On a winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland country. It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation.
Here was the very heart of industrial Ameria, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth---and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.
Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination---and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats. Paragraph 2
I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight.
From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of 25 miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye.
Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious --churches, stores, warehouses, and the like--that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away.
A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer window on the side of a bare leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat--trap somewhere further down the line.
But most of all I recall the general effect--of hideousness without a break. There was not a single decent house within eyerange from the Pittsburgh to the Greensburg yards.
There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby. Lesson 6 Disappearing through the Skylight Paragraph 13
The playfulness of the modern aesthetic is, finally, its most striking---and also its most serious and, by corollary, its most disturbing ---feature.
The playfulness imitates the playfulness of science that produces game theory and virtual particles and black holes and that, by introducing human growth genes into cows, forces students of ethics to reexamine the definition of cannibalism.
The importance of play in the modern aesthetic should not come as a surprise. It is announced in every city in the developed world by the fantastic and playful buildings of postmodernism and neomodernism and by the fantastic juxtapositions of architectural styles that typify collage city and urban adhocism. Paragraph 14
Today modern culture includes the geometries of the International Style, the fantasies of facadism, and the gamesmanship of theme parks and museum villages.
It pretends at times to be static but it is really dynamic. Its buildings move and sway and reflect dreamy visions of everything that is going on around them.
It surrounds its citizens with the linear sculpture of pipelines and interstate highways and high--tension lines and the delicate virtuosities of the surfaces of the Chrysler Airflow and the Boeing 747 and the lacy weavings of circuits etched on silicon, as well as with the brutal assertiveness of oil tanker and bulldozers and the Tinkertoy complications of trusses and geodesic domes and lunar landers.
It abounds in images and sounds and values utterly different from those of the world of natural things seen from a middle distance. Lesson 5 Love Is a Fallacy Paragrath 145-154
I dashed perspiration from my brow. “Polly,” I croaked, “you mustn’t take all these things so literally. I mean this is just classroom stuff. You know that the things you learn in school don’t have anything to do with life.”
“Dicto Simpliciter, ” she said, wagging her finer at me playfully.
That did it. I leaped to my feet, bellowing like a bull. “Will you or will you not go steady with me?” “I will not,” she replied. “Why not?” I demanded.
“Because this afternoon I promised Petey that I would go steady with him.”
I reeled back, overcome with the infamy of it. After he promised, after he made a deal, after he shook my hand! “The rat!” I shrieked, kicking up great chunks of turf. “You can’t go with him, Polly. He is a liar. He is a cheat. He is a rat.”
“ Poisoning the well,” said Polly, “and stopping shouting. I think shouting must be a fallacy too.” With an immense efforts of will, I modulated my voice. “All right,” I said. “You are a logician. Let us look at this thing logically. How could you choose Petey over me? Look at me--a brilliant student, a tremendous intellectual, a man with an assured future. Look at Petey---a knothead, a jitterbug, a guy who will never know where his next meal is coming from. Can you give me one logical reason why you should go stead with him?”
“I certainly can,” declared Polly, “He’s got a raccoon coat.” Lesson 4 Inaugural Address Paragraph 23
Can we forge against these enemies a grand and global alliance, North and South, East and West, that can assure a more fruitful life for all mankind? Will you join in the historic effort?
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In the long history of the world, only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility; I welcome it. I do not believe that any of us would exchange places with any other people or any other generation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it, and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
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And so, my fellow Americans ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.
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My fellow citizens of the world, ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.
Lessen 3 Pub Talk and the King’s English
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Someone took one of the best-known of examples, which is still always worth the reconsidering. When we talk of meat on our tables we use French words; when we speak of the animals from which the meat comes we use Anglo-Saxon words. It is a pig in its sty; it is pork (porc) on the table. They are cattle in the fields, but we sit down to beef (boeuf). Chickens become poultry (poulet), and a calf becomes veal (veau). Even if our menus were not written in French out of snobbery, the English we used in them would still be Norman English. What all this tells us is of a deep class rift in the culture of England after the Norman conquest.
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The Saxon peasants who tilled the land and reared the animals could not afford the meat, which went to Norman tables. The peasants were allowed to eat the rabbits that scampered over their fields and, since that meat was cheap, the Norman lords of course turned up their up noses at it. So rabbit is still rabbit on our tables, and not changed into some rendering of lapin.
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As we listen today to the arguments about bilingual education, we ought to think ourselves back into
the shoes of the Saxon peasant. The new ruling class had built a cultural barrier against him by building their French against his own language. There must have been a great deal oaf cultural humiliation felt by the English when they revolted under Saxon leaders like Hereward the Wake. “The King’s English”--if the term had existed then--had become French. And here in America now, 900 years later, we are still the heirs to it.
Lessen 2 Marrakech
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But what is strange about these people is their invisibility. For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing--that was how I saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being beneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth--coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it. There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St.Bernard dog, it carries a load which in the British Army would be considered too much for a 15-hands mule, and very often its packsaddle is not taken off its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that it is the most willing creature on earth, it follows its master like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter. After a dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its guts out before it is cold.
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This kind of thing makes one’s blood boil, whereas--on the whole--the plight of the human beings does not. I am not commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks. Lesson 1 Face to Face with Hurricane Camille
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Seconds after the roof blew off the Koshak house, John yelled, “Up the stairs--into our bedroom! Count the kids.” The children huddled in the slashing rain within the circle of adults. Grandmother Koshak implored, “Children, let’s sing!” The children were too frightened to respond. She carried on alone for a few bars; then her voice trailed away.
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Debris flew as the living-room fireplace and its chimney collapsed. With two walls in their bedroom sanctuary beginning to disintegrate, John ordered, “Into the television room!” This was the room farthest from the direction of the storm.
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For an instant, John put his arm around his wife, Janis understood. Shivering from the wind and rain and fear, clutching 2 children to her, she thought. Dear Lord, give me the strength to endure what I have to. She felt anger against the hurricane. We won’t let it win.
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Pop Koshak raged silently, frustrated at not being able to do anything to fight Camaille. Without reason, he dragged a cedar chest and a double mattress from a bedroom into the TV room. At that moment, the wind tore out one wall and extinguished the lantern. A second wall moved, waved, Charlie Hill tried to support it, but it toppled on him, injuring his back. The house, shuddering and rocking, had moved 25 feet from its foundations. The world seemed to be breaking apart.
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“let’s get that mattress up!” John shouted to his father. “Make it a lean-to against the wind. Get the kids under it. We can prop it up with our heads and shoulders!”
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The larger children sprawled on the floor, with the smaller ones in a layer on top of them, and the adults bent over all nine. The floor tilted. The box containing the litter of kittens slid off a shelf and vanished in the wind. Spooky flew off the top of a sliding bookcase and also disappeared. The dog cowered with eyes closed. A third wall gave way. Water lapped across the slanting floor. John grabbed a door which was still hinged to one closet wall. “If the floor goes,” he yelled at his father, “ Let’s go the kids on this.”
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In that moment, the wind slightly diminished, and the water stopped rising. Then the water began receding. The main thrust of Camille had passed. The Koshaks and their friends had survived.
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