新视野大学英语第四册课文原文.pdf

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1、1A An artist who seeks fame is like a dog chasinghis own tail who,when he captures it,does notknow what else to do but to continue chasing it.The cruelty of success is that it often leads thosewho seek such success to participate in their owndestruction.Dont quit your day job!is advice frequentlygiv

2、en by understandably pessimistic familymembers and friends to a budding artist who istrying hard to succeed.The conquest of fame is difficult at best,and manyend up emotionally if not financially bankrupt.Still,impure motives such as the desire forworshipping fans and praise from peers may spurthe a

3、rtist on.The lure of drowning in fames imperial glory isnot easily resisted.Those who gain fame most often gain it as a resultof exploiting their talent for singing,dancing,painting,or writing,etc.They develop a style that agents marketaggressively to hasten popularity,and their ride onthe express e

4、levator to the top is a blur.Most would be hard-pressed to tell you how theyeven got there.Artists cannot remain idle,though.When the performer,painter or writer becomesbored,their work begins to show a lack ofcontinuity in its appeal and it becomes difficult tosustain the attention of the public.Af

5、ter their enthusiasm has dissolved,the publicsimply moves on to the next flavor of the month.Artists who do attempt to remain current bymaking even minute changes to their style ofwriting,dancing or singing,run a significant riskof losing the audience*s favor.The public simply discounts styles other

6、 thanthose for which the artist has become ftimous.Famous authors*stylesa Tennessee Williamsplay or a plot by Ernest Hemingway or a poem byRobert Frost or T.S.Eliot-are easilyrecognizable.The same is true of painters like Monet,Renoir,orDali and moviemakers like Hitchcock,Fellini,Spielberg,Chen Kaig

7、e or Zhang Yimou.Their distinct styles marked a significant changein form from others and gained them fame andfortune.However,they paid for it by giving up thefreedom to express themselves with other styles orforms.Fame*s spotlight can be hotter than a tropicaljungle-a fraud is quickly exposed,and t

8、hepressure of so much attention is too much fbr mostto endure.It takes you out of yourself:You must be what thepublic thinks you are,not what you really are orcould be.The performer,like the politician,must oftenplease his or her audiences by saying things he orshe does not mean or fully believe.One

9、 drop of fame will likely contaminate theentire well of a man*s soul,and so an artist whoremains true to himself or herself is particularlyamazing.You would be hard-pressed to underline manynames of those who have not compromised andstill succeeded in the fame game.An example,the famous Irish writer

10、 Oscar Wilde,known for his uncompromising behavior,bothsocial and sexual,to which the public objected,paid heavily for remaining true to himself.The mother of a young man Oscar was intimatewith accused him at a banquet in front of hisfriends and fans of sexually influencing her son.Extremely angered

11、 by her remarks,he sued theyoung mans mother,asserting that she haddamaged his good”name.He should have hired a better attorney,though.The judge did not second Wildes call to have thewoman pay for damaging his name,and insteadfined Wilde.He ended up in jail after refusing to pay,and evenworse,was pe

12、rmanently expelled from the widercircle of public favor.When things were at their worst,he found that noone was willing to risk his or her name in hisdefense.His price for remaining true to himself was to beleft alone when he needed his fans the most.Curiously enough,it is those who fail that reap t

13、hegreatest reward:freedom!They enjoy the freedom to express themselves inunique and original ways without fear of losingthe support of fans.Failed artists may find comfort in knowing thatmany great artists never found fame until wellafter they had passed away or in knowing that theydid not sell out.

14、They may justify their failure by convincingthemselves their genius is too sophisticated forcontemporary audiences.Single-minded artists who continue their quest forfame even after failure might also like to knowthat failure has motivated some famous people towork even harder to succeed.Thomas Wolfe

15、,the American novelist,had his firstnovel Look Homeward,Angel rejected 39 timesbefore it was finally published.Beethoven overcame his father,who did notbelieve that he had any potential as a musician,tobecome the greatest musician in the world.And Pestalozzi,the famous Swiss educator in the19th cent

16、ury,failed at every job he ever had untilhe came upon the idea of teaching children anddeveloping the fundamental theories to produce anew form of education.Thomas Edison was thrown out of school in thefourth grade,because he seemed to his teacher tobe quite dull.Unfortunately for most people,howeve

17、r,failure isthe end of their struggle,not the beginning.I say to those who desperately seek fame andfortune:good luck.But alas,you may find that it was not what youwanted.The dog who catches his tail discovers that it isonly a tail.The person who achieves success often discoversthat it does more har

18、m than good.So instead of trying so hard to achieve success,tryto be happy with who you are and what you do.Try to do work that you can be proud of.Maybe you wont be famous in your own lifetime,but you may create better art.IB One summer day my father sent me to buysome wire and fencing to put aroun

19、d our barn topen up the bull.At 16,I liked nothing better than getting behindthe wheel of our truck and driving into town onthe old mill road.Water from the milfs wheel sprayed in thesunshine making a rainbow over the canal and Ioften stopped there on my way to bathe and cooloff for a spell-natural

20、air conditioning.The sun was so hot,I did not need a towel as I wasdry by the time I climbed the clay banks andcrossed the road ditch to the truck.Just before town,the road shot along the seawhere I would collect seashells or gather seaweedbeneath the giant crane unloading the ships.This trip was di

21、fferent,though.My father had told me Id have to ask for credit atthe store.It was 1976,and the ugly shadow of racism wasstill a fact of life.Fd seen my friends ask for credit and then stand,head down,while a storeowner enquired intowhether they were good for it.Many store clerks watched black youths

22、 with theassumption that they were thieves every time theyeven went into a grocery.My family was honest.We paid our debts.But just before harvest,all the money flowed out.There were no new deposits at the bank.Cash was short.At Davis Brothers1 General Store,Buck Davisstood behind the register,talkin

23、g to a middle-agedfarmer.Buck was a tall,weathered man in a red huntingshirt and I nodded as I passed him on my way tothe hardware section to get a container of nails,acoil of binding wire and fencing.I pulled my purchases up to the counter and placedthe nails in the tray of the scale,saying careful

24、ly,I need to put this on credit.My brow was moist with nervous sweat and Iwiped it away with the back of my arm.The farmer gave me an amused,cynical look,butBucks face didnt change.“Sure,he said easily,reaching for his bookletwhere he kept records for credit.I gave a sigh of relief.Your daddy is alw

25、ays good for it.He turned to the farmer.This here is one of James Williams*sons.They broke the mold when they made that man.The farmer nodded in a neighborly way.I was filled with pride.MJames Williams1 son.1Those three words had opened a door to an adultsrespect and trust.As I heaved the heavy frei

26、ght into the bed of thetruck,I did so with ease,feeling like a strongerman than the one that left the farm that morning.I had discovered that a good name could furnish acapital of good will of great value.Everyone knew what to expect from a Williams:adecent person who kept his word and respectedhims

27、elf too much to do wrong.My great grandfather may have been sold as aslave at auction,but this was not an excuse to dowrong to others.Instead my father believed the only way to honorhim was through hard work and respect for allmen.We children-eight brothers and twosisters-could enjoy our good name,u

28、nearned,unless and until we did something to lose it.We had an interest in how one another behavedand our own actions as well,lest we destroy thename my father had created.Our good name was and still is the glue that holdsour family tight together.The desire to honor my fathers good namespurred me t

29、o become the first in our family to goto university.I worked my way through college as a porter at afour-star hotel.Eventually,that good nameprovided the initiative to start my own successfulpublic relations firm in Washington,D.C.America needs to restore a sense of shame in itsneighborhoods.Doing d

30、rugs,spending all your money at theliquor store,stealing,or getting a young womanpregnant with no intent to marry her should inducea deep sense of embarrassment.But it doesnt.Nearly one out of three births in America is to asingle mother.Many of these children will growup without the security and gu

31、idance they need tobecome honorable members of society.Once the social ties and mutual obligations of thefamily melt away,communities fall apart.While the population has increased only 40percent since 1960,violent crime in America hasincreased a staggering 550 percent-and wevebecome exceedingly used

32、 to it.Teen drug use hasalso risen.In one North Carolina County,police arrested 73students from 12 secondary schools for dealingdrugs,some of them right in the classroom.Meanwhile,the small signs of civility and respectthat hold up civilization are vanishing fromschools,stores and streets.Phrases li

33、ke yes,maam，no,sir1,thank you*and please1 get a yawn from kids today who areencouraged instead by cursing on television and inmusic.They simply shrug off the rewards of a goodname.The good name passed on by my father andmaintained to this day by my brothers and sistersand me is worth as much now as

34、ever.Even today,when I stop into Buck Davis shop ormy hometown barbershop for a haircut,I am still greeted as James Williams1 son.My familys good name did pave theway for me.2A He was born in a poor area of South London.He wore his mothers old red stockings cut downfor ankle socks.His mother was tem

35、porarily declared mad.Dickens might have created Charlie Chaplinschildhood.But only Charlie Chaplin could have created thegreat comic character of the Tram pthe littleman in rags who gave his creator permanent fame.Other countries-France,Italy,Spain,evenJapan-have provided more applause(and profit)w

36、here Chaplin is concerned than the land of hisbirth.Chaplin quit Britain for good in 1913 when hejourneyed to America with a group of performersto do his comedy act on the stage,where talentscouts recruited him to work for Mack Sennett,theking of Hollywood comedy films.Sad to say,many English people

37、 in the 1920s and1930s thought Chaplins Tramp a bit,well,crude.Certainly middle-class audiences did;theworking-class audiences were more likely to clapfor a character who revolted against authority,using his wicked little cane to trip it up,or aimingthe heel of his boot for a well-placed kick at its

38、broad rear.All the same,Chaplins comic beggar didnt seemall that English or even working-class.English tramps didn,t sport tiny moustaches,hugepants or tail coats:European leaders and Italianwaiters wore things like that.Then again,the Tramps quick eye for a pretty girlhad a coarse way about it that

39、 was considered,well,not quite nice by English audiences-thatshow foreigners behaved,wasnt it?But for over half of his screen career,Chaplin hadno screen voice to confirm his British nationality.Indeed,it was a headache for Chaplin when hecould no longer resist the talking movies and hadto find the

40、right voice”for his Tramp.He postponed that day as long as possible:InModern Times in 1936,the first film in which hewas heard as a singing waiter,he made up anonsense language which sounded like no knownnationality.He later said he imagined the Tramp to be acollege-educated gentleman who*d come dow

41、n inthe world.But if he*d been able to speak with an educatedaccent in those early short comedies,its doubtfulif he would have achieved world fame.And the English would have been sure to find it“odd”.No one was certain whether Chaplin did iton purpose but this helped to bring about his hugesuccess.H

42、e was an immensely talented man,determined toa degree unusual even in the ranks of Hollywoodstars.His huge fame gave him the freedom-and,moreimportantly,the money-to be his own master.He already had the urge to explore and extend atalent he discovered in himself as he went along.It cant be me.Is tha

43、t possible?Howextraordinary/is how he greeted the first sight ofhimself as the Tramp on the screen.But that shock roused his imagination.Chaplin didnt have his jokes written into a scriptin advance;he was the kind of comic who used hisphysical senses to invent his art as he went along.Lifeless objec

44、ts especially helped Chaplin make“contact with himself as an artist.He turned them into other kinds of objects.Thus,a broken alarm clock in the movie ThePawnbroker became a sick patient undergoingsurgery;boots were boiled in his film The GoldRush and their soles eaten with salt and pepperlike prime

45、cuts of fish(the nails being removedlike fish bones).This physical transformation,plus the skill withwhich he executed it again and again,is surely thesecret of Chaplins great comedy.He also had a deep need to be loved-and acorresponding fear of being betrayed.The two were hard to combine and someti

46、mes一asin his early marriages-the collision betweenthem resulted in disaster.Yet even this painfully-bought self-knowledgefound its way into his comic creations.The Tramp never loses his faith in the flower girlwholl be waiting to walk into the sunset with him;while the other side of Chaplin makes Mo

47、nsieurVerdoux,the French wife killer,into a symbol ofhatred for women.Its a relief to know that life eventually gaveCharlie Chaplin the stability and happiness it hadearlier denied him.In Oona O*Neill Chaplin,he found a partnerwhose stability and affection spanned the 37 yearsage difference between

48、them,which had seemedso threatening,that when the official who wasmarrying them in 1942 turned to the beautiful girlof 17 whod given notice of their wedding date,hesaid,And where is the young man?一Chaplin,then 54,had cautiously waited outside.As Oona herself was the child of a large familywith its o

49、wn problems,she was well prepared forthe battle that Chaplins life became as manyunfounded rumors surrounded them both一and,later on,she was the center of calm in the quarrelsthat Chaplin sometimes sparked in his own largefamily of talented children.Chaplin died on Christmas Day 1977.A few months lat

50、er,a couple of almost comicbody thieves stole his body from the family burialchamber and held it for money.The police recovered it with more efficiency thanMack Sennetts clumsy Keystone Cops wouldhave done,but one can*t help feeling Chaplinwould have regarded this strange incident as afitting memori