As we walked homeward across the fields, the sun dropped and lay like a great golden globe in the low west. While it hung there, t...he moon rose in the east, as big as a cart-wheel, pale silver and streaked with rose colour, thin as a bubble or a ghost-moon. For five, perhaps ten minutes, the two luminaries confronted each other across the level land, resting on opposite edges of the world. In that singular light every little tree and shock of wheat, every sunflower stalk and clump of snow-on-the-mountain, drew itself up high and pointed; the very clods and furrows in the fields seemed to stand up sharply. I felt the old pull of the earth, the solemn magic that comes out of those fields at nightfall. I wished I could be a little boy again, and that my way could end there.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
But in a hundred high schools and colleges, this warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or ten years, the pupil... is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously called, he shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of young men are graduated at our colleges in this country every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato. But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this country should be directed in its best years on studies which lead to nothing?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Success matters very much to the under-six age group. These children want so desperately to be able to hold their heads high. They... sound exceedingly boastful: "I can count up to five...." "I can tie my shoes...." "I know how old I am. Do you want to see...?" Each child maintains his own public relations office. He is continuously concerned with getting his name and his skill and his knowledge and his power into the "headlines." But we mustn't be misled by this drumbeating. The bombast is as much for the child's benefit as for ours--he can't quite believe his own importance.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Teams move in patterns, in rhythms, at high velocity; one must watch the game abstractly, not focusing on any single individual al...one, but upon, as it were, the blurred and intricate designs woven by the paths through which all five together cast a spell upon the opposition. The eye watches five men at once, delighting in their unity, groaning at their lapses of concentration. Yet basketball moves so rapidly and so depends on the versatility of each individual in escaping from the defense intended to contain him that the game cannot be choreographed in advance. Twelve men are constantly in movement (counting two referees), the rebounds of the ball are unpredictable, the occasions for passing or dribbling, or shooting must be decided instantaneously; basketball players must be improvisers. They have a score, a melody; each team has its own appropriate tempo, a style of the game best suited to its talents; but within and around that general score, each individual is free to elaborate as the spirit moves him. Basketball is jazz: improvisatory, free, individualistic, corporate, sweaty, fast, exulting, screeching, torrid, explosive, exquisitely designed for letting first the trumpet, then the sax, then the drummer, then the trombonist soar away in virtuoso excellence.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I have often wished since that I was with them. They search for timber over a given section, climbing hills and often high trees t...o look off; explore the streams by which it is to be driven, and the like; spend five or six weeks in the woods, they two alone, a hundred miles or more from any town, roaming about, and sleeping on the ground where night overtakes them, depending chiefly on the provisions they carry with them, though they do not decline what game they come across.... It is a solitary and adventurous life, and comes nearest to that of the trapper of the West, perhaps. They work ever with a gun as well as an axe, let their beards grow, and live without neighbors, not on an open plain, but far within a wilderness.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The houses are from five to seven feet high, and all built upon one arbitrary plan--the ungraceful form of a dry-goods box. The si...des are daubed with a smooth white plaster, and tastefully frescoed aloft and alow with disks of camel-dung placed there to dry. This gives the edifice the romantic appearance of having been riddled with cannon-balls, and imparts to it a very pleasing effect. When the artist has arranged his materials with an eye to just proportion--the small and the large flakes in alternate rows, and separated by carefully-considered intervals--I know of nothing more cheerful to look upon than a spirited Syrian fresco. Nothing in this world has such a charm for me as to stand and gaze for hours and hours upon the inspired works of these old masters.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Spacious Firmament on high, With all the blue Ethereal Sky,... And spangled Heav'ns, a Shining Frame, Their great Original proclaim: Th' unwearied Sun, from day to day, Does his Creator's Pow'r display, And publishes to every Land The Work of an Almighty Hand.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
There is a sort of veteran women of condition, who, having lived always in the grand mode, and having possibly had some gallantrie...s, together with the experience of five and twenty or thirty years, form a young fellow better than all the rules that can be given him.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Even assuming the possibility of greater knowledge among responsive young children of a mass media age, it is questionable whether... an increase in verbal knowledge and expression has much effect on the capacity for understanding in depth or on the style of behavior of children with no more than five years of living and growing behind them.... The drawings of contemporary fives are no more complex, the capacity for judgment no sharper, the feelings of helplessness when they get sick or into trouble no less painful than they have ever been, as far as we know.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Adults understandably assume that the level of verbal proficiency a five-year-old displays represents his level of proficiency in ...all areas of functioning--if he talks like an adult, he must think and feel like one. However, five-year-olds,... belie the promise of adult-like behavior with their child-like, impulsive actions.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »