Unit 2: Part 2 Vocabulary

I was, being May-born, literally an “infant of the spring” and, during the later childhood years, tended, for some reason or other, to rather worship the cold aloofness of winter.

The adolescence, admittedly lingering still, brought the traditional passionate commitment to melancholy autumn—and all that.

In fact, my earliest memory of anything at all is of waking up in a darkened room where I had been put to bed for a nap on a summer’s afternoon, and feeling very, very hot. I acutely disliked the feeling then and retained the bias for years.

By duration alone, for instance, a summer’s day seemed maddeningly excessive; an utter overstatement.

Through her eyes I finally gained the sense of what it might mean; more than the coming autumn with its pretentious melancholy; more than an austere and silent winter which must shut dying people in for precious months; more even than the frivolous spring, too full of too many false promises, would be the gift of another summer with its stark and intimate assertion of neither birth nor death but life at the apex; with the gentlest nights and, above all, the longest days.

Through her eyes I finally gained the sense of what it might mean; more than the coming autumn with its pretentious melancholy; more than an austere and silent winter which must shut dying people in for precious months; more even than the frivolous spring, too full of too many false promises, would be the gift of another summer with its stark and intimate assertion of neither birth nor death but life at the apex; with the gentlest nights and, above all, the longest days.

Of course, there is a compensation: television offers pictures, and the pictures move.

Without the help of the written word, film and videotape cannot portray temporal dimensions with any precision.

Those who produce television news in America know that their medium favors images that move.

These common features are thought of as purely technical matters, which a professional crew handles as a matter of course. But they are also symbols of a dominant theme of television news: the imposition of an orderly world—called “the news”—upon the disorderly flow of events.

Walter Cronkite, a revered figure in television and anchorman of the CBS Evening News for many years, has acknowledged several times that television cannot be relied on to inform the citizens of a democratic nation.

Arms control, for example, is an issue that literally concerns everyone in the world, and yet the language of arms control and the complexity of the subject are so daunting that only a minority of people can actually follow the issue from week to week and month to month.

There were bound volumes of a children’s magazine called St. Nicholas, full of spidery drawings of animals that talked, and villains who didn’t.

On a high shelf, presumed to be safe from the curious eyes of children, was a lavish (in memory) edition of The Thousand and One Nights.

But once again, as happened in 1992, the teeming imaginative life of libraries is in danger of being curtailed. Services might be cut. Hours trimmed. Staff reduced. The reason is the same: money, or the lack of it.

The rich could emulate Carnegie, who used his wealth to create more than 1,600 public libraries, including 65 in New York. But the middle class could also send in small amounts from $10 to $50.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change.

Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sickened and died.

The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly.

The smell of life was everywhere, awakening inexpressible longings in his heart: no longer was he breathing the dry, cool air of the residential levels, purged of all smells but the faint tang of ozone.

Across a quarter of a million miles of space, the glow of dying atoms was still visible, a perennial reminder of the ruinous past.