Unit oneUnit twoI dated a woman for a while — literary type, well-read, lots of books in her place — whom I admired a bit too extravagantly, and one Christmas I decided to give her something unusually nice and, I’m afraid, unusually expensive. I bought her a set of Swift’s Works — not just any set but a scarce early eighteenth-century edition; then I wrapped each leather-bound volume separately and made a card for each volume, each card containing a carefully chosen quotation from Swift himself. I thought it was terribly romantic; I had visions of her opening the set, volume by volume, while we sat by the fire Christmas Eve sipping cognac and listening to the Brandenburg Concertos.How stupid I am sometimes! She, practical woman that I should have known she was, had bought me two pairs of socks and a shirt, plus a small volume of poems by A. R. Ammons. She cried when she opened the Swift. I thought they were tears of joy, but they weren’t. “I can’t accept this,” she said. “It’s totally out of proportion.” She insisted that I take the books back or sell them or keep them for myself. When I protested she just got more upset, and finally she asked me to leave and to take the books with me. Hurt and perplexed, I did. We stopped seeing each other soon after that. It took me weeks to figure out what I had done wrong. “There’s a goat in all of us,” R. P. Blackmur wrote somewhere, “a stupid, stubborn goat.”To my credit, I’m normally more perspicacious about the gifts I give, and less of a show-off. But I have it in me, obviously, to be, as my ex-girlfriend said, totally out of proportion: to give people things I can’t afford, or things that betoken an intimacy that doesn’t exist, or things that bear no relation to the interests or desires of the person I’m giving them to. I’ve kicked myself too often not to know it’s there, this insensitivity to the niceties of gift-giving.Unit sixThe most infuriating conversation is the one where the parent clearly seeks a decisive, career-validating moment of emotional closure. Such individuals believe that securing admission to a top-flight university provides a child with an irrevocable passport to success, guaranteeing a life of uninterrupted economic mirth. Parents such as these upwardly mobile chuckleheads exude an almost Prussian belligerence when announcing their children’s destinations, congratulating themselves on a job well done, while issuing a sotto voce taunt to parents of the less gifted. For them, the hard part of child rearing is now over. Junior went to the right prep school, made the right friends, signed up for the right activities and is now headed for the right school. Now we can get the heck out of here and move to Tuscany.But in reality, life doesn’t end at age 17. Or 21. In real life, some children get the finest educations but still become first-class screw-ups. My own profession is filled with people who went to the right school but ended up in the wrong career. (They should have been flacks; the phone ringing in the next room is not and never will be the Pulitzer committee.) Some of those boys and girls most likely to succeedare going to end up on welfare or skid row. At which point they’ll need parental input. Or cash. A parent’s responsibility doesn’t end once the kids leave. A parent’s responsibility never ends. That’s why Nature gives you the job.Unit sevenAs I look over what I have written, I feel that I have presented an excessively bleak picture of an inherently glorious event. Though the misbehavior described is tragic but true, I still do not share the pessimism of the writer whose most famous work has given him a near-franchise on the digit “1984.” George Orwell viewed the Olympics as “bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard o f all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence; in other words, it is a war without the shooting.”This is going much too far. The Olympics are nothing more or less than a reflection of everything that is good as well as bad in human nature. The anecdotes of ancient Greek skulduggery prove that the Games have always suffered from what we might benevolently call “human frailty.”And one might argue that our own age can actually claim a tiny bit of moral superiority over classical Greece. Very few of us, I think, would subscribe to the view of a European coach, who was recently quoted as saying: “As long as you are still alive for the victory ceremony, you should get your reward. There is no room for ethics in sports anymore.”Unit eightThe art of pleasing is a very necessary one to possess, but a very difficult one to acquire. It can hardly be reduced to rules; and your own good sense and observation will teach you more of it than I can. “Do as you would be done by,” is th e surest method that I know of pleasing. Observe carefully what pleases you in others, and probably the same things in you will please others. If you are pleased with the complaisance and attention of others to your humors, your tastes, or your weaknesses, depend upon it, the same complaisance and attention on your part to theirs will equally please them. Take the tone of the company that you are in, and do not pretend to give it; be serious, gay, or even trifling, as you find the present humor of the company; this is an attention due from every individual to the majority. Do not tell stories in company; there is nothing more tedious and disagreeable; if by chance you know a very short story, and exceedingly applicable to the present subject of conversation, tell it in as few words as possible; and even then, throw out that you do not love to tell stories, but that the shortness of it tempted you.Of all things banish the egotism out of your conversation, and never think of entertaining people with your own personal concerns or private affairs; though they are interesting to you, they are tedious and impertinent to everybody else; besides that, one cannot keep one’s own private affairs too secret. Whatever you think your own excellencies may be, do not affectedly display them in company; nor labor, as many people do, to give that turn to the conversation, which may supply you with an opportunity of exhibiting them. If they are real, they will infallibly bediscovered, without your pointing them out yourself, and with much more advantage. Never maintain an argument with heat and clamor, though you think or know yourself to be in the right; but give your opinion modestly and coolly, which isthe only way to convince; and, if that does not do, try to change the conversation, by saying, with good-humor, “We shall hardly convince one another; nor is it necessary that we should, so let us talk of something else.”Unit nine“Women’s language” is that pleasant, euphemistic, never-aggressive way of talking we learned as little girls. Cultural bias was built into the language we were allowed to speak, the subjects we were allowed to speak about, and the ways we were spoken of. Having learned our linguistic lesson well, we go out in the world, only to discover that we are communicative cripples — damned if we do, and damned if we don’t.If we refuse to talk “like a lady,” we are ridiculed and criticized for being unfeminine. (“She thinks like a man” is, at best, a left-handed compliment.) If we do learn all the fuzzy headed, unassertive language of our sex, we are ridiculed for being unable to think clearly, unable to take part in a serious discussion, and therefore unfit to hold a position of power.It doesn’t take much of this for a wom an to begin feeling she deserves such treatment because of inadequacies in her own intelligence and education.“Women’s language” shows up in all levels of English. For example, women are encouraged and allowed to make far more precise discriminations in naming colors than men do. Words like mauve, beige, lavender, and so on, are unremarkable in a woman’s active vocabulary, but largely absent from that of most men. I know of no evidence suggesting that women actually see a wider range of colors than men do. It is simply that fine discriminations of this sort are relevant to women’s vocabularies, but not to men’s; to men, who control most of the interesting affairs of the world, such distinctions are trivial — irrelevant.Unit tenCertainly a ma n’s home is no longer his castle, or, if it is, the moat is dry and the portcullis is always up. Nothing can stanch the daily tide of impersonal mail posing as personal mail, of salesmen at the door and strangers on the telephone. In the hands of the inconsiderate the telephone is a deadly weapon, but if a man dons armor against it by refusing to have his number listed in the directory, he must now pay a penalty. The New York Telephone Company has almost half a million of these diehards on its rolls — a figure which suggests that the urge for privacy is still alive, even if the respect for it is not. A few years ago the company became impatient with its unlisted patrons and put an extra charge on their monthly bill, hoping thereby to force them back into the listed world of good fellowship.Modern architecture has also done its share to abolish privacy. The picture window was first designed by men like Frank Lloyd Wright to frame a scene of natural beauty. Today millions of Americans look out of picture windows into otherpicture windows and busy streets. The contractor has no sooner finished installing the picture window than the decorator is summoned to cover it with expensive curtains against an inquisitive world. Even then, privacy is uncertain. In many modern houses the rooms have yielded to “areas” that merge into each other, so that the husband trying to work in the “reading area” (formerly den) is naked to the blasts from the “recreation area” (formerly rumpus room) a few feet away.Unit one我想了片刻，觉得世界上讲西班牙语的人最善于辞令，也许可以从他们身上学到点什么。
