高级英语Lesson2 Marrakech 马拉喀什见闻
(2009-06-21 11:12:46)
标签:
课文 |
分类: AdvancedEnglish |
2 The little crowd of mourners -- all men and boys, no
women--threaded their way across the market place between the piles
of pomegranates
and the taxis and the camels, walling a short chant over and over
again. What really appeals to the flies is that the corpses here
are never put into coffins, they are merely wrapped in a piece of
rag and carried on a rough wooden bier on the shoulders of four
friends. When the friends get to the burying-ground they hack an
oblong hole a foot or two deep, dump the body in it and fling over
it a little of the dried-up, lumpy earth, which is like broken
brick. No gravestone, no name, no identifying mark of any kind. The
burying-ground is merely a huge waste of hummocky earth, like a derelict
building-lot. After a month or two no one can even be certain where
his own relatives are buried.
3 When you walk through a town like this -- two
hundred thousand inhabitants of whom at least twenty thousand own
literally nothing except the rags they stand up in-- when you see
how the people live, and still more how easily they die, it is
always difficult to believe that you are walking among human
beings. All colonial empires are in reality founded upon this fact.
The people have brown faces--besides, there are so many of them!
Are they really the same flesh as your self? Do they even have
names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff,
about as individual as bees or coral
insects? They rise out of the earth,they sweat
and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the
nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are
gone. And even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.
Sometimes, out for a walk as you break your way through the prickly
pear, you notice that it is rather bumpy underfoot, and only a
certain regularity in the bumps tells you that you are walking over
skeletons.
4 I was feeding one of the gazelles in the public
gardens.
5 Gazelles are almost the only animals that
look good to eat when they are still alive, in fact, one can hardly
look at their hindquarters without thinking of a mint sauce. The gazelle I was
feeding seemed to know that this thought was in my mind, for though
it took the piece of bread I was holding out it obviously did not
like me. It nibbled nibbled rapidly at the bread,
then lowered its head and tried to butt me, then took another
nibble and then butted again. Probably its idea was that if it
could drive me away the bread would somehow remain hanging in
mid-air.
6 An Arab navvy working on the path nearby
lowered his heavy hoe and sidled slowly towards us. He
looked from the gazelle to the bread and from the bread to the
gazelle, with a sort of quiet amazement, as though he had never
seen anything quite like this before. Finally he said shyly in
French: "1 could eat some of that bread."
7 I tore off a piece and he stowed it gratefully in some secret
place under his rags. This man is an employee of
the municipality.
8 When you go through the Jewish Quarters you gather some idea of
what the medi ghettoes were probably like. Under their Moorish
Moorishrulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain
restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment
they have ceased to bother about overcrowding. Many of the streets
are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are completely
windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in
unbelievable numbers, like clouds of flies. Down the centre of the
street there is generally running a little river of urine.
9 In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long
black robe and little black skull-cap, are working in dark
fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits
crosslegged at a prehistoric lathe, turning chairlegs at lightning
speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right hand and guides
the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting
in this position his left leg is warped out of shape. At his side
his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler parts of
the job.
10 I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody
noticed that I was lighting a cigarette. Instantly, from the dark
holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them
old grandfathers with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a
cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back of one of the
booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping
in the air with his hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole
packet. None of these people, I suppose, works less than twelve
hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more
or less impossible luxury.
11 As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the
same trades as the Arabs, except for agriculture. Fruitsellers,
potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers,
tailors, water-carriers, beggars, porters -- whichever way you look
you see nothing but Jews. As a matter of fact there are thirteen
thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres. A good
job Hitlet wasn't here. Perhaps he was on his way, however. You
hear the usual dark rumours about Jews, not only from the Arabs but
from the poorer Europeans.
12 "Yes vieux mon vieux, they took my job away from me and gave
it to a Jew. The Jews! They' re the real rulers of this country,
you know. They’ve got all the money. They control the banks,
finance -- everything."
13 "But", I said, "isn't it a fact that the average Jew is a
labourer working for about a penny an hour?"
14 "Ah, that's only for show! They' re all money lenders really.
They' re cunning, the Jews."
15 In just the same way, a couple of hundred years ago, poor old
women used to be burned for witchcraft when they could not even
work enough magic to get themselves a square meal. square
meal
16 All people who work with their hands are partly invisible, and
the more important the work they do, the less visible they are.
Still, a white skin is always fairly conspicuous. In northern
Europe, when you see a labourer ploughing a field, you probably
give him a second glance. In a hot country, anywhere south of
Gibraltar or east of Suez, the chances are that you don't even see
him. I have noticed this again and again. In a tropical landscape
one's eye takes in everything except the human beings. It takes in
the dried-up soil, the prickly pear, the palm tree and the distant
mountain, but it always misses the peasant hoeing at his patch. He
is the same colour as the earth, and a great deal less interesting
to look at.
17 It is only because of this that the starved countries of Asia
and Africa are accepted as tourist resorts. No one would think of
running cheap trips to the Distressed Areas. But where the human
beings have brown skins their poverty is simply not noticed. What
does Morocco mean to a Frenchman? An orange grove or a job in
Government service. Or to an Englishman? Camels, castles, palm
trees, Foreign Legionnaires, brass trays, and bandits. One could
probably live there for years without noticing that for nine-tenths
of the people the reality of life is an endless back-breaking
struggle to wring a little food out of an eroded soil.
18 Most of Morocco is so desolate that no wild animal bigger than
a hare can live on it. Huge areas which were once covered with
forest have turned into a treeless waste where the soil is exactly
like broken-up brick. Nevertheless a good deal of it is cultivated,
with frightful labour. Everything is done by hand. Long lines of
women, bent double like inverted capital Ls, work their way slowly
across the fields, tearing up the prickly weeds with their hands,
and the peasant gathering lucerne for fodder pulls it up stalk by
stalk instead of reaping it, thus saving an inch or two on each
stalk. The plough is a wretched wooden thing, so frail that one can
easily carry it on one's shoulder, and fitted underneath with a
rough iron spike which stirs the soil to a depth of about four
inches. This is as much as the strength of the animals is equal to.
It is usual to plough with a cow and a donkey yoked together. Two
donkeys would not be quite strong enough, but on the other hand two
cows would cost a little more to feed. The peasants possess no
narrows, they merely plough the soil several times over in
different directions, finally leaving it in rough furrows, after
which the whole field has to be shaped with hoes into small oblong
patches to conserve water. Except for a day or two after the rare
rainstorms there is never enough water. A long the edges of the
fields channels are hacked out to a depth of thirty or forty feet
to get at the tiny trickles which run through the subsoil.
19 Every afternoon a file of very old women passes down the road
outside my house, each carrying a load of firewood. All of them are
mummified with age and the sun, and all of them are tiny. It seems
to be generally the case in primitive communities that the women,
when they get beyond a certain age, shrink to the size of children.
One day poor creature who could not have been more than four feet
tall crept past me under a vast load of wood. I stopped her and put
a five-sou sou piece ( a little more than a farthing into her hand.
She answered with a shrill wail, almost a scream, which was partly
gratitude but mainly surprise. I suppose that from her point of
view, by taking any notice of her, I seemed almost to be violating
a law of nature. She accept- ed her status as an old woman, that is
to say as a beast of burden. When a family is travelling it is
quite usual to see a father and a grown-up son riding ahead on
donkeys, and an old woman following on foot, carrying the
baggage.
20 But what is strange about these people is their invisibility.
For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file
of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and
though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly
say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing -- that was how I
saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind
them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my
attention to the human being beneath it. Then for the first time I
noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones
and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I
suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I
noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it.
There is no question that the donkeys are damnably treated. The
Moroccan donkey is hardly bigger than a St. Bernard dog, it carries
a load which in the British Army would be considered too much for a
fifteen-hands mule, and very often its packsaddle is not taken off
its back for weeks together. But what is peculiarly pitiful is that
it is the most willing creature on earth, it follows its master
like a dog and does not need either bridle or halter . After a
dozen years of devoted work it suddenly drops dead, whereupon its
master tips it into the ditch and the village dogs have torn its
guts out before it is cold.
21 This kind of thing makes one's blood boil, whereas-- on the
whole -- the plight of the human beings does not. I am not
commenting, merely pointing to a fact. People with brown skins are
next door to invisible. Anyone can be sorry for the donkey with its
galled back, but it is generally owing to some kind of accident if
one even notices the old woman under her load of sticks.
22 As the storks flew northward the Negroes were marching
southward -- a long, dusty column, infantry , screw-gun batteries,
and then more infantry, four or five thousand men in all, winding
up the road with a clumping of boots and a clatter of iron
wheels.
23 They were Senegalese, the blackest Negroes in Africa, so black
that sometimes it is difficult to see whereabouts on their necks
the hair begins. Their splendid bodies were hidden in reach-me-down
khaki uniforms, their feet squashed into boots that looked like
blocks of wood, and every tin hat seemed to be a couple of sizes
too small. It was very hot and the men had marched a long way. They
slumped under the weight of their packs and the curiously sensitive
black faces were glistening with sweat.
24 As they went past, a tall, very young Negro turned and caught
my eye. But the look he gave me was not in the least the kind of
look you might expect. Not hostile, not contemptuous, not sullen,
not even inquisitive. It was the shy, wide-eyed Negro look, which
actually is a look of profound respect. I saw how it was. This
wretched boy, who is a French citizen and has therefore been
dragged from the forest to scrub floors and catch syphilis in
garrison towns, actually has feelings of reverence before a white
skin. He has been taught that the white race are his masters, and
he still believes it.
25 But there is one thought which every white man (and in this
connection it doesn't matter twopence if he calls himself a
socialist) thinks when he sees a black army marching past. "How
much longer can we go on kidding these people? How long before they
turn their guns in the other direction?"
26 It was curious really. Every white man there had this thought
stowed somewhere or other in his mind. I had it, so had the other
onlookers, so had the officers on their sweating chargers and the
white N. C. Os marching in the ranks. It was a kind of secret which
we all knew and were too clever to tell; only the Negroes didn't
know it. And really it was like watching a flock of cattle to see
the long column, a mile or two miles of armed men, flowing
peacefully up the road, while the great white birds drifted over
them in the opposite direction, glittering like scraps of
Paper.
(from Reading for Rhetoric, by Caroline Shrodes,
Clifford A. Josephson, and James R. Wilson)
NOTES
1. Orwell: George Orwell was the pseudonym of Eric Arthur Blair
(1903-50), an English writer who at one time served with the Indian
Imperial Police in Burma. He fought in the Spanish Civil War, an
experience he recorded in Homage to Catalonia. His novels include
Down and Out in Paris and London ; Burmese Days ; Coming up for Air
; A Clergyman' s Daughter ; Keep the Aspidistra Flying; Animal
Farm; and 1984. The last two novels vilify socialist society and
communism. Among his well known essays are: Shooting an Elephant ;
A Hanging ; Marrakech ; and Politics and the English
Language.
2. Moorish: Moors, mixed Arabs and Berbers, and inhabitants of
Morocco. They set up a Moorish empire from the end of the 8th
century to the 12th century: by 12th century the empire included
North Africa to the borders of Egypt, as well as Mohammedan
Spain.
3. Mon vieux: a French phrase meaning, "my old fellow
(friend)"
4. Distressed Area: area where there is widespread unemployment,
poverty, etc., a slum area.
5. Foreign Legionnaires: France organized a foreign legion shortly
after the conquest of Algiers in 1830, enlisting recruits who were
not French subjects. Spain had a foreign legion, up till the
revolution in Morocco, and Holland in the Dutch East Indies.
6. fifteen-hands: unit of measurement, especially for the height of
horses; a hand, the breadth of the human palm, is now usually taken
to be 4 inches.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Aims
1.To know the
writing technique of exposition.
2.To learn the methods in developing an expository writing,esp.
the use of examples.
3.To appreciate the language features
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Teaching Contents
1.Exposition
2.George Orwell
3.Detailed study of the text
4.Organizational pattern
5.Language features
6.Exercises
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time allocation
1.Background
information (15 min.)
2. Detailed study of the text (120 min.)
3. Structure analysis (15 min.)
4. Language appreciation (15 min.)
5. Exercises (15 min)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------