高级英语下册课文1416课

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1、lesson fourteenSaturday Night and Sunday Morningby Alan Sillitoe Text14-1 He sat by the canal fishing on a Sunday morning in spring, at an elbow where alders dipped over the water like old men on their last legs, pushed by young sturdy oaks from behind. He straightened his back, his fingers freeing

2、nylon line from a speedily revolving reel. Around him lay knapsack and jacket, an empty catch-net, his bicycle, and two tins of worms dug from the plot of garden at home before setting out. Sun was breaking through clouds, releasing a smell of earth to heaven. Birds sang. A soundless and minuscular

3、explosion of water caught his eye. He moved nearer the edge, stood up, and with a vigorous sweep of his arm, cast out the line. 14-2 Another solitary man was fishing further along the canal, but Arthur knew that they would leave each other in peace, would not even call out greetings . No one bothere

4、d you: you were a hunter, a dreamer, your own boss away from it all for a few hours on any day that the weather did not throw down its rain . Like the corporal in the army who said it was marvellous the things you thought about as you sat on the lavatory. Even better than that, it was marvellous the

5、 things that came to you in the tranquillity of fishing.14-3 He drank tea from the flask and ate a cheese sandwich, then sat back to watch the red and white float-up to its waist in water under the alder trees-and keep an eye always close to it for the sudden indication of a fortunate catch. For him

6、self, his own catch had been made, and he would have to wrestle with it for the rest of his life. Whenever you caught a fish, the fish caught you, in a way of speaking , and it was .the same with anything else you caught, like the measles or a woman. Everyone in the world was caught, somehow, one wa

7、y or another, and those that werent were always on the way to it. As soon as you were born you were captured by fresh air that you screamed against the minute you came out . Then you were roped in by a factory, had a machine slung around your neck , and then you were hooked .up by the arse with a wi

8、fe. Mostly you were like a fish: you swam about with freedom , thinking how good it was to be left alone, doing anything you wanted to do and caring about no one, when suddenly: SPLUTCH!-the big hook clapped itself into your mouth and you were caught. Without knowing what you were doing you had chew

9、ed off more than you could bite and had to stick with the same piece of bait for the rest of your life . It meant death for a fish; but for a man it might not be so bad. Maybe it was only the beginning of something better in life, better than you could ever have thought possible before clamping your

10、 avid jaws down over the vital bait. Arthur knew he had not yet bitten, that he had really only licked the bait and. found it tasty, that he could still disengage his mouth from the nibbled morsel. But he did not want to do so. If you went through life refusing all the bait dangled before you, that

11、would be no life at all. No changes would be made and you would have nothing to fight against. Life would be as dull as ditchwater. You could kill yourself by too much cunning. Even though bait meant trouble, you could not ignore it for ever. He laughed to think that he was full of bait already, hal

12、f-digested slop that had certainly given him a share of trouble, one way or another. 14-4 Watching the float so intently made him sleepy: he had been with Doreen until two the night before. They spoke of getting married in three months, by which time, Arthur said, they would have collected a good am

13、ount of money, nearly a hundred and fifty pounds, not counting income-tax rebate, which will probably bump it up to a couple of hundred. So they would be sitting pretty, Doreen replied, because Mrs. Greatton had already offered to let them stay with her for as long as they liked, paying half the ren

14、t. For she would be lonely when Chumley left. Arthur said he would be able to get on with Mrs. Greatton , because living there he would be the man of the house. And if there was any argument, they could get rooms somewhere. So it looked as though theyd be all right together, he thought, as long as a

15、 war didnt start, or trade slump and bring back the dole. As long as there wasnt a famine, a plague to sweep over England, an earthquake to crack it in two and collapse the city around them, or a bomb to drop and end the world with a big bang. But you couldnt concern yourself too much with these thi

16、ngs if you had plans and wanted to get something out of life that you had never had before. And that was a fact, he thought, chewing a piece of grass.14-5 He fixed the rod firmly against the bank and stood to stretch himself. He yawned widely, felt his legs weaken, then strengthen, then relax, his t

17、all figure marked against a background of curving canal and hedges and trees bordering it. He rubbed his hand over the rough features of his face , upwards over thick lips, grey eyes, low forehead ,short fair hair, then looked up at the mixture of grey cloud and blue patches of sky overhead . For so

18、me reason he smiled at what he saw, and turned to walk some yards along the towpath. Forgetting the stilled float in the water, he stopped to urinate against the bushes. While fastening his trousers, he saw the float in violent agitation, as if it were suddenly alive and wanted to leap out of the wa

19、ter,14-6 He ran back to the rod and began winding in the reel with steady movements . His hands worked smoothly and the line came in so quickly that it did not seem to be moving except on the reel itself where the nylon thread grew in thickness and breadth, where he evened it out with his thumb so t

20、hat it would not clog at a vital moment . The fish came out of the water, flashing and struggling on the end of the line, and he grasped it firmly in his hand to take the hook from its mouth. He looked into its glass-grey eye, at the brown pupil whose fear expressed all the life that it had yet live

21、d, and all its fear of the death that now threatened it. In its eye he saw the green gloom of willow-sleeved canals in cool decay, an eye filled with panic and concern for the remaining veins of life that circled like a silent whirlpool around it. Where do fishes go when they die? he wondered. The g

22、low of long-remembered lives was mirrored in its eyes, and the memory of cunning curves executed in the moving shadows from reed to reed as it scattered the smaller fry and was itself chased by bigger fish was also pictured there. Arthur felt mobile waves of hope running the length of its squamous b

23、ody from head to tail. He removed the hook, and threw it back into the water. He watched it flash away and disappear.14-7 One more chance, he said to himself; but if you or any of your pals come back to the bait, its curtains for em . With float bobbing before him once more he sat down to wait. This

24、 time it was war, and he wanted fish to take home, either to cook in the pan or feed to the cat. Its trouble for you and trouble for me, and all over a piece of bait, The fattest worm of the lot is fastened to the hook, so dont grumble when you feel that point sticking to your chops.14-8 And trouble

25、 for me itll be, fighting every day until I die. Why do they make soldiers out of us when were fighting up to the hilt as it is? Fighting with mothers and wives, landlords and gaffers, coppers, army, government. If its not one thing its another, apart from the work we have to do and the way we spend

26、 our wages. Theres bound to be trouble in store for me every day of my life, because trouble its always been and always will be. Born drunk and married blind, misbegotten into a strange and crazy world, dragged up through the dole and into the war with a gas-mask on your clock, and the sirens rattli

27、ng into you every night while you rot with scabies in an air-raid shelter. Slung into khaki at eighteen, and when they let you out, you sweat again in a factory, grabbing for an extra pint, doing women at the weekend and getting to know whose husbands are on the night-shift, working with rotten guts

28、 and an aching spine , and nothing for it but money to drag you back there every Monday morning .14-9 Well, its a good life and a good world, all said and done, if you dont weaken, and if you know that the big wide world hasnt heard from you yet, no, not by a long way, though it wont be long now. 14

29、-10 The float bobbed more violently than before and, with a grin on his face, he began to wind in the reel.Lesson Fifteen Is America Falling Apart? 15-1 I am back in Bracciano, a castellated town about 13 miles north of Rome, after a year in New Jersey. I find the Italian Government still unstable,

30、gasoline more expensive than anywhere in the world, butchers and bank clerks and tobacconists ready to go on strike at the drop of a hat, neo-fascists at their dirty work, the hammer and sickle painted on the rumps of public statues, a thousand-lira note (officially worth about $1.63) shrunk to the

31、slightness of a dollar bill. 15-2 Nevertheless, its delightful to be back. People are underpaid but they go through an act of liking their work, the open markets are luscious with esculent color , the community is important than the state, the human condition is humorously accepted. The northern win

32、d blows viciously today, and theres no central heating to turn on, but it will be pleasant when the wind drops. The two television channels are inadequate, but next Wednesdays return of an old Western is something to look forward to. Manifold consumption isnt important here. The quality of life has

33、nothing to do with the quantity of brand names. What matters is talk, family, cheap wine in the open air, the wresting of minimal sweetness out of the long-known bitterness of living . I was spoiled in New Jersey.15-3 In New Jersey, I never had to shiver by a fire that wouldnt draw, or go without ca

34、nned food . America made me develop new appetites in order to make proper use of the supermarket. A character in Evelyn Waughs Put out More Flags said that the difference between prewar and postwar life was that, prewar, if one thing went wrong the day was ruined; postwar, if one thing went right th

35、e day would be made. America is a prewar country, psychologically unprepared for one thing to go wrong. Hence the neurosis, despair, the Kafka feeling that the whole marvelous fabric of American life is coming apart at the seams. 15-4 Let us stay for a while on this subject of consumption. American

36、individualism, on the face of it an admirable philosophy, wishes to manifest itself in independence of the community. You dont share things in common; you have your own things. A familys strength is signalized by its possessions. Herein lies a paradox. For the desire for possessions must eventually

37、mean dependence on possessions. Freedom is slavery. Once let the acquisitive instinct burgeon, and there are ruggedly individual forces only too ready to make it come to full and monstrous blossom. New appetites are invented; what to the European are bizarre luxuries become, to the American, plain n

38、ecessities. 15-5 During my years stay in New Jersey I let my appetite flower into full Americanism except for one thing. I did not possess an automobile. This self-elected deprivation was a way into the nastier side of the consumer society. Where private ownership prevails, public amenities decay or

39、 are prevented from coming into being. The rundown rail services of America are something I try, vainly, to forget. The nightmare of filth, outside and in, that enfolds the trip from Springfield, Mass., to Grand Central Station would not be accepted in backward Europe. But far worse is the nightmare

40、 of travel in and around Los Angeles, where public transport does not exist and people are literally choking to death in their exhaust fumes . This is part of the price of individual ownership.15-6 But if the car owner can ignore the lack of public transport, he can hardly ignore the decay of servic

41、es in general. His car needs mechanics, and mechanics grow more expensive and less efficient. The gadgets in the home are cheaper to replace than repair. The more efficiently self-contained the home seems to be, the more dependent it is on the great impersonal corporations, as well as a diminishing

42、army of servitors. Skills at the lowest level have to be wooed slavishly and exorbitantly rewarded. Plumbers will not come. Nor, at the higher level, will doctors. And doctors and dentists know their scarcity value and behave accordingly .15-7 Americans are at last realizing that the acquisition of

43、goods is not the whole of life. Consumption, on one level, is turning insipid, especially as the quality of the goods seems to be deteriorating. Planned obsolescence is not conducive to pride in workmanship. On another level, consumption is turning sour . There is a growing guilt about the masses of

44、 discarded junk- -rusting automobiles and refrigerators and washing machines and dehumidifiers that it is uneconomical to recycle. Indestructible plastic hasnt even the grace to undergo chemical change . America, the worlds biggest consumer, is the worlds biggest polluter. Awareness of this is a kin

45、d of redemptive grace, but it has not led to repentance and a revolution in consumer habits. Citizens of Los Angeles are horrified by the daily pall of golden smog, but they dont noticeably clamor for a decrease in the number of owner-vehicles. There is no worse neurosis than that which derives from

46、 a consciousness of guilt and an inability to reform .15-8 It would be unnecessary for me to list those areas in which thoughtful Americans feel that collapse is coming. It is enough for me to concentrate on education. America has always despised its teachers and, as a consequence, it has been grant

47、ed the teachers it deserves . The quality of first-grade education that my son received, in a New Jersey town noted for the excellence of its public schools, could not, I suppose, be faulted on the level of dogged conscientiousness. The teachers worked rigidly from the approved rigidly programed pri

48、mers. But there seemed to be no spark, no daring, no madness, no readiness to engage the individual childs mind as anything other than raw material for statistical reductions. The fear of being unorthodox is rooted in the American teachers soul; you can be fired for treading the path of experimental

49、 enterprises.15-9 I know that American technical genius, and most of all the moon landing, seems to give the lie to too summary a condemnation of the educational system , but there is more to education than the segmental equipping of the mind. There is that transmission of the value of the past as a

50、 force still miraculously fertile and moving mostly absent from American education at all levels.15-10 Of course, America was built on a rejection of the past. Even the basic Christianity which was brought to the continent in 1620 was of a novel and bizarre kind . And now America, filling in the vac

51、uum left by the liquefied British Empire, has the task of showing the best thing to the rest of the world. The best thing can only be money-making and consumption for its own sake. In the name of this ghastly creed the jungle must be defoliated .15-11 No wonder thoughtful Americans feel guilty and w

52、ant to take all the blame they can find. What do Europeans really think of us? is a common question at parties. The expected answer is: They think youre a load of decadent, gross-lipped, potbellied, callous, overbearing neo-imperialists. But the fact is that such an answer, however much desired, wou

53、ld not be an honest one. Europeans think more highly of Americans now than they ever did. Let me explain why.15-12 When Europe had sunk to the level of sewer, America became the golden dream, the Eden where innocence could be recovered . Original sin was the monopoly of that dirty continent over the

54、re. In America, progress was possible, and the wrongs committed against the Indians, the wildlife, the land itself, could be explained away in terms of the rational control of environment necessary for the building of a New Jerusalem. Morally there were only right and wrong; evil had no place in Ame

55、rica.15-13 At last, with the Vietnam War, Americans are beginning to realize that they are subject to original sin as much as Europeans are. Some things the massive crime figures, for instance can now be explained only in terms of absolute evil. America is no longer Europes daughter nor her rich ste

56、pmother; she is Europes sister; The agony that America is undergoing is not to be associated with breakdown as much as with the parturition of self-knowledge. 15-14 It has been assumed that the youth of America has been in the vanguard of the discovery of both the disease and the cure. The various e

57、scapist movements, however, have committed the gross error of assuming that original sin rested with their elders, their rulers, and that they themselves could manifest their essential innocence by building little neo-Edens. The drug culture could confirm that the paradisal vision was available to a

58、ll who sought it. But instant ecstasy has to be purchased, like any other commodity, and, in economic terms, that passive life involves parasitism. Practically all of the crime I encountered in New York was a preying of the opium-eaters on the working community. There has to be the snake in paradise

59、. You cant escape the heritage of human evil by building communes, usually on an agronomic ignorance that does violence to life . The American young are well-meaning but misguided, and must not themselves be taken as guides.15-15 The guides, as always, lie among the writers and artists. And American

60、s ought to note that, however things may seem to be falling apart, arts and the humane scholarship are flourishing here. Im not suggesting that writers and artists have the task of finding a solution to the American mess , but they can at least clarify its nature and show how it relates to the human

61、 condition in general. Literature often reacts magnificently to an ambience of unease or apparent breakdown. 15-16 I am not suggesting that Americans sit back and wait for a transient period of mistrust and despair to resolve itself. Americans living here and now have a right to an improvement in th

62、e quality of their lives, and they themselves must do something about it. It is not right that men and women should fear to go on the street at night, and that they should sometimes fear the police as much as the criminals, both of whom sometimes look like mirror images of each other. There are too

63、many guns about, and the disarming of the police should be a natural aspect of the disarming of the entire citizenry .15-17 American politics, at both the state and the Federal levels, is too much concerned with the protection of large fortunes. The wealth qualification for the aspiring politician i

64、s taken for granted; a governmental system dedicated to the promotion of personal wealth in a few selected areas will never act for the public good . The time has come, nevertheless, for citizens to demand, from their government, amenities for the many, of which adequate state pensions and sickness

65、benefits, as well as nationalized transport, should be priorities. 15-18 This angst about America coming apart at the seams, which apparently is shared by nearly 50 per cent of the entire American population, is something to rejoice about . A sense of sin is always admirable, though it must not be a

66、llowed to become neurotic. I ask the reader to note that I, an Englishman who no longer lives in England and cant spend more than six months at a stretch in any other European country, home to America as to a country more stimulating than depressing. I brave the brutality and the guilt in order to be on the scene. I shall be backLesson sixteen Throug