高考英语美文系列

Passage 90. Old Friends, Good Friends

More than 30 years ago, when I took my first job in New York City, I found myself working with a number of young women. Some I got to know just in passing, but others gradually became my friends. Today, six of these women remain an important part of my life. They are more than simply friends, more even than close friends.They are old friends, as indispensable as sunshine and more dear to me than ever. These people share a long-standing history with me. In fact, old friends are a lot like promises. They put reliability into the uncertainty of life and establish a reassuring link between the past, present, and future.

The attachment between friends who have known each other for many years is bound to be complex. On occasion we are exceedingly close, and at other times one or both of us invariably step back. Ebb and flow. Thick and thin. How smoothly and gently we negotiate these hills and valleys has everything to do with how well the friendship ages.

Sometimes events intervene in a way that requires us to rework the term of a relationship. A friend starts a second career.L et’s say, and suddenly has less free time. Another remarries, adding someone new to the equation. Talk honestly and listen to each other to find out if the other’s needs are being met. Renegotiating pays full tribute to life’s inevitable changes and says that we deem our friendships worthy of preserving.

Old friends are familiar with the layers of our lives. They have been there in the gloom and the glory. Even so, there’s always room to know more about another person. Of course, self-disclosure can make even old friends more vulnerable, so go slowly: Confiding can open new doors, but only if we knock first.

Time is the prime commodity between old friends —by this I mean the time spent doing things together. Whether it’s face to face over a cup of coffee, side by side while jogging, ear to ear over the phone, or via email and letters, don’t let too much time go by without sharing your thoughts with each other.

Passage 89 Stress Prevention

Stress is a normal part of life and usually comes from everyday occurrences. Here are some ways you can deal with everyday sources of stress.

Eliminate as many sources of stress as you can. For example, if crowds bother you, go to supermarket when you know the lines won’t be too long. Try renting videotapes rather than going to crowded movie theaters.

If you are always running late, sit down with a pencil and paper and see how you are actually allotting your time. You may be able to solve your problem (and distress your life a bit) just by being realistic.

If you can’t find the time for all the activities that are important to you, maybe you are trying to do too much. Again, make a list of what you do during the day and how much each activity takes. Then cut back. Avoid predictably stressful situations.

If a certain sport or game makes you tense (whether it’s tennis or bridge), decline the invitation to play. After all, the point of these activities is to have a good time. If you know you won’t, there’s no reason to play.

If you can’t remove the stress, remove yourself. Slip away once in a while for some private time. These quiet moments may give you a fresh perspective on your problems. Competing with others, whether in accomplishments, appearance, or possessions, is an avoidable source of stress. You might know people who do all they can to provoke envy in others. While it may seem easy to say you should be satisfied with what you have, it’s the truth.

Stress from this kind of jealousy is self’ inflicted. Labor-saving devices, such as cell phones or internet, often encourage us to cram too many activities into each day. Before you buy new equipment, be sure that it will really improve your life. Be aware that taking care of equipment and getting it repaired can be stressful. Try doing only one thing at a time. For example, when you’re riding your exercise bike,you don’t have to listen to the radio or watch television. Remember, sometimes it’s okay to do nothing.

If you feel stress (or anything else) is getting the better of you, seek professional help—a doctor or psychologist. Early signs of excess stress are loss of a sense of well-being and reluctance to get up in the morning to face another day.

Passage 88. Ambition

It may seem an exaggeration to say that ambition is the drive of society, holding many of its different elements together, but it is not an exaggeration by much.

Remove ambition and the essential elements of society seem to fly apart. Ambition is intimately connected with family, for men and women not only work partly for their families; husbands and wives are often ambitious for each other, but harbor some of their most ardent ambitions for their children. Yet to have a family nowadays—with birth control readily available, and inflation a good economic argument against having children—is nearly an expression of ambition in itself. Finally, though ambition was once the domain chiefly of monarchs and aristocrats, it has, in more recent times, increasingly become the domain of the middle classes. Ambition and futurity—a sense of building for tomorrow—are inextricable. Working, saving, planning—these, the daily aspects of ambition—have always been the distinguishing marks of a rising middle class. The attack against ambition is not incidentally an attack on the middle class and what it stands for. Like it or not, the middle class has done much of society’s work in America; and it, the middle class, has from the beginning run on ambition.

It is not difficult to imagine a world short of ambition. It would probably be a kinder world: without demands, without abrasions, without disappointments. People would have time for reflection. Such work as they did would not be for themselves but for the collectivity. Competition would never enter in. Conflict would be eliminated, tension become a thing of the past. The stress of creation would be at an end. Art would no longer be troubling, but purely entertaining in its functions. The family would become superfluous as a social unit, with all its former power for bringing about neurosis drained away. Life span would be expanded, for fewer people would die of heart attack or stroke caused by overwork. Anxiety would be extinct. Time would stretch on and on, with ambition long departed from the human heart. Ah, how unbearably boring life would be!

Passage 87. Motherly and Fatherly Love

Motherly love by its very nature is unconditional. Mother loves the newborn infant because it is her child, not because the child has fulfilled any specific condition, or lived up to any specific expectation. Unconditional love corresponds in one of the deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one’s merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe I did not please the person whom I want to love me, maybe this or that—there is always a fear that love could disappear. Furthermore, “deserved” love easily leaves a bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used. No wonder that we all cling to the longing for motherly love, as children and also as adults.

The relationship to father is quite different. Mother is the home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean; father does not represent any such natural home. He has little connection with the child in the first years of its life, and his importance for the child in this early period cannot be compared with that of mother. But while father does not represent the natural world, he represents the other pole of human existence; the world of thought, of man-made things, of law and order, of discipline, of travel and adventure. Father is the one who teaches the child, who shows him the road into the world. Fatherly love is conditional love. Its principle is “I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because you do your duty, because you are like me.”

In conditional fatherly love we find, as with unconditional motherly love, a negative and a positive aspect. The negative aspect is the very fact that fatherly love has to be deserved, that it can be lost if one does not do to what is expected. In the nature of fatherly love lies the fact that obedience becomes the main virtue, that disobedience is the main sin—and its punishment the withdrawal of fatherly love. The positive side is equally important. Since his love is conditional, I can do something to acquire it, I can work for it; his love is not outside of my control as motherly love is.

Passage 82. Youth

Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind; it is not a matter of rosy cheeks, red lips and supple knees; it is a matter of will, a quality of imagination, a vigor of the emotions; it is the freshness of the deep springs of life. Youth means a temperamental predominance of courage over timidity, of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. This often exists in a man of 60 more than a boy of 20. Nobody grows old merely by a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul. Worry, fear,

self-distrust bows the heart and turns the spirit back to dust.

Whether 60 or 16, there is in every human being’s heart the lu re of wonder, the unfailing childlike appetite of what’s next and the joy of the game of living. In the center of your heart and my heart there is a wireless station: so long as it receives messages of beauty, hope, cheer, courage and power from men and from the infinite, so long as you are young. When the aerials are down, and your spirit is covered with snows of cynicism and the ice of pessimism, then you are grown old, even at 20, but as long as your aerials are up to catch waves of optimism, there is hope you may die young at 80.

Passage 80. Success Is a Choice

All of us ought to be able to brace ourselves for the predictable challenges and setbacks that crop up every day. If we expect that life won’t be perfect,we’ll be able to avoid that impulse to quit. But even if you are strong enough to persist through the obstacle course of life and work, sometimes you will encounter an adverse event that will completely knock you on your back.

Whether it’s financial loss, the loss of respect of you r peers or loved ones, or some other traumatic event in your life, these major setbacks leave you doubting yourself and wondering if things can ever change for the better again. Adversity happens to all of us, and it happens all the time. Some form of major adversity is either going to be there or it’s lying in wait just around the corner. To ignore adversity is to succumb to the ultimate self-delusion. But you must recognize that history full of examples of men and women who achieved greatness despite facing hurdles so steep that they easily could have crushed their spirit and left them lying in the dust. Moses was a stutter, yet he was called on to be the voice of God. Abraham Lincoln overcame a difficult childhood, depression, the death of two sons, and constant ridicule during the Civil War to become arguably our greatest president ever.

Helen Keller made an impact on the world despite being deaf, dumb, and blind from an early age. Franklin Roosevelt had polio. There are endless examples. These were people who not only looked adversity in the face but learned valuable lessons about overcoming difficult circumstances and were able to move ahead.

Passage 79．Learn to Live in the Present Moment

To a large degree, the measure of our peace of mind is determined by how much we are able to live in the present moment. Irrespective of what happened yesterday or last year, or what may or may not happen tomorrow, the present moment is where you are—always! Without question, many of us have mastered the neurotic art of spending much of our lives worrying about a variety of things—all at once. We allow past problems and future concerns to dominate our present moments, so much so that we end up anxious, frustrated, depressed, and hopeless.

On the flip side, we also postpone our gratification, our stated priorities, and our happiness, often convincing ourselves that “someday” will be better than today. Unfortunately, the same mental dynamics that tell us to look toward the future

will only repeat themselves so that “someday” never actually arrives.John Lennon once said, “Life is what’s happening while we’re busy making”, our children are busy growing up, the people we love are moving away busy dying, our bodies are getting out of shape, and our dreams are slipping away. In short, we miss out on life. Many people live as if life were a dress rehearsal for some later date. It isn’t. In fact, no one has a guarantee that he or she will be here tomorrow. Now is the only time we have, and the only time that we have any control over. When our attention is in the present moment, we push fear from our minds. Fear is the concern over events that might happen in the future—we won’t have enough money, our children will get into trouble, we will get old and die, whatever.

To combat fear, the best strategy is to learn to bring your attention back to the present. Mark Twain said, “I’ve lived through m any terrible things in my life, some of which actually happened.”I don’t think I can say it any better. Practice keeping your attention on the here and now. Your efforts will pay great dividends.