Unit 6: Part 4 Vocabulary

Sitting center side by side stage right to left FLO, VI and RU. Very erect, facing front, hands clasped in laps.

[FLO moves to center seat, whispers in RU's ear. Appalled.]

[Enter FLO. RU and VI turn back front, resume pose. FLO sits right.]

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.

I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.

But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline blackening dregs of the brightening grey
Halved the sky ahead.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage

The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he’s dead

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself.

Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town.

A jug of water
has its own lustrous turmoil

The kettle alone knows the good he does,
Here in the kitchen, loving the world,
Steadfastly loving

This moved many of the women in the crowd so much that they were seen to raise the ends of their saris and dab at their tears while the men reached out for the betel-leaves and sweetmeats that were offered around on trays and shook their heads in wonder and approval of such exemplary filial behavior.

This moved many of the women in the crowd so much that they were seen to raise the ends of their saris and dab at their tears while the men reached out for the betel-leaves and sweetmeats that were offered around on trays and shook their heads in wonder and approval of such exemplary filial behavior.

He went to the USA (that was what his father learnt to call it and taught the whole family to say—not America, which was what the ignorant neighbors called it, but, with a grand familiarity, “the USA”) where he pursued his career in the most prestigious of all hospitals and won encomiums from his American colleagues which were relayed to his admiring and glowing family.

Instead he agreed, almost without argument, to marry a girl she had picked out for him in her own village, the daughter of a childhood friend, a plump and uneducated girl, it was true, but so old-fashioned, so placid, so complaisant that she slipped into the household and settled in like a charm, seemingly too lazy and too good-natured to even try and make Rakesh leave home and set up independently, as any other girl might have done.

How one man—and a man born to illiterate parents, his father having worked for a kerosene dealer and his mother having spent her life in a kitchen—had achieved, combined and conducted such a medley of virtues, no one could fathom, but all acknowledged his talent and skill.

Inside the car it was quiet, the noise of the engine even and subdued, the air just the right temperature, the windows tight-fitting.

They went into a room looking out onto a terrace. Beyond, dappled lawns, gently shifting trees, black and white cows grazing behind iron railings.

She worked over the headmaster's wife from shoes to hair-style. Pricing and assessing.

The father, sherry warming his guts, thought that this was an amusing woman. Not attractive, of course, a bit homespun, but impressive all the same.

His clothes were mature rather than old, his skin well-scrubbed, his shoes clean, his geniality untainted by the least condescension.

His face is haggard with anticipation.

Man will never conquer space. Such a statement may sound ludicrous, now that our rockets are already 100 million miles beyond the moon and the first human travelers are preparing to leave the atmosphere.

When a friend leaves for what was once a far country, even if he has no intention of returning, we cannot feel that same sense of irrevocable separation that saddened our forefathers.

To a culture which has come to take instantaneous communication for granted, as part of the very structure of civilized life, this “time barrier” may have a profound psychological impact.

Five years to the triple system of Alpha Centauri, 10 to the strangely-matched doublet Sirius A and B, 11 to the tantalizing enigma of 61 Cygni, the first star suspected to possess a planet.

But now consider the effect of the inevitable, unavoidable time lag.

Today, such satellite communication is common, but it was a revolutionary idea when a scientist and science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke first proposed it in the October, 1945, issue of the journal Wireless World.

...A rocket which achieved a sufficiently great speed in flight outside the earth’s atmosphere would never return.

This “orbital” velocity is 8 km per sec (5 miles per sec), and a rocket which attained it would become an artificial satellite, circling the world forever with no expenditure of power—a second moon, in fact….

It will be possible in a few more years to build radio controlled rockets which can be steered into such orbits beyond the atmosphere and left to broadcast scientific information back to the earth.

Oh, of course I can understand people dismissing pop music. I know that a lot of it, nearly all of it, is trashy, unimaginative, poorly written, slickly produced, inane, repetitive, and juvenile (although at least four of these adjectives could be used to describe the incessant attacks on pop that you can still find in posh magazines and newspapers)...

Oh, of course I can understand people dismissing pop music. I know that a lot of it, nearly all of it, is trashy, unimaginative, poorly written, slickly produced, inane, repetitive, and juvenile (although at least four of these adjectives could be used to describe the incessant attacks on pop that you can still find in posh magazines and newspapers)...

I know, too, believe me, that Cole Porter was “better” than Madonna or Travis, that most pop songs are aimed cynically at a target audience three decades younger than I am, that in any case the golden age was thirty-five years ago and there has been very little value since.

I don’t even want to make a case for this song, as opposed to any other—although I happen to think that it’s a very good pop song, with a dreamy languor and a bruised optimism that immediately distinguishes it from its anemic and stunted peers.

I don’t even want to make a case for this song, as opposed to any other—although I happen to think that it’s a very good pop song, with a dreamy languor and a bruised optimism that immediately distinguishes it from its anemic and stunted peers.

So, yes, it’s disposable, as if that makes any difference to anyone’s perceptions of the value of pop music.