现代大学精读英语4 leon one课文(外语教学出版社)_现代大学英语精读课文
现代大学精读英语4 leon one课文(外语教学出版社)由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便，猜你可能喜欢“现代大学英语精读课文”。
Leon 1 Thinking as a Hobby
William Golding
While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking;and that I myself could not think at all.It was the headmaster of my grammar school who first brought the subject of thinkingbefore me.He had somestatuettes in his study.They stood on a high cupboard behind his desk.One was a lady wearing nothing but a bath towel.She seemed frozen in an eternal panic lest the bath towel slip down any farther, and since she had no arms, she was in an unfortunate position to pull the towel up again.Next to her, crouched the statuette of a leopard, ready to spring down at the top drawer of a filing cabinet.Beyond the leopard was a naked, muscular gentleman, who sat, looking down, with his chin on his fist and his elbow on his knee.He seemed utterly miserable.Some time later, I learned about these statuettes.The headmaster had placed them where they would face delinquent children, because they symbolized to him to whole of life.The naked lady was the Venus.She was Love.She was not worried about the towel.She was just busy being beautiful.The leopard was Nature, and he was being natural.The naked, muscular gentleman was not miserable.He was Rodin's Thinker, an image of pure thought.I had better explain that I was a frequent visitor to the headmaster's study, because of the latest thing I had done or left undone.As we now say, I was not integrated.I was, if anything, disintegrated.Whenever Ifound myself in a penal position before the headmaster's desk, I would sink my head, and writhe one shoe over the other.The headmaster would look at me and say，“What are wegoing to do with you?”
Well, what were they going to do with me? I would writhe my shoe some more and staredown at the worn rug.“Look up, boy!Can't you look up?”
Then I would look at the cupboard, where the naked lady was frozen in her panic and themuscular gentleman contemplated the hindquarters of the leopard in endle gloom.I had nothing to say to the headmaster.His spectacles caught the light so that you could see nothing human behind them.There was no poibility of communication.“Don't you ever think at all?”
No, I didn't think, wasn't thinking, couldn't thinkhadn't you?“
On one occasion the headmaster leaped to his feet, reached up and put Rodin's masterpiece on the desk before me.”That's what a man looks like when he's really thinking.“
Clearly there was something miing in me.Nature had endowed the rest of the human race with a sixth sense and left me out.But like someone born deaf, but bitterly determined to find out about sound, I watched my teachers to find outabout thought.There was Mr.Houghton.He was always telling me to think.With a modest satisfaction, he would tell that he had thought a bit himself.Then why did he spend so much time drinking? Or was there more sense in drinking than there appeared to be? But if not, and if drinking were in fact ruinous to healthwhy was he always talking about the clean life and the virtues of fresh air?
Sometimes, exalted by his own oratory, he would leap from his desk and hustle usoutside into a hideous wind.”Now, boys!Deep breaths!Feel it right down inside youand I know what I think!“
Mr.Houghton thought with his neck.This was my introduction to the nature of what is commonly called thought.Through them I discovered that thought is often full of unconscious prejudice, ignorance, and hypocrisy.It will lecture on disinterested purity while its neck is being remorselely twisted toward a skirt.Technically, it is about as proficient as most businemen's golf, as honest as most politician's intentions, or as coherent as most books that get written.It is what I came to call grade-three thinking, though more properly, it is feeling, rather than thought.True, often there is a kind of innocence in prejudices, but in those days I viewed grade-three thinking with contempt and mockery.I delighted to confront a pious lady who hated the Germans with the proposition that we should love our enemies.She taught me a great truth in dealing with grade-three thinkers;because of her, I no longer dismi lightly a mental proce which for nine-tenths of the population is the nearest they will ever get to thought.They have immense solidarity.We had better respect them, for we are outnumbered and surrounded.A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs.Man enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.Grade-two thinking is the detection of contradictions.Grade-two thinkers do not stampede easily, though often they fal linto the other fault and lag behind.Grade-two thinking is a withdrawal, with eyes and ears open.It destroys without having the power to create.It set me watching the crowds cheering His Majesty the King and asking myself what all the fu was about, without giving me anything positive to put in the place of that heady patriotism.But there were compensations.To hear people justify their habit of hunting foxes by claiming that the foxes like it.To her our Prime Minister talk about the great benefit we conferred on India by jailing people like Nehru and Gandhi.To hear American politicians talk about peace and refuse to join the League of Nations.Yes, there were moments of delight.But I was growing toward adolescence and had to admit that Mr.Houghton was not the only one with an irresistible spring in his neck.I, too, felt the compulsive hand of nature and began to find that pointing out contradiction could be costly as well as fun.There was Ruth, for example, a serious and attractive girl.I was an atheist at the time.And she was a Methodist.But, alas, instead of relying on the Holy Spirit to convert me, Ruth was foolish enough to open her pretty mouth in argument.She claimed that the Bible was literally inspired.I countered by saying that the Catholics believed in the literal inspiration of Saint Jerome's Vulgate, and the two books were different.Argument flagged.At last she remarked that there were an awful lot of Methodists and they couldn't bewrong, could theynot all those hundreds of millions? An awful flicker of doubt appeared in her eyes.I slid my arm round her waist and murmured that if we were counting heads, the Buddhists were the boys for my money.She fled.The combination of my arm and those countle Buddhists was too much for her.That night her father visited my father and left, red-cheeked and indignant.I was given the third degree to find out what had happened.I lost Ruth and gained an undeserved reputation as a potential libertine.Grade-two thinking, though it filled life with fun and excitement, did not make for content.To find out the deficiencies of our elders satisfies the young ego but does not make for personal security.It took the swimmer some distance from the shore and left him there, out of his depth.A typical grade-two thinker will say, ”What is truth?“ There is still a higher grade of thought which says, ”What is truth?" and sets out to find it.But these grade-one thinkers were few and far between.They did not visit my grammar school in the flesh though they were there in books.I aspired to them, because I now saw my hobby as an unsatisfactory thing if it went no further.If you set out to climb a mountain, however high you climb, you have failed if you cannot reach the top.I therefore decided that I would be a grade-one thinker.I was irrelevant at the best of times.Political and religious systems, social customs, loyalties and traditions, they all came tumbling down like so many rotten apples off a tree.I came up in the end with what mustalways remain the justification for grade-one thinking.I devised a coherent system for living.It was a moral system, which was wholly logical.Of course, as I readily admitted, conversion of the world to my way of thinking might be difficult, since my system did away with a number of trifles, such as big busine, centralized government, armies, marriage...It was Ruth all over again.I had some very good friends who stood by me, and still do.But my acquaintances vanished, taking the girls with them.Young people seemed oddly contented with the world as it was.A young navy officer got as red-necked as Mr.Houghton when I proposed a world without any battleships in it.Had the game gone too far? In those prewar days, I stood to lose a great deal, for the sake of a hobby.Now you are expecting me to describe how I saw the folly of my ways and came back to the warm nest, where prejudices are called loyalties, pointle actions are turned into customs by repetition, where we are content to say we think when all we do is feel.But you would be wrong.I dropped my hobby and turned profeional.
现代大学精读英语4 leon four课文(外语教学出版社)
Leon 4 A Drink in the Paage In the year 1960 the Union of South Africa celebrated its Golden Jubilee, and there was a nationwide sensation when the one-thousand......
Leon tenThe Telephone When I was growing up in Magdaluna, a small Lebanese village in the terraced, rocky mountains east of Sidon, time didn't mean much to an......
现代大学精读英语4 leon eight课文(外语教学出版社)
Leon 8 Globalization’s Dual PowerAt the edge of a new century, globalization is a double-edged sword: a powerful vehicle that raises economic growth, spreads......
现代大学精读英语4 leon nine课文(外语教学出版社)
Leon 9 The Most Dangerous Game 1) “General,” said Rainsford firmly, “I wish to leave this island at once.” 2) The General raised his eyebrows.He seemed hurt......
Leon 2 Waiting for the Police I wonder where Mr Wainwright's gone?' said Mrs Mayton.It didn't matter to her in the least where he had gone.All that mattered......
