“I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I site here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I begin where I left off.”
O Pioneers! Pt. 2 ch. 8 (1913)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
“A La Recherche du Temps Perdu: A work of genius written in bed. It opens with the narrator tucked between his sheets. It is rarely read for any length of time on a mattress.
It is also rarely read, but is often talked about and has had a major impact on many people who haven’t read it, if only because of the strain of waiting for Marcel Proust to be mentioned in conversation, which can happen as many as three times in a year. The educated person may the be required to make a comment on what they have only read about.
That literature could mean, as the French novelist Julian Gracq once complained, books more talked about than read indicates the extent to which language today may be used more to obscure and control than to communicate.”
Excerpted from: Saul, John Ralston. The Doubter’s Companion. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Here is a reading on time as a philosophical concept, along with its accompanying vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet. The reading invokes Kant, Leibniz, and Newton; as I recall, I wrote this about ten years ago for a student interested in philosophy. I don’t know that I or anyone else as looked at it since. Here it is for your use. Remember that like everything else on Mark’s Text Terminal, these are Microsoft Word documents, so you can tailor them to your students’ needs.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Grammar: Rules of a language governing its phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics; also, a written summary of such rules. The first Europeans to write grammar texts were the Greeks, notably the Alexandrians of the 1st century BC. The Romans applied the Greek grammatical system to Latin, The works of the Latin Grammarians Donatus (4th century BC) and Priscian (6th century) were widely used to teach grammar in Medieval Europe. By 1700, grammars of 61 vernacular languages had been printed. These were mainly used for teaching and were intended to reform or standardize language. In the 19th-20th centuries linguists began studying languages to trace their evolution father than to prescribe correct usage. Descriptive linguists (see Ferdinand de Saussure) studied spoken language by collecting and analyzing sample sentences. Transformational grammarians (see Noam Chomsky) examined the underlying structure of language (see generative grammar). The older approach to grammar as a body of rules needed to speak and write correctly is still the basis of primary and secondary teaching.
Excerpted/Adapted from: Stevens, Mark A., Ed. Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Encyclopedia. Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, 2000.
“Dada: An international movement in fine arts, drama, and literature that took shape in Zurich in 1916, with other major centers in New York (1915-1920), Germany (1918-1923), and Paris (1919-1922). Symbolizing their antirational stance, founding artists ‘chose’ the word ‘Dada’ (Fr., hobby horse) by sticking a penknife into a dictionary at random. The movement reflected the cynicism engendered by World War I in improvised, sarcastic expressions of intuition and irrationality. Dada artists—among them Marcel Duchamp, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Kurt Schwitters, and Max Ernst—appropriated papiers colles for their witty collages and ready-mades for their sculpture. A forerunner of Surrealism. See Anti-Art.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“The most common of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.”
H.L. Mencken
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged humor, literary oddities, philosophy/religion
“The Magic Mountain: (German title: Der Zauberberg). A novel (1924; English translation 1927) by Thomas Mann (1875-1955). The densely symbolic story is centered on a young man, Hans Castorp, who goes to visit his cousin at Haus Berghof, a high-altitude sanatorium for people with tuberculosis at Davos in the Swiss Alps. Castorp is fascinated by the place, and ends up staying there for years, searching for self-knowledge while prevaricating between the demands of reason and action on the one hand, and mysticism and decadence on the other. The novel is ultimately a symbolic study of the uneasy situation in Europe before the outbreak of the First World War, and explores the isolation of the world of art and philosophy (the mountain) from the crisis of contemporary existence below.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“Yet even as I wince at the terrible risk we all took, I remember thinking at the time that it was the right decision—because it it felt as though the hand of fate was ushering us forward.”
Melba Pattillo Beals on the Integration of Little Rock Schools, Warriors Don’t Cry (1994)
Excerpted from: Howe, Randy, ed. The Quotable Teacher. Guilford, CT: The Lyons Press, 2003.
“Nawal El Saadawi: (1931-2021) Egyptian writer. The foremost woman writer of Egypt and the Middle East, el Saadawi has published nearly thirty books of fiction and sociology. She is also an influential activist for woman’s rights and a medical doctor. About half of her work has been translated from Arabic into English, including several novels. Woman at Point Zero (1983) is about a young village girl forced into prostitution and condemned to die for murder. The novel, which has been translated into twenty-two languages, chronicles the sexual exploitation of women in Egypt and examine the narrow range of options available to women in a conformist society. Other novels include God Dies by the Nile (1987), The Fall of the Imam (1988), and The Innocence of the Devil (1992). El Saadawi’s fiction draws on indigenous Arabic narratives, and thus her prose often seems highly stylized and poetic. Death of an Ex-Minister and Other Stories (tr 1987) reveals her experiments with diction, with the various narrative voices usually speaking in a monologue. The Hidden Face of Eve (1980), a sociological work, was the first book to document the horrors of clitoridectomy in northeastern Africa. El Saadawi has also written a travel account and political tracts devoted to women’s causes.
As Health Minister under the Anwar Sadat regime, el Saadawi was imprisoned for her outspoken opposition to that government’s social policies, which produced Memoirs from a Women’s Prison (tr 1986). In 1982 she formed the Arab Women’s Solidarity Association (AWSA), and international women’s organization which has a consultative status with the United Nations and combats state repression and censorship, The Cairo chapter of AWSA was forcibly closed in 1991, though it continues to operate without headquarters.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“It is urged that the use of the masculine pronouns he, his, and him in all the constitutions and laws is proof that only men were meant to be included in their provisions. If you insist on this version of the letter of the law, we shall insist that you be consistent and accept the other horn of the dilemma, which would compel you to exempt women from taxation for the support of the government and from penalties for the violation of laws. There is not she or her or hers in the tax laws, and this is equally true in of all the criminal laws.”
Quoted in Ida Husted Harper, The Life and Work of Susan B. Anthony (1899)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
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