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1、Unit One TEXT I Two Words to Avoid, Two to Remember Arthur Gordon 1Nothing in life is more exciting and rewarding than the sudden flash of insight that leaves you a changed person – not only changed, but changed for the better. Such moments are rare, certainly, but they come to all of us. Someti

2、mes from a book, a sermon, a line of poetry. Sometimes from a friend…. 2 That wintry afternoon in Manhattan, waiting in the little French restaurant, I was feeling frustrated and depressed. Because of several miscalculations on my part, a project of considerable importance in my life had fallen thr

3、ough. Even the prospect of seeing a dear friend (the Old Man, as I privately and affectionately thought of him) failed to cheer me as it usually did. I sat there frowning at the checkered tablecloth, chewing the bitter cud of hindsight. 3He came across the street, finally, muffled in his ancient ov

4、ercoat, shapeless felt hat pulled down over his bald head, looking more like an energetic gnome than an eminent psychiatrist. His offices were nearby; I knew he had just left his last patient of the day. He was close to 80, but he still carried a full case load, still acted as director of a large fo

5、undation, still loved to escape to the golf course whenever he could. 4By the time he came over and sat beside me, the waiter had brought his invariable bottle of ale. I had not seen him for several months, but he seemed as indestructible as ever. “Well, young man,” he said without preliminary, “wh

6、at’s troubling you?” 5I had long since ceased to be surprised at his perceptiveness. So I proceeded to tell him, at some length, just what was bothering me. With a kind of melancholy pride, I tried to be very honest. I blamed no one else for my disappointment, only myself. I analyzed the whole thin

7、g, all the bad judgments, the false moves. I went on for perhaps 15 minutes, while the Old Man sipped his ale in silence. 6When I finished, he put down his glass. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go back to my office.” 7“Your office? Did you forget something?” 8“No,” he said mildly. “I want your reacti

8、on to something. That’s all.” 9A chill rain was beginning to fall outside, but his office was warm and comfortable and familiar: book-lined walls, long leather couch, signed photograph of Sigmund Freud, tape recorder by the window. His secretary had gone home. We were alone. 10The Old Man took a t

9、ape from a flat cardboard box and fitted it onto the machine. “On this tape,” he said, “are three short recordings made by three persons who came to me for help. They are not identified, of course. I want you to listen to the recordings and see if you can pick out the two-word phrase that is the com

10、mon denominator in all three cases.” He smiled. “Don’t look so puzzled. I have my reasons.” 11What the owners of the voices on the tape had in common, it seemed to me, was unhappiness. The man who spoke first evidently had suffered some kind of business loss or failure; he berated himself for not h

11、aving worked harder, for not having looked ahead. The woman who spoke next had never married because of a sense of obligation to her widowed mother; she recalled bitterly all the marital chances she had let go by. The third voice belonged to a mother whose teen-age son was in trouble with the police

12、; she blamed herself endlessly. 12The Old Man switched off the machine and leaned back in his chair. “Six times in those recordings a phrase is used that’s full of subtle poison. Did you spot it? No? Well, perhaps that’s because you used it three times yourself down in the restaurant a little while

13、 ago.” He picked up the box that had held the tape and tossed it over to me. “There they are, right on the label. The two saddest words in any language.” 13I looked down. Printed neatly in red ink were the words: If only. 14“You’d be amazed,” said the Old Man, “if you knew how many thousands of ti

14、mes I’ve sat in this chair and listened to woeful sentences beginning with those two words. ‘If only,’ they say to me, ‘I had done it differently – or not done it at all. If only I hadn’t lost my temper, said the cruel thing, made that dishonest move, told that foolish lie. If only I had been wiser,

15、 or more unselfish, or more self-controlled.’ They go on and on until I stop them. Sometimes I make them listen to the recordings you just heard. ‘If only,’ I say to them, ‘you’d stop saying if only, we might begin to get somewhere!’” 15The Old Man stretched out his legs. “The trouble with ‘if only

16、,’” he said, “is that it doesn’t change anything. It keeps the person facing the wrong way – backward instead of forward. It wastes time. In the end, if you let it become a habit, it can become a real roadblock, an excuse for not trying any more. 16“Now take your own case: your plans didn’t work ou

17、t. Why? Because you made certain mistakes. Well, that’s all right: everyone makes mistakes. Mistakes are what we learn from. But when you were telling me about them, lamenting this, regretting that, you weren’t really learning from them.” 17“How do you know?” I said, a bit defensively. 18“Because,

18、” said the Old Man, “you never got out of the past tense. Not once did you mention the future. And in a way-be honest, now! –you were enjoying it. There’s a perverse streak in all of us that makes us like to hash over old mistakes. After all, when you relate the story of some disaster or disappointm

19、ent that has happened to you, you’re still the chief character, still in the center of the stage.” 19I shook my head ruefully. “Well, what’s the remedy?” 20“Shift the focus,” said the Old Man promptly. “Change the key words and substitute a phrase that supplies lift instead of creating drag.” 21“

20、Do you have such a phrase to recommend?” 22“Certainly. Strike out the words ‘if only’; substitute the phrase ‘next time.’” 23“Next time?” 24“That’s right. I’ve seen it work minor miracles right here in this room. As long as a patient keeps saying ‘if only’ to me, he’s in trouble. But when he look

21、s me in the eye and says ‘next time,’ I know he’s on his way to overcoming his problem. It means he has decided to apply the lessons he has learned from his experience, however grim or painful it may have been. It means he’s going to push aside the roadblock of regret, move forward, take action, res

22、ume living. Try it yourself. You’ll see.” 25My old friend stopped speaking. Outside, I could hear the rain whispering against the windowpane. I tried sliding one phrase out of my mind and replacing it with the other. It was fanciful, of course, but I could hear the new words lock into place with an

23、 audible click…. 26The Old Man stood up a bit stiffly. “Well, class dismissed. It has been good to see you, young man. Always is. Now, if you will help me find a taxi, I probably should be getting on home.” 27We came out of the building into the rainy night. I spotted a cruising cab and ran toward

24、 it, but another pedestrian was quicker. 28“My, my,” said the Old Man slyly. “If only we had come down ten seconds sooner, we’d have caught that cab, wouldn’t we?” 29I laughed and picked up the cue. “Next time I’ll run faster.” 30“That’s it,” cried the Old Man, pulling his absurd hat down around

25、his ears. “That’s it exactly!” 31Another taxi slowed. I opened the door for him. He smiled and waved as it moved away. I never saw him again. A month later, he died of sudden heart attack, in full stride, so to speak. 32More than a year has passed since that rainy afternoon in Manhattan. But to th

26、is day, whenever I find myself thinking “if only”, I change it to “next time”. Then I wait for that almost-perceptible mental click. And when I hear it, I think of the Old Man. 33A small fragment of immortality, to be sure. But it’s the kind he would have wanted. From: James I. Brown, pp. 146-148.

27、 Unit Two TEXT I The Fine Art of Putting Things Off Michael Demarest 1“Never put off till tomorrow,” exhorted Lord Chesterfield in 1749, “what you can do today.” That the elegant earl never got around to marrying his son’s mother and had a bad habit of keeping worthies like Dr. Johnson cool

28、ing their heels for hours in an anteroom attests to the fact that even the most well-intentioned men have been postponers ever. Quintus Fabius Maximus, one of the great Roman generals, was dubbed “Cunctator” (Delayer) for putting off battle until the last possible vinum break. Moses pleaded a speech

29、 defect to rationalize his reluctance to deliver Jehovah’s edict to Pharaoh. Hamlet, of course, raised procrastination to an art form. 2The world is probably about evenly divided between delayers and do-it-nowers. There are those who prepare their income taxes in February, prepay mortgages and serv

30、e precisely planned dinners at an ungodly 6:30 p.m. The other half dine happily on leftovers at 9 or 10, misplace bills and file for an extension of the income tax deadline. They seldom pay credit-card bills until the apocalyptic voice of Diners threatens doom from Denver. They postpone, as Faustian

31、 encounters, visits to barbershop, dentist or doctor. 3Yet for all the trouble procrastination may incur, delay can often inspire and revive a creative soul. Jean Kerr, author of many successful novels and plays, says that she reads every soup-can and jam-jar label in her kitchen before settling do

32、wn to her typewriter. Many a writer focuses on almost anything but his task-for example, on the Coast and Geodetic Survey of Maine’s Frenchman Bay and Bar Harbor, stimulating his imagination with names like Googins Ledge, Blunts Pond, Hio Hill and Burnt Porcupine, Long Porcupine, Sheep Porcupine and

33、 Bald Porcupine islands. 4From Cunctator’s day until this century, the art of postponement had been virtually a monopoly of the military (“Hurry up and wait”), diplomacy and the law. In former times, a British proconsul faced with a native uprising could comfortably ruminate about the situation wit

34、h Singapore Sling in hand. Blessedly, he had no nattering Telex to order in machine guns and fresh troops. A.U.S. general as late as World War II could agree with his enemy counterpart to take a sporting day off, loot the villagers’ chickens and wine and go back to battle a day later. Lawyers are am

35、ong the world’s most addicted postponers. According to Frank Nathan, a nonpostponing Beverly Hills insurance salesman, “The number of attorneys who die without a will is amazing.” 5Even where there is no will, there is a way. There is a difference, of course, between chronic procrastination and pur

36、poseful postponement, particularly in the higher echelons of business. Corporate dynamics encourage the caution that breeds delay, says Richard Manderbach, Bank of America group vice president. He notes that speedy action can be embarrassing or extremely costly. The data explosion fortifies those se

37、eking excuses for inaction – another report to be read, another authority to be consulted. “There is always,” says Manderbach, “a delicate edge between having enough information and too much.” 6His point is well taken. Bureaucratization, which flourished amid the growing burdens of government and t

38、he great complexity of society, was designed to smother policymakers in blankets of legalism, compromise and reappraisal – and thereby prevent hasty decisions from being made. The centralization of government that led to Watergate has spread to economic institutions and beyond, making procrastinatio

39、n a worldwide way of life. Many languages are studded with phrases that refer to putting things off – from the Spanish manana to the Arabic bukrafil mishmish (literally “tomorrow in apricots,” more loosely “l(fā)eave it for the soft spring weather when the apricots are blooming”). 7Academe also takes h

40、igh honors in procrastination. Bernard Sklar, a University of Southern California sociologist who churns out three to five pages of writing a day, admits that “many of my friends go through agonies when they face a blank page. There are all sorts of rationalizations: the pressure of teaching, respon

41、sibilities at home, checking out the latest book, looking up another footnote.” 8Psychologists maintain that the most assiduous procrastinators are women, though many psychologists are (at $50 — plus an hour) pretty good delayers themselves. Dr. Ralph Greenson, a U.C.L.A. professor of clinical psyc

42、hiatry (and Marilyn Monroe’s onetime shrink), takes a fairly gentle view of procrastination. “To many people,” he says, “doing something, confronting, is the moment of truth. All frightened people will then avoid the moment of truth entirely, or evade or postpone it until the last possible moment.”

43、To Georgia State Psychologist Joen Fagan, however, procrastination may be a kind of subliminal way of sorting the important from the trivial. “When I drag my feet, there’s usually some reason,” says Fagan. “I feel it, but I don’t yet know the real reason.” 9In fact, there is a long and honorable hi

44、story of procrastination to suggest that many ideas and decisions may well improve if postponed. It is something of a truism that to put off making a decision is itself a decision. The parliamentary process is essentially a system of delay and deliberation. So, for that matter, is the creation of a

45、great painting, or an entrée, or a book, or a building like Blenheim Palace, which took the Duck of Marlborough’s architects and laborers 15years to construct. In the process, the design can mellow and marinate. Indeed, hurry can be the assassin of elegance. As T. H. White, author of Swords in the S

46、tone, once wrote, time “is not meant to be devoured in an hour or a day, but to be consumed delicately and gradually and without haste.” In other words, pace Lord Chesterfield, what you don’t necessarily have to do today, by all means put off until tomorrow. From: G. Levin, 4th ed., pp. 429 - 434

47、 Unit Three TEXT I Walls and Barriers Eugene Raskin 1My father’s reaction to the bank building at 43rd Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City was immediate and definite: “You won’t catch me putting my money in there!” he declared. “Not in that glass box!” 2Of course, my father is a gen

48、tleman of the old school, a member of the generation to whom a good deal of modern architecture is unnerving; but I suspect—I more than suspect, I am convinced—that his negative response was not so much to the architecture as to a violation of his concept of the nature of money. 3In his generation

49、money was thought of as a tangible commodity—bullion, bank notes, coins—that could be hefted, carried, or stolen. Consequently, to attract the custom of a sensible man, a bank had to have heavy walls, barred windows, and bronze doors, to affirm the fact, however untrue, that money would be safe insi

50、de. If a building’s design made it appear impregnable, the institution was necessarily sound, and the meaning of the heavy wall as an architectural symbol dwelt in the prevailing attitude toward money, rather than in any aesthetic theory. 4But that attitude toward money has of course changed. Excep

51、ting pocket money, cash of any kind is now rarely used; money as a tangible commodity has largely been replaced by credit, a bookkeeping-banking matter. A deficit economy, accompanied by huge expansion, has led us to think of money as a product of the creative imagination. The banker no longer offer

52、s us a safe, he offers us a service—a service in which the most valuable elements are dash and a creative flair for the invention of large numbers. It is in no way surprising, in view of this change in attitude, that we are witnessing the disappearance of the heavy-walled bank. The Manufactures Trus

53、t, which my father distrusted so heartily, is a great cubical cage of glass whose brilliantly lighted interior challenges even the brightness of a sunny day, while the door to the vault, far from being secluded and guarded, is set out as a window display. 5Just as the older bank asserted its invuln

54、erability, this bank by its architecture boasts of its imaginative powers. From this point of view it is hard to day where architecture ends and human assertion begins. In fact, there is no such division; the two are one and the same. 6It is in the understanding of architecture as a medium for the

55、expression of human attitudes, prejudices, taboos, and ideals that the new architectural criticism departs from classical aesthetics. The latter relied upon pure proportion, composition, etc., as bases for artistic judgment. In the age of sociology and psychology, walls are not simply walls but phys

56、ical symbols of the barriers in men’s minds. 7In a primitive society, for example, men pictured the world as large, fearsome, hostile, and beyond human control. Therefore they built heavy walls of huge boulders, behind which they could feel themselves to be in a delimited space that was controllabl

57、e and safe; these heavy walls expressed man’s fear of the outer world and his need to find protection, however illusory. It might be argued that the undeveloped technology of the period precluded the construction of more delicate walls. This is of course true. Still, it was not technology, but a fea

58、rful attitude toward the world, which made people want to build walls in the first place. The greater the fear, the heavier the wall, until in the tombs of ancient kings we find structures that are practically all wall, the fear of dissolution being the ultimate fear. 8And then there is the questio

59、n of privacy – for it has become questionable. In some Mediterranean cultures it was not so much the world of nature that was feared, but the world of men. Men were dirty, prying, vile, and dangerous. One went about, if one could afford it, in guarded litters, women went about heavily veiled, if the

60、y went about at all. One’s house was surrounded by a wall, and the rooms faced not out, but in, toward a patio, expressing the prevalent conviction that the beauties and values of life were to be found by looking inward, and by engaging in the intimate activities of a personal as against a public li

61、fe. The rich intricacies of the decorative arts of the period, as well as its contemplative philosophies, are as illustrative of this attitude as the walls themselves. 9We feel different today. For one thing, we place greater reliance upon the control of human hostility, not so much by physical bar

62、riers, as by the conventions of law and social practice — as well as the availability of motorized police. We do not cherish privacy as much as did our ancestors. We are proud to have our women seen and admired, and the same goes for our homes. We do not seek solitude; in fact, if we find ourselves

63、alone for once, we flick a switch and invite the whole world in through the television screen. Small wonder, then, that the heavy surrounding wall is obsolete, and we build, instead, membranes of thin sheet metal or glass. 10The principal function of today’s wall is to separate possibly undesirable

64、 outside air from the controlled conditions of temperature and humidity which we have created inside, Glass may accomplish this function, though there are apparently a good many people who still have qualms about eating, sleeping, and dressing under conditions of high visibility; they demand walls t

65、hat will at least give them a sense of adequate screening. But these shy ones are a vanishing breed. The Philip Johnson house in Connecticut, which is much admired and widely imitated, has glass walls all the way around, and the only real privacy is to be found in the bathroom, the toilette taboo be

66、ing still unbroken, at least in Connecticut. 11To repeat, it is not our advanced technology, but our changing conceptions of ourselves in relation to the world that determine how we shall build our walls. The glass wall expresses man’s conviction that he can and does master nature and society. The “open plan” and the unobstructed view are consistent with his faith in the eventual solution of all problems through the expanding efforts of science. This is perhaps why it is the most “advanced” and