, conceptions utterly alien to the spirit and imagination of the age. Within this vast domain, he gave men of all races, creeds and colors not only freedom from the feudalistic lords of their class and tribes, but guaranteed equal privileges for all: the Rights of Man. No man valued freedom more than Cyrus. To him life itself had little meaning without freedom. When he saw his people in the streets and before the altars of Anshan, praying for freedom from the despotic rule of the Medes, he responded to their plea with courage and promptness. He overcame the Medes and freed his people from an alien domination. He then proceeded to conquer the destroyers of Asshur, rebuilt Asshur and Babylon to their former glory, and bestowed them to their native rulers. In the first-ever declaration of human rights, inscribed in cuneiform script in 539 B.C. on a clay cylinder (now in the possession of the British Museum) he said: “When I entered Babylon … I did not allow anyone to terrorize the land of Sumer and Akkad. I kept in view the needs of Babylon and all its sanctuaries to promote their well-being. The citizens of Babylon … I lifted their unbecoming yoke. Their dilapidated dwellings I restored. I put an end to their misfortunes.” This was Cyrus’ declaration at Babylon. When the city gates were opened to him, Cyrus dismounted from his horse and walked towards the Temple of Bel, which was guarded by bearded High Priests in richly ornamented garb. He passed through their

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lines in the corridor of the holy temple until he reached the scared alter. There he laid the royal rod of authority, which he carried at the feet of Marduk. Marduk was the great God of all Babylon, the dreaded lord of the Priests and the laymen, the God who had created the heaven and earth, constellations and planets and fixed their movements, and who had finally created mankind out of nothingness. The Supreme Priest of Babylon stepped forward and picked up the rod lying at the feet of Marduk. He handed it back to Cyrus and proclaimed him as the rightful ruler of Babylon. Cyrus placed his hand on Marduk and swore that he would protect the Gods of Babylon and its people against all harm. By this gesture Cyrus indicated to the people and the High Priests of Babylon that he not only tolerated Marduk worship but served him with reverence as long as the Faith promoted the principles of truth, justice and the freedom of men. Cyrus repaired the ruined dwellings of the humble classes and rebuilt their traditional shrine, the great Temple of Marduk. He removed the yoke of servitude in which people lived by taking away the iron plows from the priests and landlords and handing them back to the farmers to whom they really belonged. He abolished the water tax and unjust land dues, and stopped the age-old custom of employing slaves. Impressed by these acts, the Elders of the Jews living in captivity approached Cyrus and cried out for freedom from their bondage. He heard their plea, appeared before them and was given a tremendous ovation by the multitude. He silenced them by waving the royal rod and then proclaimed: “The lord God of Heaven … hath charged me to build Him a house at Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever is among you of all his people … let him go up to Jerusalem, which is in Judah and rebuild the house of the lord.” The Elders of the Jews appealed to Cyrus to build the great Temple of Jehovah. He agreed to let the expense for rebuilding the temple be given out of the King’s treasury. Cyrus was not there to see the House of the Lord completed in Jerusalem, but his spirit shared the freedom of the Jews, and their glory. Cyrus never tolerated the man of strength taking away the labor and earnings of the weak without labor of his own. He declared, “It is the law, henceforth, that the strong shall not injure the weak. I, Cyrus, who enforce the law, understand that you have been injured. Who else will testify?”

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To the noblemen and lords of Babylon and Marcanda who gathered round him and begged to be allowed to erect a great palace for his permanent dwelling and who offered for his pleasure the most beautiful maidens of noblest birth, Cyrus said, “I have not come here to share in your bribes and treachery. I have not come here to live a life of deceit and debauchery. My mission is to free men and women from servitude, to restore their dwellings, to increase the yield of the lands and to rebuild their sacred shrines, so that all mankind, men of all races and creeds can live in peace, happiness and freedom under the Achaemenid and pay homage to their Gods.” This farsightedness caused Plato to comment: “Cyrus was a great leader and a great friend of his people. During his reign the Persians ruled numerous peoples. He gave to all of them the rights of free men. And by that, he won their hearts, and his soldiers stood ready to face any peril in order to serve him. If among his subjects there was found someone who could offer just and reasonable advice, he was not angry; rather, he gave the subject complete freedom of speech. He rewarded all those who provided him good advice. This encouraged the sages to put at his disposal their reason and their experience. Under his rule the vast Persian Empire realized an ever-increasing well-being, profiting from the liberties accorded to it through the wisdom of the King and from the harmony which prevailed throughout the country and from which his successors benefited.” At the break of dawn after the death of Cyrus in 529 B.C., a Magus was observed keeping watch at the lowest step of the tomb of the King. He said he was a pilgrim and his pilgrimage would end once he had made a suitable garden around the tomb of the one who never forgot for a moment, even at the height of conquest, the Rights of Man.

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. In what ways is Cyrus’s career as a conqueror unique? 2. What concepts of Cyrus were alien to the spirit and imagination of his age? 3. In what ways did he set men free, and what distinctions did he make among races, creeds and colors? 4. What was one of the main reasons for Cyrus’s conquest of the Medes? 5. How was the first-ever declaration of human rights prepared? 6. In speaking about the Babylonians, what did Cyrus mean when he wrote that he “lifted their unbecoming yoke”? 7. What beliefs did Babylonians hold about their great God, Marduk? 8. How did Cyrus treat the religious beliefs and practices of the Babylonians? 9. Why was it important that Cyrus returned the plows to the Babylonian farmers? What did this mean? 10. Which Babylonian practices did he stop, or modify, to help the common people? 11. Who financed the rebuilding of the great Temple of Jehovah in Jerusalem? 12. What did Cyrus believe to be the obligation of “the man of strength”? 13. How did the noblemen and lords of Babylon try to gain favor with Cyrus? 14. What did he believe were his own obligations to the people that he had conquered? 15. Why did Plato have a high opinion of Cyrus? 16. How did Cyrus benefit from the brains and experience of others? 17. What did Cyrus establish that especially benefited his successors? 18. Why did the Magus-pilgrim wish to build a garden around Cyrus’s tomb?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. No man throughout history can parallel the achievements of Cyrus the Achaemenid. “Parallel” here means: a) match b) follow c) compare with d) comprehend

Cyrus (Founder of Human Rights)

2. Cyrus’s story is full of triumphs and adversity. “Adversity” here denotes: a) unlucky b) misfortune c) contrary

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d) fate

3. He built an empire beyond the dreams of the ruthless Jenghiz Khan. This means that Jenghiz Khan was: a) selfish b) impolite c) merciless d) cruelty 4. Cyrus’s conceptions were utterly alien to the spirit and imagination of the age. This means that his conceptions were: a) barbaric b) superior c) unpleasant d) foreign 5. Cyrus saw his people praying for freedom from the despotic rule of the Medes. “Despotic” here denotes: a) dictator b) oppressive c) slavery d) foreign 6. Cyrus kept in mind the needs of Babylon and all its sanctuaries to promote their well-being. “Sanctuaries” here are: a) safety b) protection c) religions d) temples 7. Cyrus wrote: “Their dilapidated dwellings I restored.” These buildings were: a) ruined b) destroyed c) old-fashioned d) overcrowded 8. The Supreme Priest of Babylon proclaimed Cyrus as the rightful ruler of Babylon. The means that he: a) elected b) appointed c) declared d) crowned 9. Cyrus served Marduk with reverence as long as the Faith promoted the principles of truth, justice and the freedom of man. “reverence” here denotes: a) holiness b) honor c) religion d) respectful 10. Cyrus removed the yoke of servitude in which people lived. The peoples’ condition was one of: a) slave b) bondage c) disrespect d) poverty

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11. He abolished the water tax and unjust land dues. “Dues” in this context denotes: a) owes b) charges c) divisions d) obligate 12. Cyrus appeared before the Jews and was given a tremendous ovation by the multitude. This means that they gave him: a) support b) applause c) disapproval d) public tribute 13. He declared … “I, Cyrus, who enforce the law, understand that you have been injured.” “Enforce” here means: a) execute b) make c) understand d) strength 14. Cyrus asked, “Who else will testify?” “Testify” means: a) prove b) bear witness c) evidence

d) swear to be honest

15. Cyrus said … “I have not come here to live a life of deceit and treachery.” “Treachery” refers to: a) dishonorable b) sinfulness c) treason d) dishonest 16. Cyrus’s farsightedness caused Plato to comment favorably on him. “Farsighted” here denotes: a) long distance b) good eyesight c) knowledge d) good judgment 17. Plato said that Cyrus’s soldiers stood ready to face any peril in order to serve him. By “peril,” Plato meant: a) possibility b) enemy c) danger d) death 18. Cyrus’s encouragement made the sages put at his disposal their reason and their experience. These “sages” were: a) noblemen b) students c) old men d) wise men 19. Even at the height of conquest, Cyrus never forgot the Rights of Man. “Conquest” here refers to: a) victory b) oppression c) tyranny d) success

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Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Achieve = accomplish Adversity = bad luck; misfortune Alien = strange; unknown; foreign Appeal to = request; petition Bestow = give; present Captivity = slavery; servitude; bondage Charge = order Constellation = group or collection of stars Corridor = hallway; passageway Creed = a set of basic beliefs Debauchery = corruption; debasement Despotic = tyrannical; absolute Dilapidated = ruined; falling into decay Domains = lands belonging to the ruler or government Enforce = execute or carry out orders Farsightedness= vision; prudence Genius = brilliance; great intellect Henceforth = after this time Keep in view = bear in mind; remember

Lift a yoke = to free someone Mission = task or function undertaken Multitude = crowd Ovation = applause; homage; tribute Pay homage to = worship; give allegiance to Peril = danger Planet = a celestial body that does not give off its own light Prevail = exist; continue Proclaim = declare Put at one’s disposal = make available for use Ruthless = cruel; pitiless; merciless Sage = wise man; thinker Sanctuary = religious building; temple Superb = outstanding; first-rate Testify = bear witness; attest Tolerate = accept without trying to change; suffer Treachery = violation of faith or loyalty Unbecoming = undignified; demeaning

CHAPTER SIX TELEVISION IN MODERN LIFE JOHN STEINBECK

How to Tell Good Guys from Bad Guys TELEVISION HAS CREPT UPON US SO GRADUALLY IN AMERICA THAT WE HAVE NOT yet become aware of the extent of its impact for good or bad. I myself do not look at it very often except for its coverage of sporting events, news, and politics. Indeed, I get most of my impressions of the medium from my young sons. Whether for good or bad, television has taken the place of the sugar-tit, soothing syrups, and the mild narcotics parents in other days used to reduce their children to semi consciousness and consequently to semi noisiness. In the past, a harassed parent would say, “Go sit in a chair!” or “Go outside and play!” or “If you don't stop that noise, I’m going to beat your dear little brains out!” The present-day parent suggests, “Why don’t you go look at television?” From that moment the screams, shouts, revolver shots, and crashes of motor accidents come from the loudspeaker, not from the child. For some reason, this is presumed to lie more relaxing to the parent. The effect on the child has yet to be determined. I have observed the physical symptoms of television-looking on children as well as on adults. The mouth grows slack and the lips hang open; the eyes take on a hypnotized or slack look; the nose runs rather more than usual; the backbone turns to water and the fingers slowly and methodically pick the designs out of brocade furniture. Such is the appearance of semi consciousness that one wonders how much of the “message” of television is getting through to the brain. This wonder is further strengthened by the fact that a television-looker will look at anything at all and for hours. Recently I came into a room to find my

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eight-year-old son Catbird sprawled in a chair, idiot slackness on his face, with the doped eyes of an opium smoker. On the television screen stood a young woman of mammary distinction with ice-cream hair listening to a man in thick glasses and a doctor’s smock. “What’s happening?” I asked. Catbird answered in the monotone of the sleep-talker which is known as television voice, “She is asking if she should dye her hair.” “What is the doctor’s reaction?” “If she uses Trutone it's all right,” said Catbird. “But if she uses ordinary or adulterated products, her hair will split and lose its “golden natural sheen”. The big economy size is two dollars and ninety-eight cents if you act now,” said Catbird. You see, something was getting through to him. He looked punchdrunk, but he was absorbing. I did not feel it fair to interject a fact I have observed—that natural golden sheen does not exist in nature. But I did think of my friend Elia Kazan’s cry of despair, and although it is a digression I shall put it down. We were having dinner in a lovely little restaurant in California. At the table next to us were six beautiful, young, well-dressed American girls of the age and appearance of magazine advertisements. There was only one difficulty with their perfection. You couldn’t tell them apart. Kazan, who is a primitive of a species once known as men, regarded the little beauties with distaste, and finally in more sorrow than anger cried. “It’s years since I’ve seen or smelled a dame! It’s all products, Golden Glint, I’ Eaud’Eau, Butisan, Elyn’s puff-adder cream—I remember I used to like how women smelled. Nowadays it’s all products!” End of digression. When television in America first began to be a threat to the motionpicture industry that industry fought back by refusing to allow its films to be shown on the home screens. One never saw new pictures, but there were whole blocks of the films called Westerns which were owned by independents and these were released to the television stations. The result is that at nearly any time of the day or night you can find a Western being shown on some television stations. It is not

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only the children who see them. All of America sees them. They are typically an American conception, the cowboy picture. The story never varies and the conventions are savagely adhered to. The hero never kisses a girl. He loves his horse and he stands for right and justice. Any change in the story or the conventions would be taken as an outrage. Out of these films folk heroes have grown up—Hop-a-long Cassidy, the Lone Ranger, Roy Rogers, and Gene Autry. These are more than great men. They are symbols of courage, purity, simplicity, honesty, and right. You must understand that nearly every American is drenched in the tradition of the Western, which is, of course, the celebration of a whole pattern of American life that never existed. One afternoon, hearing gunfire from the room where our television set is installed, I went in with that losing intention of fraternizing with my son for a little while. There sat Catbird with the cretinous expression I have learned to recognize. A Western was in progress. “What's going on?” I asked. He looked at me in wonder. “What do you mean, what’s going on? Don’t you know?” “Well, no. Tell me!” He was kind to me. Explained as though I were the child. “Well, the Bad Guy is trying to steal her father’s ranch. But the Good Guy won’t let him. Bullet figured out the plot.” “Who is Bullet?” “Why, the Good Guy’s horse.” “Now wait,” I said, “which one is the Good Guy?” “The one with the white hat.” “Then the one with the black hat is the Bad Guy?” “Anybody knows Hint” said Catbird. For a time I watched the picture, and I realized that I had been ignoring a part of our life that everybody knows. I was interested in the characterization. The girl, known as Her or She, was a blonde, very pretty

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but completely unvoluptuous because these are family pictures. Sometimes she wore a simple gingham dress and sometimes a leather skirt and boots, but always she had a bit of a bow in her hair and her face was untroubled with emotion or, one might almost say, intelligence. This also is part of the convention. She is a symbol, and any acting would get her thrown out of the picture by popular acclaim. The Good Guy not only wore a white hat but light-colored clothes, shining boots, tight riding pants, and a shirt embroidered with scrolls and flowers. In my young days I used to work with cattle, and our costume was blue jeans, a leather jacket, and boots with run-over heels. The cleaning bill alone of this gorgeous screen cowboy would have been four times what our pay was in a year. The Good Guy had very little change of facial expression. He went through his fantastic set of adventures with no show of emotion. This is another convention and proves that he is very brave and very pure. He is also scrubbed and has an immaculate shave. I turned my attention to the Bad Guy. He wore a black hat and dark clothing, but his clothing was definitely not only unclean but unpressed. He had stubble of beard but the greatest contrast was in his face. His was not an immobile face. He leered, he sneered, and he had a nasty laugh. He bullied and shouted. He looked evil. While he did not swear, because this is a Family Picture, he said things like “Wall dog it” and “You rat” and “I’ll cut off your ears and eat ’em,” which would indicate that his language was not only coarse but might, off screen, be vulgar. He was, in a word, a Bad Guy. I found a certain interest in the Bad Guy which was lacking in the Good Guy. “Which one do you like best?” I asked. Catbird removed his anaesthetized eyes from the screen. “What do you mean?” “Do you like the Good Guy or the Bad Guy?” He sighed at my ignorance and looked back at the screen. “Are you kidding?” he asked. “The Good Guy of course.” Now a new character began to emerge. He puzzled me because he wore a gray hat. I felt a little embarrassed about asking my son, the

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expert, but I gathered my courage. “Catbird,” I asked shyly, “what kind of a guy is that, the one in the gray hat?” He was sweet to me then. I think until that moment he had not understood the abysmal extent of my ignorance. “He’s the In-Between Guy.” Catbird explained kindly. “If he starts bad he ends good and if he starts good he ends bad.” “What’s this one going to do?” “See how he’s sneering and needs a shave?” my son asked. “Yes.” “Well, the picture’s just started, so that guy is going to end good and help the Good Guy get Her father’s ranch back.” “How can you be sure?” I asked. Catbird gave me a cold look. “He’s got a gray hat, hasn’t he? Now don’t talk. It’s about time for the chase.” There it was, not only a tight, true criticism of a whole art form but to a certain extent of life itself. I was deeply impressed because this simple explanation seemed to mean something to me more profound than television or Westerns. Several nights later I told the Catbird criticism to a friend who is a producer. He has produced many successful musical comedies. My friend has an uncanny perception for the public mind and also for its likes and dislikes. You have to have if you produce musical shows. He listened and nodded and didn’t think it was a cute child story. He said, “It’s not kid stuff at all. There’s a whole generation in this country that makes its judgments pretty much on that basis.”

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. What is the writer’s view concerning television? Do you agree with him? 2. According to the writer, what are the advantages of television? Do you consider them advantages too? 3. What are the physical symptoms of television-looking in children as well as in adults? 4. On the basis of the writer’s analysis of Western movies, how would you explain their enormous popularity throughout the world? 5. The author makes much of the clear-cut distinction between “Good Guys” and “Bad Guys”. Why should this clean-cut distinction be especially appealing to children? 6. Does the writer express his point of view explicitly?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. Television has crept upon us so gradually in America that we have not yet become aware of the extent of its impact for good or bad. What has television done? a) moved rapidly b) moved slowly c) fastened d) threatened 2. In the past, a harassed parent would say, “Go sit in a chair!” This parent is: a) quick b) nimble c) friendly d) worried 3. The mouth grows slack and the lips hang open. “Slack” here means: a) not tight b) careful c) distinct

d) skilled

4. But if she uses ordinary or adulterated products, her hair will split. “Adulterated” products are: a) strange b) made poorer in quality c) abnormal d) shy 5. I did not feel it fair to interject a fact I have observed. “Interject” means: a) interest b) interpose c) interlude d) look

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6. Nearly every American is drenched in the tradition. This means that nearly every American is: a) introduced b) intrinsic c) inadequate d) inundated 7. I went in with that losing intention of fraternizing with my son. By “fraternizing,” the writer means: a) become friendly b) overshadowing c) fraud d) impersonate 8. She was a blond, very pretty but completely unvoluptuous. “Unvoluptuous” here denotes: a) not having a sexually desirable figure b) mild c) having an untidy figure d) unveiled 9. He is also scrubbed and has an immaculate shave. What do these two terms mean here? a) canceled-out / neat b) clean / perfect c) cleaned with a brush / tidy d) deleted / holy 10. He had a stubble of beard. “Stubble” here means: a) long hair b) short hair

c) shaved

d) growth

11. He leered, he sneered, and he had a nasty laugh. “Leered” here means: a) desired b) looked pleasantly c) looked unpleasantly d) left 12. Catbird removed his anaesthetized eyes from the screen. This means that his eyes were: a) conscious b) amplified c) curious d) deprived of sensation 13. Until that moment, he had not understood the abysmal extent of my ignorance. “Abysmal” means: a) extremely bad b) accidental c) necessary d) full 14. My friend has an uncanny perception for the public mind. This means a perception that is: a) natural b) unnatural c) explicit d) unclean

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Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Abysmal = very bad or poor in quality Anaesthetized = unconscious Brocade = a thick, expensive material, often made of silk, with a raised pattern on it Bullied = to bully is to use strength or power to hurt or frighten somebody Crept = (past tense of creep), move slowly and carefully, esp. in order to avoid being heard or noticed Cretinous = stupid Dame = informal word in American English to refer to a woman Doped eyes = with eyes like those of an addicted person Drenched = saturated; inundated Embroidered = decorated cloth with needlework Fraternizing = being friendly Gingham = cotton clothes that have squares or stripes. Harassed = tired and anxious because you have too much to do

Immaculate = perfectly clean or tidy “Mammary distinction” = having large breasts Methodically = carefully and in order Outrage = a disgrace; scandal Punch-drunk = dazed and confused Rotting away = decaying Savagely = violently Scrolls = decoration or shape on fabric Scrubbed = clean Semiconscious = half alert Sheen = if the surface of something has a sheen, it has a smooth and gentle brightness Slack = loose and not firmly stretched or tightly in position Smock = a loose garment, often worn over other clothes to protect them Sprawled = sitting or lying with arms and legs stretched out in a careless way

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Stubble = the very short hair on a man’s face when he has not shaved recently

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Uncanny = strange and hard to explain Unvoluptuous = not seductive

CHAPTER SEVEN BULLFIGHTING ERNEST HEMINGWAY

Bullfighting Is Not a Sport—It Is a Tragedy Bullfighting is not a sport. It is a tragedy, and it symbolizes the struggle between man and the beasts. There are usually six bulls to a fight. A fight is called a cordial de toros. Fighting bulls are bred like race horses, some of the oldest breeding establishments being several hundred years old. A good bull is worth about $2000. They are bred for speed, strength and viciousness. In other words a good fighting bull is an absolutely incorrigible bad bull. Bullfighting is an exceedingly dangerous occupation. In sixteen fights I saw there were only two in which there was no one badly hurt. On the other hand it is very remunerative. A popular espada gets $5000 for his afternoon’s work. An unpopular espada though may not get $500, both run the same risks. It is a good deal like Grand Opera for the really great matadors except they run the chance of being killed every time they cannot hit high C. No one at any time in the fight can approach the bull except directly from the front. That is where the danger comes. There are also all sorts of complicated passes that must be done with the cape, each requiring as much technique as a champion billiard player. And underneath it all is the necessity for playing the old tragedy in the absolutely custom bound, lawlaid-down way. It must all be done gracefully, seemingly effortlessly and always with dignity. The worst criticism the Spaniards ever make of a bullfighter is that his work is “vulgar”. The three absolute acts of the tragedy are first the entry of the bull when the picadors receive the shock of his attacks and attempt to protect their horses with their lances. Then the horses go out and the second act is

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the planting of the banderillos. This is one of the most interesting and difficult parts but among the easiest for a new bullfight fan to appreciate in technique. The banderillos are three-foot, gaily colored darts with a small fish hook prong in the end. The man who is going to plant them walks out into the arena alone with the bull. He lifts the banderillos at arm’s length and points them toward the bull. Then he calls “Toro! Toro!” The bull charges and the banderillos rises to his toes, bends in a curve forward and just as the bull is about to hit him drops the darts into the bull’s hump just back of his horns. They must go in evenly, one on each side. They must not be shoved, or thrown or stuck in from the side. This is the first time the bull has been completely baffled, there is the prick of the dart that he cannot escape and there are no horses for him to charge into. But he charges the man again and again and each time he gets a pair of the long banderillos that hang from his hump by their tiny barbs and flop like porcupine quills. Last is the death of the bull, which is in the hands of the matador who has had charge of the bull since his first attack. Each matador has two bulls in the afternoon. The death of the bull is most formal and can only be brought about in one way, directly from the front by the matador who must receive the bull in full charge and kill him with a sword thrust between the shoulders just back of the neck and between the horns. Before killing the bull he must do a series of passes with the muleta, a piece of red cloth he carries about the size of a large napkin. With the muleta the torero must show his complete mastery of the bull, must make the bull miss him again and again by inches, before he is allowed to kill him. It is in this phase that most of the fatal accidents occur. The word “toreador” is obsolete Spanish and is never used. The torero is usually called an espada or swordsman. He must be proficient in all three acts of the fight. In the first he uses the cape and does veronicas and protects the picadors by taking the bull out and away from them when they are spilled to the ground. In the second act he plants the banderillos. In the third act he masters the bull with the muleta and kills him. Few toreros excel in all three departments. Some, like young Chicuelo, are unapproachable in their cape work. Others like the late Joselito are wonderful banderillos. Only a few are great killers. Most of the greatest killers are gypsies.

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. Can you identify the writer’s view concerning bullfighting in this passage? 2. What is it that attracts people to events like bullfighting? 3. The writer has used many Spanish words in this text. What is the reason? Has he provided enough context to enable the reader to guess the meanings of unfamiliar words from the text? Cite a few examples from the text. 4. Why is bullfighting dangerous? 5. Read the text again. Which stages of bullfighting have been compared to billiards? Why? 6. In the fifth paragraph, the writer uses “he” for the bull. What does it signify? Discuss! 7. Why do the matadors “take a red rag to the bull?” Do they really want to make it very angry? Why?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. They are bred for speed, strength and viciousness. The third quality here means: a) preference b) violence c) change d) veteran 2. Bull fighting is very remunerative. This means that it is: a) dangerous b) generous c) profitable

d) bulky

3. They must go in evenly, one on each side. “Evenly” here means: a) in a changing manner b) in a rough manner c) irregularly d) in a steady manner 4. With the muleta the torero must show his complete mastery of the bull. The “torero” is the: a) matador b) muleta c) bullfighter d) both a and c

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5. The word “toreador” is obsolete Spanish. This means that the word is: a) an obstacle b) out of date c) wrong

d) reasonable

6. There is the prick of the dart that the bull cannot escape. “Prick” here means: a) obscurity b) injury c) wound d) both b and c

Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Baffled = confused Barbs = arrows; points Bred = raised; brought up Breeding = rearing; raising Cape = shawl Charges = attacks; rushes Establishments= organizations Excel = outshine; stand out Flop = fall; drop Gaily = brightly Gracefully = elegantly; pleasingly Gypsies= ramblers; travelers; wanderers High C = at or near the top of the “C” note in music Hump = a large lump on the back of some animals Incorrigible = unalterable Lances = weapons with a long wooden handle and a pointed

metal end, which were used by people fighting on horses in the past Law-laid-down = legalized; prescribed by rules Matadors = bullfighters Picadors = horseman who jabs the bull with a lance to weaken its neck and shoulder muscles Planting = inserting Porcupine = an animal covered with long, stiff parts like needles (called quills), which it can raise to protect itself when attacked Prick = wound; pinhole Prong = tip; point Quills = needles of a porcupine Remunerative = rewarding; profitable

Bullfighting

Shoved = pressed Spaniards = Spanish people Torero = bullfighter Veronicas = passes with the

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cape in bullfighting Viciousness = Cruelty; savagery Vulgar = tasteless; not suitable; common

CHAPTER EIGHT SNOBBERY ALDOUS HUXLEY

All Men Are Snobs about Something One is almost tempted to add: There is nothing about which men cannot feel snobbish. But this would doubtless be an exaggeration. There are certain disfiguring and mortal diseases about which there has probably never been any snobbery. I cannot imagine, for example, that there are any leprosy-snobs. More picturesque diseases, even when they are dangerous, and less dangerous diseases, particularly when they are the diseases of the rich, can be and very frequently are a source of snobbish self-importance. I have met several adolescent consumption-snobs, who thought that it would be romantic to fade away in the flower of youth, like Keats or Marie BashKirtseff. Alas, the final stages of the consumptive fading are generally a good deal less romantic than these ingenuous young tubercle-snobs seem to imagine. To anyone who has actually witnessed these final stages, the complacent poeticizings of these adolescents must seem as exasperating as they are profoundly pathetic. In the case of those commoner disease-snobs, whose claim to distinction is that they suffer from one of the maladies of the rich, exasperation is not tempered by very much sympathy. People who possess sufficient leisure, sufficient wealth, not to mention sufficient health, to go travelling from spa to spa, from doctor to fashionable doctor in search of cures from problematical diseases (which, in so far as they exist at all, probably have their source in overeating) cannot expect us to be very lavish in our solicitude and pity. Disease-snobbery is only one out of a great multitude of snobberies, of which now some others take pride of place in general esteem. For snobberies ebb and flow; their empire rises, declines, and falls in the most approved historical manner. What were good snobberies a hundred years ago are now out of fashion. Thus, the snobbery of family is everywhere on the decline. The snobbery of culture, still strong, has now to wrestle with

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an organized and active low-browism with snobbery of ignorance and stupidity unique, so far as I know, in the whole of history. Hardly less characteristic of our age is that repulsive booze-snobbery, born of American prohibition. The malefic influences of this snobbery are rapidly spreading all over the world. Even in France, where the existence of so many varieties of delicious wine has hitherto imposed a judicious connoisseurship and has led to the branding of mere drinking as a brutish solecism, even in France the American booze-snobbery, with its odious accompaniments—a taste for hard drinks in general and for cocktails in particular—is making headway among the rich. Boozesnobbery has now made it socially permissible, and in some circles even rather creditable, for well-brought-up men and (this is the novelty) well-brought-up women of all ages, from fifteen to seventy, to be seen drunken, if not in public, at least in the very much tempered privacy of a party. Modernity-snobbery, though not exclusive to our age, has come to assume an unprecedented importance. The reasons for this are simple and of a strictly economic character. Thanks to modern machinery, production is out-running consumption. Organized waste among consumers is the first condition of our industrial prosperity. The sooner a consumer throws away the object he has bought and buys another, the better for the producer. At the same time, of course, the producer must do his bit by producing nothing but the most perishable articles. “The man who builds a skyscraper to last for more than forty years is a traitor to the building trade.” The words are those of a great American contractor. Substitute motor car, boots, suit of clothes, etc, for skyscraper, and one year, three months, six months, and so on for forty years, and you have the gospel of any leader of any modern industry. The modernity-snob, it is obvious, is this industrialist’s best friend. For modernity-snobs naturally tend to throw away their old possessions and buy new ones at a greater rate than those who are not modernitysnobs. Therefore it is in the producer’s interest to encourage modernity-snobbery. Which in fact he does so—on an enormous scale and to the tune of millions and millions a year—by means of advertising. The newspapers do their best to help those who help them; and to the flood of advertisement is added a flood of less directly paidfor propaganda in favour of modernity-snobbery. The public is taught that up-to-datedness is one of the first duties of man. Docile, it accepts the reiterated suggestion. We are all modernity-snobs now. #Exercise 1

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

What different types of snobbery does the writer mention in this text? Which types of snobbery are said to be of unique importance? Why? Which kind of snobbery has to struggle with “low-browism”? How can disease be a source of snobbery? Do different types of snobbery change according to fashion? What does the writer mean by “booze-snobbery”? Based on what you have read in this essay, why do people become snobs?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. There are certain disfiguring and mortal diseases about which there has probably never been any snobbery. “Disfiguring” here means: a) disgracing b) spoiling c) disintegrating d) dislocating 2. The complacent poeticizings of these adolescents must seem … exasperating. “Complacent” here means: a) curious about b) satisfied with c) complain about d) disobey 3. These adolescents must seem … exasperating. This means that they were: a) excited b) exchanged c) disordered

d) irritating

4. These adolescents … are profoundly pathetic. This means that they were: a) amusing b) pretty c) causing sadness d) delightful 5. People … cannot expect us to be very lavish in our solicitude and pity. This means that we cannot be: a) famous b) generous c) shrewd d) clever

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6. People … cannot expect us to be very lavish in our solicitude and pity. “Solicitude” means: a) anxiety b) senility c) selfishness d) solitude 7. Snobberies ebb and flow. “Ebb” means: a) appear b) faint c) embrace d) strengthen 8. France … has hitherto imposed a judicious connoisseurship. “Judicious” here means: a) isolated b) irrelevant c) irresistible d) showing good sense 9. France … has hitherto imposed a judicious connoisseurship. “Connoisseurship” means a) appreciation b) connotation c) bad evaluation d) conclusion 10. Modern snobbery … has come to assume an unprecedented importance. Its importance is: a) ordinary b) unheard c) congruent d) similar

Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Booze = (slang) any alcoholic beverage Brutish= uncivilized; violent; wild Complacent = smug

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Connoisseurship = the status of being competent to pass critical judgments in an art, particularly one of the fine arts, or in matters of taste Consumption= tuberculosis of the lungs, progressive wasting of the body Disfigure = spoil; mar Docile = submissive; manageable; malleable; obedient Ebb = a flowing backward or away; decline or decay Exasperating = annoying; infuriating Gospel = message; a doctrine regarded as of prime importance Hitherto = up to this time; until now Ingenuous = frank; straightforward; open; naïve Lavish = extravagant; generous; openhanded Leprosy = disease in which the skin becomes rough, flesh and nerves are destroyed, and fingers drop off Low-browism = state of being uncultured, not interested in art, books, etc. Malefic = evil; wicked Marie Bash-Kirtseff = singer; painter, and writer, who died at the age of twenty-five Odious = very unpleasant; detestable Pathetic = causing pity or sorrow Perishable = subject to decay, ruin, or destruction Picturesque = charming; pleasing; vivid Poeticize = to make (thoughts, feelings, etc.) poetic; to express in poetry. Prohibition = the legal prohibiting of the manufacture and sale of alcoholic drinks for common consumption; the period (1920–33) when the Eighteenth Amendment was in force and alcoholic beverages could not legally be manufactured, transported, or sold in the US. Propaganda = information spread to influence public opinion Prosperity = richness; success Repulsive = disgusting; extremely unpleasant Solecism = a breach of good manners or etiquette Solicitude = concern; care Spa = spring of mineral water where people come to improve their health Tubercle = a small, firm, rounded nodule or swelling as the characteristic lesion of tuberculosis Unprecedented = never having happened before

CHAPTER NINE A VOYAGE TO LILLIPUT JONATHAN SWIFT

I lay down on the grass, which was very short and soft, where I slept sounder than ever I remember to have done in my life, and, as I reckoned, above nine hours; for when I awakened, it was just daylight. I attempted to rise, but was not able to stir: for as I happened to lie on my back, I found my arms and legs were strongly fastened on each side to the ground; and my hair, which was long and thick, tied down in the same manner. I likewise felt several slender ligatures across my body, from my armpits to my thighs. I could only look upwards, the sun began to grow hot, and the light offended my eyes. I heard a confused noise about me, but, in the posture I lay, could see nothing except the sky. In a little time I felt something alive moving on my left leg, which advancing gently forward over my breast, came almost up to my chin; when bending my eyes downwards as much as I could, I perceived it to be a human creature not six inches high, with a bow and arrow in his hands, and a quiver at his back. In the meantime, I felt at least forty more of the same kind (as I conjectured) following the first. I was in the utmost astonishment, and roared so loud, that they all ran back in a fright; and some of them, as I was afterwards told, were hurt with the falls they got by leaping from my sides upon the ground. .

… I heard one of them cry aloud, Tolgophonac, when in an instant I felt above an hundred arrows discharged on my left hand, which pricked me like so many needles; and besides, they shot another flight into the air, as we do bombs in Europe, whereof many I suppose fell on my body (though I felt them not), and some on my face, which I immediately covered with my left hand. When this shower of arrows was over, I fell agroaning with grief and pain, and then striving again to get loose, they discharged another volley larger than the first, and some of them attempted with spears to stick me in the sides; but, by good luck, I had on me a buff

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jerkin, which they could not pierce. I thought it the most prudent method to lie still, and my design was to continue so till night, when my left hand being already loose, I could easily free myself: and as for the inhabitants, I had reason to believe I might be a match for the greatest armies they could bring against me, if they were all of the same size with him that I saw. But Fortune, disposed otherwise of me. … The Hurgo (for so they call a great lord, as I afterwards learnt) understood me very well. He descended from the stage, and commanded that several ladders should be applied to my sides, on which above a hundred of the inhabitants mounted, and walked towards my mouth, laden with baskets full of meat, which had been provided and sent thither by the King's orders, upon the first intelligence he received of me. I observed there was the flesh of several animals, but could not distinguish them by the taste. There were shoulders, legs, and loins, shaped like those of mutton, and very well dressed, but smaller than the wings of a lark. I ate them by two or three at a mouthful, and took three loaves at a time, about the bigness of musket bullets. … I had three hundred cooks to dress my victuals, in little convenient huts built about my house, where they and their families lived, and prepared me two dishes apiece. I took up twenty waiters in my hand, and placed them on the table; an hundred more attended below on the ground, some with dishes of meat, and some with barrels of wine and other liquors, slung on their shoulders, all which the waiters above drew up as I wanted, in a very ingenious manner, by certain cords, as we draw the bucket up a well in Europe. A dish of then-meat was a good mouthful, and a barrel of their liquor a reasonable draught. Their mutton yields to ours, but their beef is excellent. I have had a sirloin so large, that I have been forced to make three bits of it; but this is rare. My servants were astonished to see me eat it bones and all, as in our country we do the leg of a lark. Their geese and turkeys I usually ate at a mouthful; and, I must confess, they far exceed ours.

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. 2. 3. 4.

What is so special about the Lilliputians? Who is the Hurgo? What is the attitude of the Lilliputians toward Gulliver? What about the language of the Lilliputians? Is that different or similar to Gulliver’s? 5. What kinds of weapon do Lilliputians use? How does Gulliver feel their effects? 6. What special kind of food do Lilliputians eat? 7. How does Gulliver eat Lilliputian food? 8. How is the Lilliputians’ way of life different from that of ours? 9. How does Gulliver’s situation change after visiting the Hurgo? 10. Gulliver compares Lilliputian life with that of his own. Can you mention some of the differences or similarities?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. I reckoned, above nine hours. “Reckon” here means: a) recite b) recommend

c) think

d) ban

2. A hundred arrows … pricked me like so many needles. This means that the arrows: a) pressed b) pierced c) powdered d) printed 3. I thought it the most prudent method to lie still. This type of method is: a) simple b) slender c) slightest 4. But Fortune, disposed otherwise of me. “Disposed of” in this idiomatic context means: a) positioned me b) got rid of me c) had other ideas for me d) prompted me

d) sensible

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5. I had three hundred cooks to dress my victuals. Gulliver’s “victuals” are his: a) clothes b) carving c) food

d) victims

Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary A-groaning = in the middle of uttering a deep, mournful sound expressive of pain or grief Apiece = each Applied = brought into physical contact with or close proximity to Armpit = the hollow under the arm at the shoulder; axilla Astonishment = overpowering wonder or surprise; amazement Attended = waited upon; accompanied as a companion or servant Bucket = a deep, cylindrical vessel, usually of metal, plastic, or wood, with a flat bottom and a semicircular bail, for collecting, carrying, or holding water, sand, fruit, etc.; pail Buff jerkin = leather jacket without sleeves

Commanded = governed; controlled Conjectured = surmised; supposed; presumed Cord = a string or thin rope made of several strands braided, twisted, or woven together Cry = scream; shout; roar Descended = passed from a higher to a lower place; moved down Discharged = fired or shot Design = (here) a plan Disposed = got rid of; discarded Draught = a drink, dose Exceed = to surpass; excel; be superior to Flesh = meat Fright = sudden and extreme fear; a sudden terror Hut = a simple roofed shelter, often with one or two sides left open

A Voyage to Lilliput

Ingenious = bright; gifted; able; resourceful; adroit Intelligence = (here) news Laden with = carrying with difficulty Leap = bound; jump Liquor = juice, a distilled or spirituous beverage, as brandy or whiskey Ligature = things used for tying up Loaves = pl. of loaf; a portion of bread or cake baked in a mass, usually oblong with a rounded top Loins = the parts of the body between the hips and the lower ribs, esp. regarded as the seat of physical strength and generative power Match = (here) the equal of; equal to or just as strong as another party Mounted = climbed up Musket = single-barreled shoulder gun carried by foot soldiers (16th –18th century) Mutton = the flesh of sheep, esp. full-grown or more mature sheep, used as food Posture = position, condition, or state Pricked = pierced with a sharp point; punctured Prudent = sensible Quiver = (here) a case for arrows Reckoned = deemed; considered; guessed

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Roared = uttered a loud, deep cry or howl, as in excitement, distress, or anger Sirloin = the portion of the loin of beef in front of the rump Slung = from sling; to hang by a sling or place so as to swing loosely Sounder = in a better condition; comparative with sleep: deeper, more uninterrupted, and untroubled than on other occasions Spear = a long, stabbing weapon for thrusting or throwing, consisting of a wooden shaft to which a sharp-pointed head of iron or steel is attached Stage = raised platform Striving = trying; toiling; struggling; fighting Thither = to that place Tolgophonac = “Fire the arrows!” in Swift’s fictional Lilliputian language Utmost = most extreme Victuals = (archaic) food Volley = succession of shots fired at the same time Well = a hole drilled or bored into the earth to obtain water, petroleum, etc. Well dressed = appropriately attired Whereof = (archaic) of which Yields = gives up or surrenders

CHAPTER TEN TREASURE ISLAND ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

“Well, well, captain,” returned the sea-cook, sitting down as he was bidden on the sand, “you’ll have to give me a hand up again, that’s all. A sweet pretty place you have of it here. Ah, there’s Jim! the top of the morning to you, Jim. Doctor, here’s my service. Why, there you all are together like a happy family, in a manner of speaking.” “If you have anything to say, my man, better say it,” said the captain. “Right you were, Captain Smollett,” replied Silver. “Duty is duty, to be sure. Well, now, you look here, that was a good lay of yours last night. I don’t deny it was a good lay. Some of you pretty handy with a handspike end. And I’ll not deny neither but what some of my people was shook— maybe all was shook; maybe I was shook myself; maybe that’s why I’m here for terms. But you mark me, captain; it won’t do twice, by thunder! We’ll have to do sentry-go, and ease off a point or so, on the rum. Maybe you think we were all a sheet in the wind’s eye. But I’ll tell you I was sober; I was only dog tired; and if I’d awoke a second sooner I’d have caught you in the act, I would. He wasn’t dead when I got round to him, not he.” “Well?” says Captain Smollett, as cool as can be. All that Silver said was a riddle to him, but you would never have guessed it from his tone. As for me, I began to have inkling. Ben Gunn’s last words came back to my mind. I began to suppose that he had paid the buccaneers a visit while they all lay drunk together round their fire, and I reckoned up with glee that we had only fourteen enemies to deal with. “Well, here it is,” said Silver. “We want that treasure, and we’ll have it—that’s our point! You would just as soon save your lives, I reckon; and that’s yours. You have a chart, haven’t you?”

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“That’s as may be,” replied the captain. “Oh, well, you have, I know that,” returned Long John. “You needn’t be so husky with a man; there aint a particle of service in that, and you may lay to it. What I mean is, we want your chart. Now, I never meant you no harm, myself.” “That won’t do with me, my man,” interrupted the captain. “We know exactly what you meant to do, and we don’t care; for now, you see, you can’t do it.” And the captain looked at him calmly, and proceeded to fill a pipe. “If Abe Gray—” Silver broke out. “Avast there!” cried Mr. Smollett. “Gray told me nothing, and I asked him nothing; and what’s more I would see you and him and this whole island blown clean out of the water into blazes first. So there’s my mind for you, my man, on that.” This little whiff of temper seemed to cool Silver down. He had been growing nettled before, but now he pulled himself together. “Like enough,” said he. “I would set no limits to what gentlemen might consider shipshape, or might not, as the case were. And, seeing as how you are about to take a pipe, captain, I’ll make so free as do likewise.” And he filled a pipe and lighted it; and the two men sat silently smoking for quite a while, now looking each other in the face, now stopping their tobacco, now leaning forward to spit. It was as good as the play to see them. “Now,” resumed Silver, “here it is. You give us the chart to get the treasure by, and drop shooting poor seamen, and stoving of their heads in while asleep. You do that, and we’ll offer you a choice. Either you come aboard along of us, once the treasure shipped, and then I’ll give you my affy-davy, upon my word of honour, to clap you somewhere safe ashore. Or, if that aint to your fancy, some of my hands being rough, and having old scores, on account of hazing, then you can stay here, you can. We’ll divide stores with you, man for man; and I’ll give my affy-davy, as before, to speak the first ship I sight, and send them here to pick you up. Now you’ll own that’s talking. Handsomer you

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couldn’t look to get, not you. And I hope”—raising his voice—“that all hands in this here block-house will overhaul my words, for what is spoke to one is spoke to all.” Captain Smollett rose from his seat, and knocked out the ashes of his pipe in the palm of his left hand. “Is that all?” he asked. “Every last word, by thunder!” answered John. “Refuse that, and you’ve seen the last of me but musket-balls.” “Very good,” said the captain. “Now you’ll hear me. If you’ll come up one by one, unarmed, I’ll engage to clap you all in irons, and take you home to a fair trial in England. If you won’t my name is Alexander Smollett, I’ve flown my sovereign’s colours, and I’ll see you all to Davy Jones. You can’t find the treasure. You can’t sail the ship—there’s not a man among you fit to sail the ship. You can’t fight us—Gray, there, got away from five of you. Your ship’s in irons, Master Silver; you’re on a lee shore, and so you’ll find. I stand here and tell you so; and they’d the last good words you’ll get from me; for, in the name of heaven, I’ll put a bullet in your back when next I meet you. Tramp, my lad. Bundle out of this, please, hand over hand, and double quick.” Silver’s face was a picture; his eyes started in his head with wrath. He shook the fire out of his pipe. “Give me a hand up!” he cried. “Not I,” returned the captain. “Who’ll give me a hand up?” he roared. Not a man among us moved. Growling the foulest imprecations, he crawled along the sand till he got hold of the porch and could hoist himself again upon his crutch. Then he spat into the spring. “There!” he cried, “that’s what I think of you. Before an hour’s out, I’ll stove in your old block-house like a rum puncheon. Laugh, by thunder, laugh! Before an hour’s out, you’ll laugh upon the other side. Them that die’ll be the lucky ones.”

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And with a dreadful oath he stumbled off, ploughed down the sand, was helped across the stockade, after four or five failures, by the man with the flag of truce, and disappeared in an instant afterwards among the trees.

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or for both. 1. The characters in the story speak an unusual language, using specific words and phrases. Why do you think they speak differently from us? In cases like this we say the writer has observed the principle of “decorum” in creating his dialogues. What does “decorum” mean? How can you relate it to the overall effect of the story? 2. Who do you think is narrating the story? 3. Why did Long John Silver say that the captain would have to help him to stand up later on? 4. What did Silver really want? 5. What was the choice that Silver offered to the captain? 6. Why was the map of Treasure Island important? Who had it? Who wanted it?

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. I’ll tell you, I was sober. This means that the speaker was: a) angry c) not affected by alcohol

b) influenced by alcohol d) significant

2. This little whiff of temper seemed to cool Silver down. A “whiff” here denotes: a) an amount b) faint c) a slight outburst 3. He had been growing nettled before. “Nettled” means: a) annoyed b) amused c) moved

d) a degree

d) identified

4. You … drop shooting poor seamen, and stoving of their heads in while asleep. By “stove in,” the speaker means: a) keep away b) drop c) smash d) pull

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5. The two men sat silently smoking for quite a while … now leaning forward to spit. “Spit” here means: a) speed up b) spare c) expectorate d) save 6. Growling the foulest imprecations, he crawled along the sand. “Imprecations” are: a) glees b) curses c) fancies d) observations

Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Affy-davy = (slang: “affidavit”) promise Ashes = grey material left after burning Ashore = on shore Avast = used as a command to stop or cease Blazes = hell Broke out = began abruptly Buccaneer = a pirate Bullet = object fired from a gun Bundle out = to leave hurriedly or unceremoniously By thunder = I swear! Chart = sailors’ map Clap = as in “to clap in irons,” meaning to put or place quickly or forcefully

Crawled = crept, moved or progressed slowly or laboriously Crutch = object put under the arm to support a one-legged or injured person Dreadful = extremely bad, unpleasant, or ugly Drop = stop, to come to an end; cease; lapse Fancy = what somebody likes Fit = suitable; apt Foulest = most dirty; shameful; infamous Glee = merriment; jollity; hilarity; mirth; joviality; gaiety Growling = making an angry noise

Treasure Island

Handspike = a bar used as a lever Handy = skillful with the hands; deft; dexterous Hazing = subjection to harassment or ridicule Hoist = to raise or lift, esp. by some mechanical appliance Husky = harsh; strong; robust Imprecations = curses In irons = fastened (as prisoners) with pieces of iron Inkling = a vague idea or notion; slight understanding Lad = a familiar or affectionate term of address for a man; “chap” Lay = plan, a short narrative or other poem, esp. one to be sung Lee = as in “lee shore,” meaning the wind blows towards the shore Musket = a heavy, large-caliber smoothbore gun for infantry soldiers, introduced in the 16th century; the predecessor of the modern rifle Nettled = irritated, annoyed, or provoked Oath = (here) a curse Palm = front of the hand Particle = a minute portion, piece, fragment, or amount; a tiny or very small bit Ploughed down = turned up (soil) with, or as if with, a plow (an agricultural implement used for cutting, lifting, turning over, and partly pulverizing soil)

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Porch = an exterior appendage to a building, forming a covered approach or vestibule to a doorway Proceeded = progressed; continued; passed on Puncheon = (archaic) a large cask or barrel Reckoned = deemed; guessed; considered Riddle = puzzle Rum = a kind of alcoholic drink Shipped = put on board ship Shipshape = in good order; well-arranged; trim or tidy Shook = strongly affected by an event, circumstance, etc.; emotionally unsettled Sight = (nautical) to see Sovereign = (here) king; ruler Spring = an issue of water from the earth, taking the form, on the surface, of a small stream or standing as a pool or small lake Stoving in = breaking to pieces; splintering; smashing Stockade = a defensive barrier consisting of strong posts or timbers fixed upright in the ground Stumbled off = hit the foot against something, as in walking or running, so as to stagger or fall; tripped Tobacco = plant that is smoked in a pipe Tramp = to walk steadily; march; trudge Wrath = rage; resentment; fury

CHAPTER ELEVEN UNIVERSITY DAYS JAMES THURBER

I passed all the other courses that I took at my University, but I could never pass botany. This was because all botany students had to spend several hours a week in a laboratory looking through a microscope at plant cells, and I could never see through a microscope. I never once saw a cell through a microscope. This used to enrage my instructor. He would wander around the laboratory pleased with the progress all the students were making in drawing the involved and, so I am told, interesting structure of flower cells, until he came to me. I would just be standing there. “I can’t see anything,” I would say. He would begin patiently enough, explaining how anybody can see through microscope, but he would always end up in a fury, claiming that I could too see through a microscope but just pretended that I couldn’t. “It takes away from the beauty of flowers anyway,” I used to tell him. “We are not concerned with beauty in this course,” he would say. “We are concerned solely with what I may call the mechanics of flars.” “Well,” I’d say, “I can’t see anything.” “Try it just once again,” he’d say, and I would put my eye to the microscope and see nothing at all, except now and again a nebulous milky substance—a phenomenon of maladjustment. You were supposed to see a vivid, restless clockwork of sharply defined plant cells. “I see what looks like a lot of milk,” I would tell him. This, he claimed, was the result of my not having adjusted the microscope properly, so he would readjust it for me, or rather, for himself. And I would look again and see milk. I finally took a deferred pass, as they called it, and waited a year and tried again. (You had to pass one of the biological sciences or you couldn’t graduate.) The professor had come back from vacation brown as a berry, bright-eyed, and eager to explain cell-structure again to his classes. “Well,” he said to me, cheerily, when we met in the first laboratory hour of the semester, “we’re going to see cells this time, aren’t we?” “Yes, sir,” I said. Students to right of me and to left of me and in front of me were

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seeing cells; what’s more, they were quietly drawing pictures of them in their notebooks. Of course, I didn’t see anything. “We’ll try it,” the professor said to me, grimly, “with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. As God is my witness. I’ll arrange this glass so that you see cells through or I’ll give up teaching. In twenty-two years of botany, I—” he cut off abruptly for he was beginning to quiver all over, like Lionel Barrymore, and he genuinely wished to hold onto his temper; his scenes with me had taken a great deal out of him. So we tried it with every adjustment of the microscope known to man. With only one of them did I see anything but blackness or the familiar lacteal opacity, and that time I saw, to my pleasure and amazement, a variegated constellation of flecks, specks, and dots. These I hastily drew. The instructor, noting my activity, came back from an adjoining desk, a smile on his lips and his eyebrows high in hope. He looked at my cell drawing. “What’s that?” he demanded, with a hint of a squeal in his voice. “That’s what I saw,” I said. “You didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t!” he screamed, losing control of his temper instantly, and he bent over and squinted into the microscope. His head snapped up. “That’s your eye!” he shouted. “You’ve fixed the lens so that it reflects! You’ve drawn your eye!” Another course that I didn’t like, but somehow managed to pass, was economics. I went to that class straight from the botany class, which didn’t help me any in understanding either subject. I used to get them mixed up. But not as mixed up as another student in my economics class who came there direct from a physics laboratory. He was a tackle on the football team, named Bolenciecwcz. At that time Ohio-State University had one of the best football teams in the country, and Bolenciecwcz was one of its outstanding stars. In order to be eligible to play, it was necessary for him to keep up in his studies, a very difficult matter, for while he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter. Most of his professors were lenient and helped him along. None gave him more hints, in answering questions, or asked him simpler ones than the economics professor, a thin, timid man named Bassum. One day when we were on the subject of transportation and distribution, it came Bolenciecwcz’s turn to answer a question. “Name one means of transportation,” the professor said to him. No light came into the big tackle’s eyes. “Just any means of transportation,” said the professor. Bolenciecwcz sat staring at him.

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“That is,” pursued the professor, “any medium, agency, or method of going from one place to another.” Bolenciecwcz had the look of a man who is being led into a trap. “You may choose among steam, horse-drawn, or electrically propelled vehicles,” said the instructor. “I might suggest the one which we commonly take in making long journeys across land.” There was a profound silence in which everybody stirred uneasily, including Bolenciecwcz and Mr. Bassum. Mr. Bassum abruptly broke this silence in an amazing manner. “Choo-choo-choo,” he said, in a low voice, and turned instantly scarlet. He glanced appealingly around the room. All of us, of course, shared Mr. Bassum’s desire that Bolenciecwcz should stay abreast of the class in economics, for the Illinois game, one of the hardest and most important of the season, was only a week off. “Toot, toot, too-tooooooot!” Some students with a deep voice moaned, and we all looked encouragingly at Bolenciecwcz. Somebody else gave a fine imitation of a locomotive letting off steam. Mr. Bassum himself rounded off the little show. “Ding, dong, ding, dong,” he said, hopefully. Bolenciecwcz was staring at the floor now, trying to think, his great brow furrowed, his huge hands rubbing together, his face red. “How did you come to college this year, Mr. Bolenciecwcz?” asked the professor. “Chuffa, chuffa, chuffa chuffa.” “M’father sent me,” said the football player. “What on?” asked Bassum. “I git an ’lowance,” said the tackle, in a low, husky voice, obviously embarrassed. “No, no,” said Bassum. “Name a means of transportation. What did you ride here on?” “Train,” said Bolenciecwcz. “Quite right,” said the professor. “Now, Mr. Nugent, will you tell us—” If I went through anguish in botany and economics—for different reasons—gymnasium work was even worse. I don’t even like to think about it. They wouldn’t let you play games or join in the exercises with your glasses on and I couldn’t see with mine off. I bumped into professors, horizontal bars, agricultural students, and swinging iron rings. Not being

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able to see, I could take it but I couldn’t dish it out. Also, in order to pass gymnasium (and you had to pass it to graduate) you had to learn to swim if you didn’t know how. I didn’t like the swimming pool, I didn’t like swimming, and I didn’t like the swimming instructor, and after all these years I still don’t. I never swam but I passed my gym work anyway, by having another student give my gymnasium number (978) and swim across the pool in my place. He was a quiet, amiable blonde youth, number 473, and he would have seen through a microscope for me if we could have got away with it, but we couldn’t get away with it. Another thing I didn’t like about gymnasium work was that they made you strip the day you registered. It is impossible for me to be happy when I am stripped and being asked a lot of questions. Still, I did better than a lanky agricultural student who was crossexamined just before I was. They asked each student what college he was in—that is, whether Arts, Engineering, Commerce, or Agriculture. “What college are you in?” the instructor snapped at the youth in front of me. “Ohio State University,” he said promptly. It wasn’t that agricultural student but it was another a whole lot like him who decided to take up journalism, possibly on the ground that when farming went to hell he could fall back on newspaper work. He didn’t realize, of course, that that would be very much like falling back full-length on a kit of carpenter’s tools. Haskins didn’t seem cut out for journalism, being too embarrassed to talk to anybody and unable to use a typewriter, but the editor of the college paper assigned him to the cow barns, the sheep house, the horse pavilion, and the animal husbandry department generally. This was a genuinely big “beat,” for it took up five times as much ground and got ten times as great a legislative appropriation as the College of Liberal Arts. The agricultural student knew animals, but nevertheless his stories were dull and colorlessly written. He took all afternoon on each of them, on account of having to hunt for each letter on the typewriter. Once in a while he had to ask somebody to help him hunt. “C” and “L,” in particular, were hard letters for him to find. His editor finally got pretty much annoyed at the farmer-journalist because his pieces were so uninteresting. “See here, Haskins,” he snapped at him one day, “why is it we never have anything hot from you on the horse pavilion? Here we have two hundred head of horses on this campus—more than any other university in the Western Conference1 except Purdue—and yet you never get any real lowdown on them. Now shoot over to the horse 1. The Big Ten.

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barns and dig up something lively.” Haskins shambled out and came back in about an hour; he said he had something. “Well, start it off snappily,” said the editor. “Something people will read.” Haskins set to work and in a couple of hours brought a sheet of typewritten paper to the desk; it was a two-hundred-word story about some disease that had broken out among the horses. Its opening sentence was simple but arresting. It read: “Who has noticed the sores on the tops of the horses in the animal husbandry building?” Ohio State was a land grant university and therefore two years of military drill was compulsory. We drilled with old Springfield rifles and studied the tactics of the Civil War even though the World War was going on at the time. At eleven o’clock each morning thousands of freshmen and sophomores used to deploy over the campus, moodily creeping up on the old chemistry building. It was good training for the kind of warfare that was waged at Shiloh but it had no connection with what was going on in Europe. Some people used to think there was German money behind it, but they didn’t dare say so or they would have been thrown in jail as German spies, it was a period of muddy thought and marked, I believe, the decline of higher education in the Middle West. As a soldier I was never any good at all. Most of the cadets were glumly indifferent soldiers, but I was no good at all. Once General Littlefield, who was commandant of the cadet corps, popped up in front of me during regimental drill and snapped, “You are the main trouble with this university!” I think he meant that my type was the main trouble with the university but he may have meant me individually. I was mediocre at drill, certainly—that is, until my senior year. But that time I had drilled longer than anybody else in the Western Conference, having failed at military at the end of each preceding year so that I had to do it all over again. I was the only senior still in uniform. The uniform which, when new, had made me look like an interurban railway conductor, now that it had become faded and too tight: made me look like Bert Williams in his bellboy act. This had a definitely bad effect on my morale. Even so, I had become by sheer practice little short of wonderful at squad maneuvers. One day General Littlefield picked our company out of the whole regiment and tried to get it mixed up by putting it through one movement after another as fast as we could execute them: squads right, squads left, squads on right into line, squads right about, squads left front into line, etc. In about three minutes one hundred and nine men were marching in one direction and I was marching away from them at an angle of forty degrees,

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all alone. “Company, halt!” shouted General Littlefield, “That man is the only man who has it right!” I was made a corporal for my achievement. The next day General Littlefield summoned me to his office. He was swatting flies when I went in. I was silent and he was silent too, for a long time. I don’t think he remembered me or why he had sent for me, but he didn’t want to admit it. He swatted some more flies, keeping his eyes on them narrowly before he let go with the swatter. “Button up your coat!” he snapped. Looking back on it now I can see that he meant me although he was looking at a fly, but I just stood there. Another fly came to rest on a paper in front of the general and began rubbing its hind legs together. The general lifted the swatter cautiously. I moved restlessly and the fly flew away. “You startled him!” barked General Littlefield, looking at me severely. I said I was sorry. “That won’t help the situation!” snapped the General, with cold military logic. I didn’t see what I could do except offer to chase some more flies toward his desk, but I didn’t say anything. He stared out the window at the far away figures of co-eds crossing the campus toward the library. Finally, he told me I could go. So I went. He either didn’t know which cadet I was or else he forgot what he wanted to see me about. It may have been that be wished to apologize for having called me the main trouble with the university; or maybe he had decided to compliment me on my brilliant drilling of the day before and then at the last minute decided not to. I don’t know. I don’t think about it much any more.

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Exercise 1 The following questions may be used for classroom discussion, for composition, or both. 1. In this story, the narrator says that he was a student who was forced to take a course that he had no interest in and could not do well in. Have you ever been in such a situation? Name some courses, if any, which you had to take but did not really enjoy doing them. 2. In the third paragraph the narrator compares his botany teacher to “Lionel Barrymore”. Who was Lionel Barrymore and in what aspect does he bear resemblance to the teacher? Can you find another similar example in the story? 3. What is your idea about prerequisite courses? Discuss your idea by referring to the passage. 4. Are sentences like: “I don’t know.”, “I don’t think about it much any more.” regarded as suitable sentences for a conclusion? Why? 5. The narrator says that as a “land grant university” the students had to go through two years of military drill. What is a land grant university? 6. What stays with you after reading this story? Do you think that this passage is a merely funny story? 7. What is the importance of tone and point of view in this story. 8. Are there any clues in this story to signify whether the narrator is male or female? Cite examples to support your answer.

Exercise 2 Choose the best answer (a, b, c, or d): 1. I finally took a deferred pass, as they called it. “Deferred” here means: a) defended b) postponed c) rejected

d) defined

2. A variegated constellation of flecks, specks, and dots. “Variegated” denotes: a) rapid b) reckless c) vanished d) marked irregularly 3. He bent over and squinted into the microscope. “Squinted” here denotes: a) looking with eyes half shut b) searching c) looking with eyes completely shut d) discussing

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4. While he was not dumber than an ox he was not any smarter. “Dumb” in this context means: a) deaf b) unable to speak c) numb d) blind 5. “You may choose among steam, horse-drawn, or electrically propelled vehicles.” “Propelled” here means: a) emergency b) prompt c) proper d) driven 6. He should stay abreast of the class in economics. “Abreast” here denotes: a) in front b) side by side with c) absence d) in dealings 7. Thousands of freshmen and sophomores … moodily creeping up on the old chemistry building. What were the students doing? a) walking fast b) drilling c) evoking d) moving slowly 8. He was commandant of the cadet corps. “Commandant” here refers to a: a) conqueror b) commanding officer c) eligible officer d) fascinated soldier 9. I was made a corporal for my achievement. “Corporal” here means: a) of the human body b) a drilling soldier c) a non-commissioned officer d) an imitator 10. I moved restlessly and the fly flew away. “Restlessly” here means: a) unable to be still b) recklessly c) carelessly d) vigorously

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Exercise 3 Write the answer to the following questions about the author’s style: 1. Does the author use long or short sentences, simple or complex structures, formal or informal language? Give examples. 2. Is imagery, metaphorical language, and connotation a characteristic in the writing of this passage, or is it just plain and literal in its approach? 3. How is the tone of the passage?

Glossary Berry = a small soft fruit with small seeds Botany = the scientific study of plants Brown as a berry = suntanned (idiomatic phrase: not all berries are brown) Cadet = a student in the armed forces or the police Co-ed = (old-fashioned) a female student in a college with male and female students, here: students Compliment = a remark that expresses approval, admiration, or respect Constellation = (here) a group of people or things that are similar Decline = when something becomes less in amount, importance, quality, or strength Defer = to put off/delay something until a later time; to postpone Deploy = to move soldiers, military equipment etc. or to be moved into action

Eager = wanting very much to do or have something, especially something interesting or enjoyable Eligible = having the necessary qualities or fulfilling the necessary conditions for a task Enrage = to cause someone to become very angry Fleck = a small mark or spot Furrow = to make the skin on your face form deep lines or folds, esp. because you are worried, angry, or thinking very hard Fury = extreme anger Genuinely = really Glum = sad and quiet, esp. because you are upset about something, disappointed, or unhappy Grim = (adj.) worried or worrying Halt = to stop, or cause to stop, something happening or moving Halt! = (command, esp. military) Stop!

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Hint = something that you say or do that shows in an indirect way what you think or want Hold one’s temper = to succeed in staying calm and not becoming angry Husky = (adj.) low- and roughvoiced, often in an attractive way or because of illness Illinois = a state in the Midwestern area of the USA Imitation = when someone or something behaves in a similar way to someone or something else, or copies the speech or behavior of someone or something else Lenient = not as severe or strong in punishment or judgment as would be expected Lose one’s temper = to suddenly become angry Mediocre = not very good Moan = to make a long, low sound of pain, suffering, or another strong emotion Nebulous = not clear or exact at all; vague—a nebulous shape cannot be seen clearly and has no definite edges Opacity = the quality of being opaque (difficult to see through) Outstanding = excellent; clearly very much better than what is usual Ox = a large cow or bull

Pop up = to appear or happen, especially suddenly or unexpectedly Quiver = (here) to shake slightly, especially because you feel angry, exited, or upset Round (something) off = to complete an event or activity in a pleasant or satisfactory way Scarlet = a bright red color Scene = (here) an expression of great anger, or similar feeling, often between two people; an occasion when this happens Snap = (here) to say something suddenly in an angry way Solely = only and not involving anyone or anything else Something takes it out of somebody = used to say that something makes someone feel very tired Speck = a very small mark, spot, or piece of something Squad = (military) a small group of soldiers, especially one gathered together for drill (i.e. marching, etc.) Squeal = a long, loud, high sound or cry Squint = to partly close your eyes in order to see something (esp. something small) more clearly Stay abreast of something = to keep up with others Stir = to move slightly or change your position, esp.

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because you are uncomfortable or anxious Swat = to hit something, especially an insect, with a flat object or your hand Tackle = a player in American football who stops other players by tackling (intercepting) them or

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preventing them from moving forward Timid = shy and nervous Variegated = having a pattern of different colors or marks Vivid = clear and distinct Wage = (here) to fight a war or organize a series of activities in order to achieve something

FURTHER READING

Of Youth and Age Francis Bacon A man that is young in years may be old in hours, if he have lost no time. But that happeneth rarely. Generally, youth is like the first cogitations, not so wise as the second. For there is a youth in thoughts, as well as in ages. And yet the invention of young men is more lively than that of old; and imaginations stream into their minds better, and as it were more divinely. Natures that have much heat and great and violent desires and perturbations are not ripe for action till they have passed the meridian of their years; as it was with Julius Cæsar and Septimius Severus. Of the latter of whom it is said, Juventutem egit erroribus, imo furoribus, plenam [He passed a youth full of errors, yea of madnesses]. And yet he was the ablest emperor, almost, of all the list. But reposed natures may do well in youth. As it is seen in Augustus Cæsar, Cosmus Duke of Florence, Gaston de Foix, and others. On the other side, heat and vivacity in age is an excellent composition for business. Young men are fitter to invent than to judge; fitter for execution than for counsel; and fitter for new projects than for settled business. For the experience of age, in things that fall within the compass of it, directeth them; but in new things, abuseth them. The errors of young men are the ruin of business; but the errors of aged men amount but to this, that more might have been done, or sooner. Young men, in the conduct and manage of actions, embrace more than they can hold; stir more than they can quiet; fly to the end, without consideration of the means and degrees; pursue some few principles which they have chanced upon absurdly; care not to innovate, which draws unknown inconveniences; use extreme remedies at first; and that which doubleth all errors will not acknowledge or retract them; like an unready horse, that will neither stop nor turn. Men of age object too much, consult too long, adventure too little, repent too soon, and seldom drive business home to the full period, but content themselves with a mediocrity of success. Certainly it is good to compound employments of both; for that will be good for the present, because the virtues of either age may correct the defects of both; and good for succession, that young men may be learners, while men in age are actors; and, lastly, good for extern accidents, because

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authority followeth old men, and favor and popularity youth. But for the moral part, perhaps youth will have the pre-eminence, as age hath for the politic. A certain rabbin, upon the text, Your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, inferreth that young men are admitted nearer to God than old, because vision is a clearer revelation than a dream. And certainly, the more a man drinketh of the world, the more it intoxicateth; and age doth profit rather in the powers of understanding, than in the virtues of the will and affections. There be some have an over-early ripeness in their years, which fadeth betimes. These are, first, such as have brittle wits, the edge whereof is soon turned; such as was Hermogenes the rhetorician, whose books are exceeding subtle; who afterwards waxed stupid. A second sort is of those that have some natural dispositions which have better grace in youth than in age; such as is a fluent and luxuriant speech; which becomes youth well, but not age: so Tully saith of Hortensius, Idem manebat, neque idem decebat [He continued the same, when the same was not becoming]. The third is of such as take too high a strain at the first, and are magnanimous more than tract of years can uphold. As was Scipio Africanus, of whom Livy saith in effect, Ultima primis cedebant. From: Essays, Of Youth and Age (1914). The Harvard Classics.

No Man is an Island John Donne No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as then as if a manor of thy friends or of thine own were. Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee. From: Meditation 17 of Donne’s Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623). Cambridge University Press.

The Pyramids Samuel Johnson Of the wall [of China] it is very easy to assign the motives. It secured a wealthy and timorous nation from the incursions of Barbarians, whose unskillfulness in arts made it easier for them to

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supply their wants by rapine than by industry, and who from time to time poured in upon the habitations of peaceful commerce, as vultures descend upon domestic fowl. Their celerity and fierceness made the wall necessary, and their ignorance made it efficacious. But for the pyramids no reason has ever been given adequate to the cost and labor of the work. The narrowness of the chambers proves that it could afford no retreat from enemies, and treasurers might have been reposited at far less expense with equal security. It seems to have been erected only in compliance with that hunger of imagination which preys incessantly upon life, and must be always appeased by some employment. Those who have already all that they can enjoy, must enlarge their desires. He that has built for use, till use is supplied, must begin to build for vanity, and extend his plan to the utmost power of human performance, that he may not be soon reduced to form another wish. I consider this mighty structure as a monument of the insufficiency of human enjoyments. A King, whose power is unlimited, and whose treasurers surmount all real and imaginary wants, is compelled to solace, by the erection of a pyramid, the satiety of dominion and tastelessness of pleasures, and to amuse the tediousness of declining life ,by seeing thousands laboring without end ,and one stone, for no purpose, laid upon another. Whoever thou art, that, not content with a moderate condition, imaginest happiness in royal magnificence, and dreamest that command or riches can feed the appetite of novelty with perpetual gratifications, survey the pyramids, and confess thy folly! From: The History of Rasselas: Prince of Abyssinia (1985). Ed. D.J. Enright. New York: Penguin Books.

The Gettysburg Address Abraham Lincoln Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the preposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

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But, in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate — we cannot consecrate — we cannot hollow — these ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. Presidential address delivered in 1863 in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

From A Farewell to Arms Ernest Hemingway I was always embraced by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the name of places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. From: A Farewell to Arms (1929). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons

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What the Novelist Gives Us Virginia Woolf It is simple enough to say that since books have classes — fiction, biography, poetry — we should separate them and take form each what it is right that each should give us. Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that this shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning. Do not dictate to your author; try to become him. be his fellow-worker and accomplice. If you hang back, and reserve and criticize at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read. But if you open your mind as widely as possible, then signs and hints of almost imperceptible fineness, from the twist and turn of the first sentences, will bring you into the presence of a human being unlike any other. Steep yourself in this, acquaint yourself with this, and soon you will find that your author is giving you, or attempting to give you, something far more definite. The thirty-two chapters of a novel — if we consider how to read a novel first — are an attempt to make something as formed and controlled as a building: but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing. Perhaps the quickest way to understand the elements of what a novelist is doing is not to read, but to write; to make your own experiment with the dangers and difficulties of words. Recall, then, some event that has left a distinct impression on you — how at the corner of the street, perhaps, your past two people talking. A tree shook; an electric light danced; the tone of the talk was comic, but also tragic; a whole vision, an entire conception, seemed contained in that moment. But when you attempt to reconstruct it in words, you will find that it breaks into a thousand conflicting impressions. Some must be subdued; others emphasized; in the process you will lose, probably, all grasp upon the emotion itself. Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist — Defoe, Jane Austen, Hardy. Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person — Defoe, Jane Austen, or Thomas Hardy — but that we are living in a different world. Here, in Robinson Crusoe, we are trudging a plain high road; one thing happens after another; the fact and the order of the fact is enough. But if the open air and

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adventure mean everything to Defoe they mean nothing to Jane Austen. Here is the drawing-room, and people talking, and by the many mirrors of their talk revealing their characters. And if, when we have accustomed ourselves to the drawing-room and its reflections, we turn to Hardy, we are once more spun around. The moors are round us and the stars are above our heads. The other side of the mind is now exposed — the dark side that comes uppermost in solitude, not the light side that shows in company. Our relations are not towards people, but toward Nature and destiny. Yet different as these worlds are, each is consistence with itself. The maker of each is careful to observe the laws of his own perspective, and however great a strain they may put upon us they will never confuse us, as lesser writers so frequently do, by introducing two different kinds of reality into the same book. Thus to go from one great novelist to another — from Jane Austen to Hardy, from Peacock to Trollope, from Scott to Meredith — is to be wrenched and uprooted; to be thrown this way and then that. To read a novel is a difficult and complex art. You must be capable not only of great finesse of perception, but of great boldness of imagination if you’re going to make us of all that the novelist — the great artist — gives you. From: the essay “How Should One Read a Book?” in The Second Common Reader (1932). Harcourt.

Nobel Prize Award Speech William Faulkner I feel that this award was not made to me as a man but my work — a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will someday stand here where I am standing. Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer

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problems of the spirit. There is only the question: when will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed — love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands. Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood alone and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure; that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worth-less rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. Given on acceptance of the Nobel Prize in 1949.

The Ugly Tourist Jamaica Kincaid The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist is true: a tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day. From day to day, you are a nice person. From

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day to day, all the people who are supposed to love you on the whole do. From day to day, as you walk down a busy street in the large and modern and prosperous city in which you work and live, dismayed, puzzled (a cliché, but only a cliché can explain you) at how alone you feel in this crowd, how awful it is to go unnoticed, how awful it is to go unloved, even as you are surrounded by more people than you could possibly get to know in a lifetime that lasted for millennia, and then out of the corner of your eye you see someone looking at you and absolute pleasure is written all over that person’s face, and then you realize that you are not as revolting a presence as you think you are (for that look just told you so). And so, ordinarily, you are a nice person, an attractive person, a person capable of drawing to yourself the affection of other people (people just like you), a person at home in your own skin (sort of; I mean, in a way; I mean, your dismay and puzzlement are natural to you, because people like you just seem to be like that, and so many of the things people like you find admirable about yourselves — the things you think about, the things you think really define you — seem rooted in these feelings): a person at home in your own house (and all its nice house things), with its nice back yard (and its nice back-yard things), at home on your street, your church, in community activities, your job, at home with your family, your relatives, your friends — you are a whole person. But one day, when you are sitting somewhere, alone in that crowd, and that awful feeling of displacedness comes over you, and really, as an ordinary person you are not well equipped to look too far inward and set yourself aright, because being ordinary is already so taxing, and being ordinary takes all you have out of you, and though the words “I must get away” do not actually pass across your lips, you make a leap from being that nice blob just seeking like a boob in your amniotic sac of the modern experience to being a person visiting heaps of death and ruin and feeling alive and inspired at the sight of it; to being a person lying on some faraway beach, your stilled body stinking and glistening in the sand, looking like something first forgotten, then remembered, then not important enough to go back for; to being a person marveling at the harmony (ordinarily, what you would say is the backwardness) and the union these other people (and they are other people) have with nature. And you look at the things they can do with a piece of ordinary cloth, the things they fashion out of cheap, vulgarly coloured (to you) twine, the way they squat down over a hole they have made in the ground, the hole itself is something to marvel at, and since you are being an ugly person this ugly but joyful thought will swell inside you: their

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ancestors were not clever in the way yours were and not ruthless in the way yours were, for then would it not be you who would be in harmony with nature and backwards in that charming way? An ugly thing, that is what you are when you become a tourist, and ugly, empty thing, a stupid thing, a piece of rubbish pausing here and there to gaze at this and taste that, and it will never occur to you that the people who inhabit the place in which you have just passed cannot stand you, that behind their closed doors they laugh at your strangeness (you do not look the way they look); the physical sight of you does not please them; you have bad manners (it is their custom to eat their food with their hands; you try eating their way, you look silly; you try eating the way you always eat, you look silly); they do not like the way you speak (you have an accent); they collapse helpless from laughter, mimicking the way they imagine you must look as you carry out some every day bodily function. They do not like you. They do not like me! That thought never actually occurs to you. Still, you feel a little uneasy. Still, you feel a little foolish. Still, you feel a little out of place. But the banality of your own life is very real to you; it drove you to this extreme, spending your days and your nights in the company of people who despise you, people you do not like really, people you would not want to have as your actual neighbor. And so you must devote yourself to puzzling out how much of what you are told is really, really true (is ground-up bottle glass in peanut sauce really a delicacy around here, or will it do just what you think ground-up bottle glass will do? Is this rare, multicolored, snout-mouthed fish really and aphrodisiac, or will it cause you to fall asleep permanently?) Oh, the hard work all of this is, and is it any wonder, then, that on your return home you feel the need of a long rest, so that you can recover from your life of a tourist? That the native does not like the tourist is not hard to explain. For every native of every place is a potential tourist, and every tourist is a native of somewhere. Every native everywhere lives a life of overwhelming and crushing banality and boredom and desperation and depression, and every deed, good and bad, is an attempt to forget this. Every native would like to find a way out, every native would like a rest, every native would like a tour. But some natives — most natives in the world — cannot go anywhere. There are too poor. They are too poor to go anywhere. They are too poor to escape the reality of their lives; and they are too poor to live properly in the place where they live, which is the very place you, the tourist, want to go — so when the natives see you, the tourist, they envy you, they envy your ability to leave your own banality and boredom, they envy your ability to turn their own banality and boredom into a source of pleasure for yourself. From: “Harper’s Magazine” (September 1988).

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Notes on Punctuation Lewis Thomas There are no precise rules about punctuation (H.W. Fowler lays out some general advice (as best he can under the complex circumstances of English prose (he points out, for example, that we possess only four stops (the comma, the semicolon, the colon and the period (the question mark and exclamation point are not, strictly speaking, stops; they are indicators of tone (oddly enough, the Greeks employed the semicolon for their question mark (it produces a strange sensation to read a Greek sentence which is a straightforward question: Why weepest thou; (instead of Why weepest thou? (And, of course, there are parentheses (which are surely a kind of punctuation making this whole much more complicated by having to count up the left-handed parentheses in order to be sure of closing with the right number (but if the parentheses were left out, with nothing to work with but the stops, we would have considerably more flexibility in the deploying of layers of meaning than if we tried to separate all the clauses by physical barriers (and in the latter case, while we might have more precision and exactitude for our meaning, we would lose the essential flavor of language, which is its wonderful ambiguity. The commas are the most useful and usable of all the stops. It is highly important to put them in place as you go along. If you try to come back after doing a paragraph and stick them in the various spots that tempt you you will discover that they tend to swarm like minnows into all sorts of crevices whose existence you hadn’t realized and before you know it the whole long sentence becomes immobilized and lashed up squirming in commas. Better to use them sparingly, and with affection, precisely when the need for each one arises, nicely, by itself. I have grown fond of semicolons in recent years. The semicolon tells you that there is still some question about the preceding full sentence; something needs to be added; it reminds you sometimes of the Greek usage. It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn’t get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer.

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Colons are a lot less attractive, for several reasons: firstly, they give you the feeling of being rather ordered around, or at least having your nose pointed in a direction you might not be inclined to take if left to yourself, and, secondly, you suspect you’re in for one of those sentences that will be labeling the points to be made: firstly, secondly and so forth, with the implication that you haven’t sense enough to keep track of a sequence of notions without having them numbered. Also, many writers use the system loosely and incompletely, starting out with number one and number two as though counting off on their fingers but then going on and on without the succession labels you’ve been led to expect, leaving you floundering about searching for the ninethly or seventeenthly that ought to be there but isn’t. Exclamation points are the most irritating of all. Look! They say, look at what I just said! How amazing is my thought! It is like being forced to watch someone else’s small child jumping up and down crazily in the center of the living room shouting to attract attention. If a sentence really has something of importance to say, something quiet remarkable, it doesn’t need a mark to point it out. And if it is really, after all, a banal sentence needing more zing, the exclamation point simply emphasizes its banality! Quotation marks should be used honestly and sparingly, when there is a genuine quotation at hand, and it is necessary to be very rigorous about the words enclosed by the marks. If something is to be quoted, the exact words must be used. If part of it must be left out because of space limitations, it is good manners to insert three dots to indicate the omission, but it is unethical to do this if it means connecting two thoughts which the original author did not intend to have tied together. Above all, quotation marks should not be used for ideas that you’d like to disown, things in the air so to speak. Nor should they be put in place around clichés; if you want to use the cliché you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to job it off on anon., or on society. The most objectionable misuse of quotation marks, but one which illustrates the dangers of misuse in ordinary prose, is seen in advertising, special in advertisements for small restaurants, for example “just around the corner,” or “a good place to eat.” No single, identifiable, citable person ever really said, for the record, “just around the corner,” much less “good place to eat,” least likely of all for restaurants of the type that use this type of prose. The dash is a handy device, informal and essentially playful, telling you that you’re about to take off on a different tack but still in some way

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connected with the present course — only you have to remember that the dash is there, and either put a second dash at the end of the notion to let the reader know that he’s back on course, or else end the sentence, as here, with a period. The great danger in punctuation is for poetry. Here it is necessary to be as economical and parsimonious with commas and periods as with the words themselves, and any marks that seem to carry their own subtle meanings, like dashes and little rows of periods, even semicolons and question marks should be left out altogether rather than inserted to clog up the thing with ambiguity. A single exclamation point in a poem, no matter what else the poem has to say, is enough to destroy the whole work. The things I like best in T.S. Eliot’s poetry, especially in the Four Quartets, are the semicolons. You cannot hear them, but they are there, laying out the connections between the images and the ideas. Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath. Commas can’t do this sort of things; they can only tell you how the different parts of a complicated thought are to be fitted together, but you cannot sit, not even take a breath, just because of a comma, From: The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979). New York: Viking.

BIOGRAPHIES OF THE WRITERS

George Orwell

George Orwell (1903- 1950) was the pen name of Eric Blair, who was an English journalist, novelist, essayist, and critic. He was born in India but educated in England. He became a police officer in the Indian Imperial Police (1922-27), a part of his life that later was depicted in his novel, Burmese Days. In 1927, he moved to Europe to develop his writing career. His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), illustrates the years when he was working as a dishwasher and day laborer. Moreover, his experience fighting in the Spanish Civil War is reflected in Homage to Catalonia (1938). His Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949) are satires addressing totalitarian governments. He also published five essay collections, including Shooting an Elephant (1950).

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John Steinbeck

John Steinbeck (1902-1968) is one of the most influential writers in 20th Century American literature. His works include 16 novels, a collection of short stories, four screenplays, many essays. In 1962, he won the Nobel Prize for literature. Among his most well-known works are The Grapes of Wrath, The Pearl, and Of Mice and Men.

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Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) was born in Illinois. He launched his career as a writer in a local newspaper in Kansas City. During the twenties, he joined a group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he explains in his first remarkable work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Moreover, his successful work was A Farewell to Arms (1929), which illustrates disillusionment of an American ambulance driver in the war. Hemingway reflects his experience as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background of his novel For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works is The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman, who struggles with a fish and the sea. Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938) are also among his short story collections. He committed suicide in Idaho in 1961.

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James Thurber

James Thurber (1894- 1961) is an outstanding American humorists. His witty prose includes autobiography, fiction, children's fantasy, and modern commentary. His two short stories, "The Catbird Seat" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," are among the best classics of American literature. He began his professional writing career as a reporter for the Columbus Dispatch in 1920. He began his career with writing for the New Yorker in 1927. He also started his career as a cartoonist in 1930.Though suffered from troubled eyesight, Thurber wrote about forty books, including short stories, collections of essays, fables, and children's stories. He won a Tony Award for his Broadway play, A Thurber Carnival.

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Aldous Huxley

He (1894 - 1963) is an English novelist and critic. He is known as one of the most significant authors of the twentieth century. His fiction has been considered influential on a generation that had their dreams ruined by two world wars. Huxley’s main concern was the human lifestyle in modern society, and through literature he attempts to depict the conflict between science and the humanities. He is best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World (1931). Furthermore, in his less critically received dystopian fiction, Ape and Essence, Huxley considers the degradation of human values in relation to technological developments, particularly the atom bomb. Besides novels he published histories, travel books, poems, plays, and essays on philosophy, arts, sociology, religion and morals.

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Jonathan Swift

Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745) was born in Dublin, Ireland. He visited Oxford in 1691 and he received an M.A degree from that University in 1692. In 1720 he started to work on Gulliver's Travels. From 1724-25, he published The Drapier Letters, which gained him popularity in Ireland, and the completion of Gulliver's Travels. in 1729, he published A Modest Proposal. 1731 saw the publication of Swift's ghastly "A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed."

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Dick Gregory

Dick Gregory (1932- ) an influential American writer shaped his comedy acts based on the civil rights movement of the 1960s and then with the antiwar movement. After many political activities, he decided to run for president of the US as the candidate of that Peace and Freedom party in 1968. He also won the Ebony-Topaz Heritage and Freedom Award In 1978. His works include From the Back of the Bus (1962). No more lies: the myth and reality of American history (1971). Dick Gregory’s political primer (1972). An autobiography. Nigger, written with the Robert Lipsyte (1964), and Up from Nigger (1976). The following selection comes from a chapter in Nigger entitled “Not Poor, Just Broke.”

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Robert Louis Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) was a Scottish writer. He showed his passion to write early in life. He was often abroad, usually for health reasons, and his travels led to some of his early literary works. Publishing his first volume at the age of 28, he became a literary celebrity during his life when works such as Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were published to eager audiences.

REFERENCES

Gregory, Dick. “Shame,” in Models for Writers: Short Essays for Composition. Ed. Alfred Rosa and Paul Eschholz. Boston, MA: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1964 (2012), pp. 288–92. Hemingway, Ernest. “Bullfighting is Not a Sport—It is a Tragedy,” Toronto Star Weekly. October 20, 1923. Huxley, Aldous. “Snobbery,” in A Book of English Essays, selected by W. E. Williams. London: Penguin Publisher, 1992. Kashani, M. Jamal. “Amir Kabir.” Iran Tribune, Vol. IX, No. 116, 1972. Kashani, M. Jamal. “Cyrus (Founder of Human Rights),” Iran Tribune, Vol. IX, No. 116, 1972. Orwell, George. “Shooting an Elephant,” in The Longman Anthology: British Literature. Third ed. Vol. 2c: Pearson Longman, 2006, pp. 2,844–848. Steinbeck, John. “How to Tell Good Guys from Bad Guys.” Reporter. March 10, 1955, pp. 42–43. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Treasure Island. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1883. Swift, Jonathan. “A Voyage to Liliput,” in Gulliver’s Travels. London: Macmillan, 1999. Thurber, James. “University Days,” in My Life and Hard Times. Columbus, OH: Logan Elm Press, 1990.