Unit 2: Part 2 Vocabulary

The few colored beads slid along the wire paths haphazardly, like ships on the high seas.

Today, the latitude and longitude lines govern with more authority than I could have imagined forty-odd years ago, for they stay fixed as the world changes its configuration underneath them—with continents adrift across a widening sea, and national boundaries repeatedly withdrawn by war or peace.

The meridians of longitude go the other way: They loop from the North Pole to the South and back again in great circles of the same size, so they all converge at the ends of the Earth.

The Equator marked the zero-degree parallel of latitude for Ptolemy. He did not choose it arbitrarily but took it on higher authority from his predecessors, who had derived it from nature while observing the motions of the heavenly bodies.

Harrison, a man of simple birth and high intelligence, crossed swords with the leading lights of his day. He made a special enemy of the Reverend Nevil Maskelyne, the fifth astronomer royal, who contested his claim to the coveted prize money, and whose tactics at certain junctures can only be described as foul play.

With no formal education or apprenticeship to any watchmaker, Harrison nevertheless constructed a series of virtually friction-free clocks that required no lubrication and no cleaning, that were made from materials impervious to rust, and that kept their moving parts perfectly balanced in relation to one another, regardless of how the world pitched or tossed about them.

Most often a first-time caller, having lavished praise on everything she saw, including us, proceeded out without any further remarks.

The summer she was eight was the one time I forgot that a child is not subordinate to a house.

She looked ten years younger than her actual years. She seemed to bounce with energy, as if she had gone through some process of rejuvenation.

She was in the hospital ten days. When she was ready to come home to convalesce, we turned the sun parlor into a sickroom, for the stairs to the upper story were forbidden to her.

When it was over, we took the sickbed away and restored the sun parlor to its natural look. But it did not look natural. The sadness resisted the sun’s cajoling. It had settled in every corner.

I did not know whether she knew it had been a sickroom, and might say, “Take your sun parlor and you-know-what,” though in less succinct phrasing.

It is with a profound sense of humility that I accept the honor you have chosen to bestow upon me. I know: your choice transcends me. This both frightens and pleases me.

Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not. That would be presumptuous. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

And I tell him that I have tried. That I have tried to keep alive, that I have tried to fight those who would forget. Because if we forget, we are guilty, we are accomplices.

It is the call from Thomas Jefferson, embodied in the great statue that looks down the Narrows of New York Harbor, and in the immigrants who answered the call, that we now celebrate.

To survive, the first emigrants had to learn to govern themselves.

Their argument ran through their successive Administrations.

Adams, the second President, suspected the French Revolutionaries; Alien and Sedition Acts were passed during his term of office to protect the American state and its liberties against French subversion.

There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger’s admiration—and regret.

If we hadn’t our bewitching autumn foliage, we should still have to credit the weather with one feature which compensates for all its bullying vagaries—the ice storm—when a leafless tree is clothed with ice from the bottom to the top—ice that is as bright and clear as crystal; when every bough and twig is strung with ice beads, frozen dewdrops, and the whole tree sparkles, cold and white, like the Shah of Persia’s diamond plume.

It happened so quickly that I forgot to put the umbrella down and I will always remember, with sickening distress, the look of incredulity mixed with hatred that came over the face of the particular hardened garage man that came over to see what we wanted, when he took a look at me and the poodle.

Nobody knew exactly what was the matter with him, but whatever it was it made him irascible, especially in the mornings.