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1、Lesson 9 Appetite By Laurie Lee One of the major pleasures in life is appetite,and one of our major duties should be to preserve it.Appetite is the keenness of living;it is one of the senses that tells you that you are still carious to exist,that you still have an edge on your longings and want to b

2、ite into the world and taste its multitudinous flavours and juices.By appetite,of course,I dont mean just the lust for food,but any condition of unsatisfied desire,any burning in the blood that proves you want more than youve got,and that you havent yet used up your life.Wilde said he felt sorry for

3、 those who never got their hearts desire,but sorrier still for those who did.I got mine once only,and it nearly killed me,and Ive always preferred wanting to having since.For appetite,to me,is this state of wanting,which keeps ones expectations alive.I remember learning this lesson long ago as a chi

4、ld,when treats and orgies were few,and when I discovered that the greatest pitch of happiness was not in actually eating a toffee but in gazing at it beforehand.True,the first bite was delicious,but once the toffee was gone one was left with nothing,neither toffee nor lust.Besides,the whole toffeene

5、ss of toffees was imperceptibly diminished by the gross act of having eaten it.No,the best was in wanting it,in sitting and looking at it,when one tasted an inexhaustible treasure-house of flavours.So,for me,one of the keenest pleasures of appetite remains in the wanting,not the satisfaction.In want

6、ing a peach,or a whisky,or a particular texture or sound,or to be with a particular friend.For in this condition,of course,I know that the object of desire is always at its most flawlessly perfect.Which is why I would carry the preservation of appetite to the extent of deliberate fasting,simply beca

7、use I think that appetite is too good to lose,too precious to be bludgeoned into insensibility by satiation and over-doing it.For that matter,I dont really want three square meals a day-I want one huge,delicious,orgiastic,table-groaning blow-out,say every four days,and then not be too sure where the

8、 next one is coming from.A day of fasting is not for me just a puritanical device for denying oneself a pleasure,but rather a way of anticipating a rarer moment of supreme indulgence.Fasting is an act of homage to the majesty of appetite.So I think we should arrange to give up our pleasures regularl

9、y-our food,our friends,our lovers-in order to preserve their intensity,and the moment of coming back to them.For this is the moment that renews and refreshes both oneself and the thing one loves.Sailors and travellers enjoyed this once,and so did hunters,I suppose.Part of the weariness of modern lif

10、e may be that we live too much on top of each other,and are entertained and fed too regularly.Once we were separated by hunger both from our food and families,and then we learned to value both.The men went off hunting,and the dogs went with them;the women and children waved goodbye.The cave was empt

11、y of men for days on end;nobody ate,or knew what to do.The women crouched by the fire,the wet smoke in their eyes;the children wailed;everybody was hungry.Then one night there were shouts and the barking of dogs from the hills,and the men came back loaded with meat.This was the great reunion,and eve

12、rybody gorged themselves silly,and appetite came into its own;the long-awaited meal became a feast to remember and an almost sacred celebration of life.Now we go off to the office and come home in the evenings to cheap chicken and frozen peas.Very nice,but too much of it,too easy and regular,served

13、up without effort or wanting.We eat,we are lucky,our faces are shining with fat,but we dont know the pleasure of being hungry any more.Too much of anything-too much music,entertainment,happy snacks,or time spent with ones friends-creates a kind of impotence of living by which one can no longer hear,

14、or taste,or see,or love,or remember.Life is short and precious,and appetite is one of its guardians,and loss of appetite is a sort of death.So if we are to enjoy this short life we should respect the divinity of appetite,and keep it eager and not too much blunted.It is a long time now since I knew t

15、hat acute moment of bliss that comes from putting parched lips to a cup of cold water.The springs are still there to be enjoyed-all one needs is the original thirst.Lesson 10 What Is It Like to Be Poor?By George Orwell It is altogether curious,your first contact with poverty.You have thought so much

16、 about poverty-it is the thing you have feared all your life,the thing you knew would happen to you sooner or later;and it is all so utterly and prosaically different.You thought it would be quite simple;it is extraordinarily complicated.You thought it would be terrible,it is merely squalid and bori

17、ng.It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first:the shifts that it puts you to,the complicated meanness,the crustwiping.You discover,for instance,the secrecy attaching to poverty.At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to an income of six francs a day.But of course you dare not adm

18、it it-you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual.From the start it tangles you in a net of lies,and even with the lies you can hardly manage it.You stop sending clothes to the laundry,and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why;you mumble something,and she,thinking y

19、ou are sending the clothes elsewhere,is your enemy for life.The tobacconist keeps asking why you have cut down on your smoking.There are letters you want to answer,and cannot,because stamps are too expensive.And then there are your meals-meals are the worst difficulty of all.Every day at meal-times

20、you go out,ostensibly to a restaurant,and loaf an hour in the Luxembourg Gardens,watching the pigeons.Afterwards you smugg1e your food home in your pockets.Your food is bread and margarine,or bread and wine,and even the nature of the food is governed by lies.You have to buy rye bread instead of hous

21、ehold bread,because the rye loaves,though dearer,are round and can be smuggled in your pockets.This wastes you a franc a day.Sometimes,to keep up appearances,you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink,and go correspondingly short of food.Your linen gets filthy,and you run out of soap and razorblade

22、s.Your hair wants cutting,and you try to cut it yours,with such fearful results that yon have to go to the barber after all,and spend the equivalent of a days food.All day you are telling lies,and expensive lies.You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day.Mean disasters happen a

23、nd rob you of food.You have spent your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk,and are boiling it over the spirit lamp.While it boils a bug runs down your forearm;you give the bug a flick with your nail,and it falls,plop!straight into the milk.There is nothing for it but to throw the milk away

24、and go foodless.You go to the bakers to buy a pound of bread,and you wait while the girl cuts a pound for another customer.She is clumsy,and cuts more than a pound.Pardon,monsieur,she says.I suppose you dont mind paying two sous extra?Bread is a franc a pound,and you have exactly a franc.When you th

25、ink that you too might be asked to pay two sous extra,and would have to confess that you could not,you bolt in panic.It is hours before you dare venture into a bakers shop again.You go to the greengrocers to spend a franc on a kilogram of potatoes.But one of the pieces that make up the franc is a Be

26、lgium piece,and the shopman refuses it.You slink cut of the shop,and can never go there again.You have strayed into a respectable quarter,and you see a prosperous friend coming.To avoid him you dodge into the nearest cafe.Once in the cafe you must buy something,so you spend your last fifty centimes

27、on a glass of black coffee with a dead fly in it.One could multiply these disasters by the hundred.They are part of the process of being hard up.You discover what it is like to be hungry.With bread and margarine in your belly,you go out and look into the shop windows.Everywhere there is food insulti

28、ng you in huge,wasteful piles:whole dead pigs,baskets of hot loaves,great yellow blocks of butter,strings of sausages,mountains of potatoes,vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones.A snivelling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food.You plan to grab a loaf and run,swallowing it before th

29、ey catch you and you refrain,from pure funk.This-one could describe it further,but it is all in the same style-is life on six francs a day.Thousands of people in Paris live it-struggling artists and students,prostitutes when their luck is out,out-of-work people of all kinds.It is the suburbs,as it w

30、ere,of poverty.I continued in this style for about three weeks.These three weeks were squalid and uncomfortable,and evidently there was worse coming,for my rent would be due before long.Nevertheless,things were not a quarter as bad as I had expected.For,when you are approaching poverty,you make one

31、discovery which outweighs some of the others.You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger,but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty,the fact that it annihilates the future.Within certain limits,it is actually true that the less money you have,the less y

32、ou worry.When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics.When you have only three francs you are quite indifferent;for three francs will feed you till tomorrow,and you cannot think further than that.You are bored,but you are not afraid.You think vaguely,I shall b

33、e starving in a day or two-shocking,isnt it 7 And then the mind wanders to other topics.A bread and margarine diet does,to some extent,provide its own anodyne.And there is another feeling that is a great consolation in poverty.I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it.It is a feelin

34、g of relief,almost of pleasure,at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out.You have talked so often of going to the dogs-and well,here are the dogs,and you have reached them,and you can stand it.It takes off a lot of anxiety.Lesson 11 Befriending By John Nicholson Social psychologists are use

35、d to hearing that their experiments are a waste of time because they just prove the obvious,and tell us what we always knew.But there is a very simple and effective riposte to this accusation.The trouble with folk-wisdom(what we always knew)is that it tends to come in pairs of statements,both of whi

36、ch are obviously true,but which-unfortunately-are mutually exclusive.For example,we all know that too many cooks spoil the broth.But wait a minute:dont many hands make light work？Similarly with friendship:birds of a feather flock together,but what about the attraction of opposites?Experiments may no

37、t be as much fun as intuitions,but they sometimes tell us which proverbs are actually true,or(more often)in what circumstances which apply.There is one other preconception to be removed before tackling the question of whom we like and love,whom we find attractive and make friends with.Why bother to

38、study an area in which we are all expert practitioners?Surely we can all make friends and organise social relationships naturally,without any assistance from behavioural scientists?Well,if you believe that,have a word with a marriage guidance counsellor,a psychiatrist,or someone involved in industri

39、al relations.Research on friendship has established a number of facts,some interesting,some even useful.Did you know that the average student has 5-6 friends,or that a friend who was previously an enemy is liked more than one who has always been on the right side?Would you believe that physically at

40、tractive individuals are preferred as friends to those less comely,and is it fair that physically attractive defendants are less likely to be found guilty in court?Unfortunately,such titbits dont tell us much more about the nature or the purpose of friendship.Why do we make friends?Students of anima

41、l behaviour have pointed out that social attraction has an obvious adaptive function:it helps a species both to protect and to reproduce itself.Behaviourists have postulated an affiliation drive,similar to the more familiar drives of hunger,thirst or sex.But although affiliative behaviour shares som

42、e of the properties associated with biological drives,I doubt whether our desire to make friends is really much influenced by adaptive considerations.And if we want to talk in terms of drives,its just as plausible to suggest that we require a certain amount of stimulation,balanced between the predic

43、table and the unexpected,which friends can provide.On this analysis,affiliation would be encompassed by a more general curiosity or exploratory drive.In fact,studies of friendship seem to implicate more complex factors.For example,one function friendship seems to fulfill is that it supports the imag

44、e we have of ourselves,and confirms the value of the attitudes we hold.Certainly we appear to project ourselves onto our friends;several studies have shown that we judge them to be more like us than they(objectively)are.This suggests that we ought to choose friends who are similar to us(birds of a f

45、eather)rather than those who would be complementary(opposites attract),a prediction which is supported by empirical evidence,at least so far as attitudes and beliefs are concerned.In one experiment,some developing friendships were monitored amongst first-year students living in the same hostel.It wa

46、s found that similarity of attitudes(towards politics,religion and ethics,pastimes and aesthetics)was a good predictor of what friendships would be established by the end of four months,though it had less to do with initial alliances-not surprisingly,since attitudes may not be obvious on first inspe

47、ction.There have also been studies of pairings,both voluntary(married couples)and forced(student roommates),to see which remained together and which split up.Again,the evidence seems to favour similarity rather than complementarity as an omen of a successful relationship,though there is a complicati

48、on:where marriage is concerned,once the field has been narrowed down to potential mates who come from similar backgrounds and share a broad range of attitudes and values,a degree of complementarity seems to become desirable.When a couple are not just similar but almost identical,something else seems

49、 to be needed.Similarity can breed contempt it has also been found that when we find others obnoxious,we dislike them more if they are like us than when they are dissimilar!The difficulty of linking friendship with similarity of personality probably reflects the complexity of our personalities:we ha

50、ve many facets and therefore require a disparate group of friends to support us.This of course can explain why we may have two close friends who have little in common and indeed dislike each other.By and large,though,it looks as though we would do well to choose friends(and spouses)who resemble us.I

51、f this were not so,computer dating agencies would have gone out of business years ago.Lesson 12 Dull London By David H.Lawrence It begins the moment you set foot ashore,the moment you step off the boats gangway.The heart suddenly,yet vaguely,sinks.It is no lurch of fear.Quite the contrary.It is as i

52、f the life-urge failed,and the heart dimly sank.You trail past the benevolent policeman and the inoffensive passport officials through the fussy and somehow foolish customs-we dont really think it matters if somebody smuggles in two pairs of false-silk stockings-and we get into the poky but inoffens

53、ive train,with poky but utterly inoffensive people,and we have a cup of inoffensive tea from a nice inoffensive boy,and we run through small,poky but nice and inoffensive country,till we are landed in the big but unexciting station of Victoria,when an inoffensive porter puts us into an inoffensive t

54、axi and we are driven through the crowded yet strangely dull streets of London to the cosy yet strangely poky and dull place where we are going to stay.And the first half-hour in London,after some years abroad,is really a plunge of misery.The strange,the grey and uncanny,almost deathly sense of dull

55、ness is overwhelming.Of course,you get over it after a while,and admit that you exaggerated.You get into the rhythm of London again,and you tell yourself that it is not dull.And yet you are haunted,all the time,sleeping or waking,with the uncanny feeling,It is dull!It is all dull!This life here is o

56、ne vast complex of dullness!I am dull!I am being dulled!My spirit is being dulled!My life is dulling down to London dullness.This is the nightmare that haunts you the first few weeks of London.No doubt if you stay longer you get over it,and find London as thrilling as Paris or Rome or New York.But t

57、he climate is against me.I cannot stay long enough.With pinched and wondering gaze,the morning of departure,I look out of the taxi upon the strange dullness of Londons arousing;a sort of death;and hope and life only return when I get my seat in the boat-train,and hear all the Good-byes!Good-bye!Good

58、-bye!Thank God to say Good-bye!Now to feel like this about ones native land is terrible.I am sure I am exceptional,or at least an exaggerated case.Yet it seems to me most of my fellow-countrymen have the pinched,slightly pathetic look in their faces,the vague,wondering realization:It is dull!It is a

59、lways essentially dull!My life is dull!Of course,England is the easiest country in the world,easy,easy and nice.Everybody is nice,and everybody is easy.The English people on the whole are surely the nicest people in the world,and everybody makes everything so easy for everybody else,that there is al

60、most nothing to resist at all.But this very easiness and this very niceness become at last a nightmare.It is as if the whole air were impregnated with chloroform or some other pervasive anaesthetic,that makes everything easy and nice,and takes the edge off everything,whether nice or nasty.As you inh

61、ale the drug of easiness and niceness,your vitality begins to sink.Perhaps not your physical vitality,but something else:the vivid flame of your individual life.England can afford to be so free and individual because no individual flame of life is sharp and vivid.It is just mildly warm and safe.You

62、couldnt burn your fingers at it.Nice,safe,easy,the whole ideal.And yet under all the easiness is a gnawing uneasiness,as in a drug-taker.It used not to be so.Twenty years ago London was to me thrilling,thrilling,thrilling,the vast and roaring heart of all adventure.It was not only the heart of the w

63、orld,it was the heart of the worlds living adventure.How wonderful the Strand,the Bank,Charing Cross at night,Hyde Park in the morning!True,I am now twenty years older.Yet I have not lost my sense of adventure.But now all the adventure seems to me crushed out of London.The traffic is too heavy!It us

64、ed to be going somewhere,on an adventure.Now it only rolls massively and overwhelmingly,going nowhere,only dully and enormously going.There is no adventure at the end of the buses journey.The bus lapses into an inertia of dullness,then dully starts again.The traffic of London used to roar with the m

65、ystery of mans adventure on the seas of life,like a vast sea-shell,murmuring a thrilling,half-comprehensible story.Now it booms like monotonous,far-off guns,in a monotony of crushing something,crushing the earth,crushing out life,crushing everything dead.And what does one do,in London?I,not having a

66、 job to attend to,lounge round and gaze in bleak wonder on the ceaseless dullness.Or I have luncheons and dinners with friends and talk.Now my deepest private dread of London is my dread of this talk.I spent most of my days abroad,saying little,or with a bit of chatter and a silence again.But in London I feel like a spider whose thread has been caught by somebody,and is being drawn out of him,so he must spin,spin,spin,and all to no purpose.He is not even spinning his own web,for his own reasons.