Unit1_passage_english_a
An artist who seeks fame is like a dog chasinghis own tail who, when he captures it, does not know what else to do but to continue chasing it.
The crueltyof success is that it often leads those who seek such success to participate in their own destruction.
\quit your day job!\is advice frequently given by understandably pessimisticfamily members and friends to a budding artist who is trying hard to succeed.
The conquestof fame is difficult at best, and many end up emotionally if not financially bankrupt.
Still, impure motivessuch as the desire for worshippingfans and praise from peers may spurthe artist on.
The lureof drowningin fame's imperialglory is not easily resisted.
Those who gain fame most often gain it as a result of exploiting their talent for singing, dancing, painting, or writing, etc.
They develop a style that agentsmarket aggressively to hastenpopularity, and their ride on the express elevatorto the top is a blur.
Most would be hard-pressed to tell you how they even got there. Artists cannot remain idle, though.
When the performer, painter or writer becomes bored, their work begins to show a lack of continuityin its appeal and it becomes difficult to sustainthe attention of the public.
After their enthusiasm has dissolved, the public simply moves on to the next flavor of the month. Artists who do attempt to remain current by making even minutechanges to their style of writing, dancing or singing, run a significant risk of losing the audience's favor.
The public simply discountsstyles other than those for which the artist has become famous.
Famous authors' styles—a Tennessee Williams play or a plotby Ernest Hemingway or a poem by Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot—are easily recognizable.
The same is true of painters like Monet, Renoir, or Dali and moviemakerslike Hitchcock, Fellini, Spielberg, Chen Kaige or Zhang Yimou.
Their distinctstyles marked a significant change in form from others and gained them fame and fortune.
However, they paid for it by giving up the freedom to express themselves with other styles or forms.
Fame's spotlightcan be hotter than a tropical jungle—a fraudis quickly exposed, and the pressure of so much attention is too much for most to endure.
It takes you out of yourself: You must be what the public thinks you are, not what you really are or could be.
The performer, like the politician, must often please his or her audiences by saying things he or she does not mean or fully believe.
One drop of fame will likely contaminatethe entire well of a man's soul, and so an artist who
remains true to himself or herself is particularly amazing.
You would be hard-pressed to underlinemany names of those who have not compromised and still succeeded in the fame game.
An example, the famous Irish writer Oscar Wilde, known for his uncompromisingbehavior, both social and sexual, to which the public objected, paid heavily for remaining true to himself. The mother of a young man Oscar was intimate with accusedhim at a banquetin front of his friends and fans of sexually influencing her son.
Extremely angered by her remarks, he suedthe young man's mother, asserting that she had damaged his \
He should have hired a better attorney, though.
The judge did not secondWilde's call to have the woman pay for damaging his name, and instead finedWilde.
He ended up in jail after refusing to pay, and even worse, was permanently expelledfrom the wider circle of public favor.
When things were at their worst, he found that no one was willing to risk his or her name in his defense.
His price for remaining true to himself was to be left alone when he needed his fans the most.
Curiously enough, it is those who fail that reap the greatest reward: freedom!
They enjoy the freedom to express themselves in unique and original ways without fear of losing the support of fans.
Failed artists may find comfort in knowing that many great artists never found fame until well after they had passed away or in knowing that they did not sell out.
They may justifytheir failure by convincing themselves their genius is too sophisticated for contemporary audiences.
Single-mindedartists who continue their quest for fame even after failure might also like to know that failure has motivated some famous people to work even harder to succeed.
Thomas Wolfe, the American novelist, had his first novel Look Homeward, Angel rejected times before it was finally published.
Beethoven overcame his father, who did not believe that he had any potential as a musician, to become the greatest musicianin the world.
And Pestalozzi, the famous Swiss educator in the th century, failed at every job he ever had until he came upon the idea of teaching children and developing the fundamental theories to produce a new form of education.
Thomas Edison was thrown out of school in the fourth grade, because he seemed to his teacher to be quite dull.
Unfortunately for most people, however, failure is the end of their struggle, not the beginning.
I say to those who desperatelyseek fame and fortune: good luck. But alas, you may find that it was not what you wanted. The dog who catches his tail discovers that it is only a tail.
The person who achieves success often discovers that it does more harm than good.
So instead of trying so hard to achieve success, try to be happy with who you are and what you do.
Try to do work that you can be proud of.
Maybe you won't be famous in your own lifetime, but you may create better art. Unit_passage_english_b
One summer day my father sent me to buy some wire and fencing to put around our barnto pen up the bull.
At , I liked nothing better than getting behind the wheel of our truck and driving into town on the old millroad.
Water from the mill's wheel sprayedin the sunshinemaking a rainbow over the canaland I often stopped there on my way to batheand cool off for a spell—natural air conditioning.
The sun was so hot, I did not need a towelas I was dry by the time I climbed the claybanks and crossed the road ditchto the truck.
Just before town, the road shot along the sea where I would collect seashellsor gather seaweedbeneath the giant craneunloading the ships. This trip was different, though.
My father had told me I'd have to ask for credit at the store.
It was , and the ugly shadow of racismwas still a fact of life.
I'd seen my friends ask for credit and then stand, head down, while a storeowner enquiredinto whether they were \
Many store clerks watched black youths with the assumption that they were thieves every time they even 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 depositsat the bank. Cash was short.
At Davis Brothers' General Store, Buck Davis stood behind the register, talking to a middle-aged farmer.
Buck was a tall, weathered man in a red hunting shirt and I nodded as I passed him on my way to the hardware section to get a containerof nails, a coilof binding wire and fencing.
I pulled my purchases up to the counter and placed the nails in the trayof the scale, saying carefully, \
My browwas moistwith nervous sweat and I wiped it away with the back of my arm.
The farmer gave me an amused, cynical look, but Buck's face didn't change. \ I gave a sighof relief.
\ He turned to the farmer.
\
They broke the mold when they made that man.\
The farmer nodded in a neighborly way. I was filled with pride. \
Those three words had opened a door to an adult's respect and trust.
As I heavedthe heavy freightinto the bed of the truck, I did so with ease, feeling like a stronger man than the one that left the farm that morning.
I had discovered that a good name could furnisha capital of good will of great value.
Everyone knew what to expect from a Williams: a decent person who kept his word and respected himself too much to do wrong.
My great grandfather may have been sold as a slave at auction, but this was not an excuse to do wrong to others.
Instead my father believed the only way to honor him was through hard work and respect for all men.
We children—eight brothers and two sisters—could enjoy our good name, unearned, unless and until we did something to lose it.
We had an interest in how one another behavedand our own actions as well, lestwe destroy the name my father had created.
Our good name was and still is the gluethat holds our family tight together.
The desire to honor my father's good name spurred me to become the first in our family to go to university.
I worked my way through college as a porterat a four-star hotel. Eventually, that good name provided the initiativeto start my own successful public relations firm in Washington, D.C.
America needs to restorea sense of shame in its neighborhoods.
Doing drugs, spending all your money at the liquorstore, stealing, or getting a young woman pregnant with no intentto marry her should inducea deep sense of embarrassment. But it doesn't.
Nearly one out of three births in America is to a single mother. Many of these children will grow up without the security and guidance they need to become honorable members of society.
Once the social ties and mutual obligationsof the family meltaway, communities fall apart.
While the population has increased only percent since , violent crime in America has increased a staggering percent—and we've become exceedinglyused to it. Teen drug use has also risen. In one North Carolina County, police arrested students from secondary schools for dealing drugs, some of them right in the classroom.
Meanwhile, the small signs of civilityand respect that hold up civilization are vanishing from schools, stores and streets.
Phrases like \encouraged instead by cursing on television and in music. They simply shrugoff the rewards of a good name.
The good name passed on by my father and maintained to this day by my brothers and sisters and me is worth as much now as ever.
Even today, when I stop into Buck Davis' shop or my hometown barbershopfor a haircut, I am still greeted as James Williams' son.
My family's good name did pavethe way for me. Unit_passage_english_a
He was born in a poor area of South London.
He wore his mother's old red stockings cut down for anklesocks. His mother was temporarily declared mad.
Dickens might have created Charlie Chaplin's childhood.
But only Charlie Chaplin could have created the great comiccharacter of \man in ragswho gave his creator permanent fame.
Other countries—France, Italy, Spain, even Japan—have provided more applause(and profit) where Chaplin is concerned than the land of his birth.
Chaplin quit Britain for good in when he journeyed to America with a group of performers to do his comedyact on the stage, where talent scoutsrecruited him to work for Mack Sennett, the king of Hollywood comedy films.
Sad to say, many English people in the s and s thought Chaplin's Tramp a bit, well, \ Certainly middle-class audiences did; the working-class audiences were more likely to clapfor a character who revoltedagainst authority, using his wicked little cane to trip it up, or aiming the heelof his boot for a well-placed kick at its broad rear.
All the same, Chaplin's comic beggar didn't seem all that English or even working-class.
English tramps didn't sport tiny moustaches, huge pants or tail coats: European leaders and Italian waiters wore things like that.
Then again, the Tramp's quick eye for a pretty girl had a coarseway about it that was considered, well, not quite nice by English audiences—that's how foreigners behaved, wasn't it?
But for over half of his screen career, Chaplin had no screen voice to confirm his British nationality.
Indeed, it was a headache for Chaplin when he could no longer resist the talking movies and had to find \
He postponedthat day as long as possible: In Modern Times in , the first film in which he was heard as a singing waiter, he made up a nonsenselanguage which sounded like no known nationality.
He later said he imagined the Tramp to be a college-educated gentleman who'd come down in the world.
But if he'd been able to speak with an educated accent in those early short comedies, it's doubtfulif he would have achieved world fame.
And the English would have been sure to find it \on purpose but this helped to bring about his huge success.