Each highbrow did and does congratulate himself on being unique in his unlikeness to other men; and conversely each lowbrow now congratulate himself on being in some mystical way unique in his likeness—on being, so to say, outstandingly average and extraordinarily ordinary.

As for the lowbrows’ claim to be specially “human”, I for one have never been able to understand why it should be “inhuman” to use the faculties that distinguish us from pigs and geese and “human” to use those which we share with the lower animals.

There is no disputing, says the proverb, about taste—though, in fact, human beings spend at least half their leisure doing nothing else—and if highbrowism and lowbrowism were exclusively ( as it is certain that they are in great part) matters of individual taste, there would be no more to say about them than what I have said in the preceding lines.

Thus I desire a great deal less pleasure from jazz and thrillers than from the music, let us say, of Beethoven(贝多芬) or the novels, for example, of Dostoievsky; and the sex appeal of the girls on the covers of magazines seems to me less thrilling than the more complicated appeal to a great variety of feelings made by a Rubens, an EI Greco, a Constable, a Seurat.

One need only ask first-year university students what music they listen to , how much of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and continues through the college years.

They start, like the pharisee in the parable , by thanking God that the are not as other men are, and proceed to paint a picture of those other men, hardly more flattering than that which Swift painted of the Yahoos.

Each time the dream was a promise out of our ancient articles of faith, phrases from the constitution, lines from the great anthem of the nation, guarantees from the Bill of Rights, all ending with a vision that they might one day all come true.

For many the day seemed an adventure, a long outing in the late summer sun—part liberation from home, part Sunday school picnic, part political convention, and part fish fry.

It may not “look to it” at once, since it is looking to so many things, but it will be a long time before it forgets the melodious(悦耳的) and melancholy (忧郁的) voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Jr., crying out his dreams to the multitude(大众).

Great comic artists assume that truth may bear all lights, and thus they seek to accentuate(强调) contradictions in social action, not gloss over or transcend them by appeals to extrasocial symbols of divine ends, cosmic purpose, or laws of nature.

The hydrologic(水文地质的) cycle, a major topic in this science, is the complete cycle of phenomena through which water passes, beginning as atmospheric water vapor, passing into liquid and solid form as precipitation (降水(量)), thence along and into the ground surface, and finally again returning to the form of atmospheric water vapor by means of evaporation and transpiration(散发).

My point is that its central consciousness—its profound understanding of class and gender as shaping influences on people’s lives—owes much to that earlier literary heritage, a heritage that, in general, has not been sufficiently valued by most contemporary literary critics.

In the early 1950’s historians who studies preindustrial Europe (which we may define here as Europe in the period from roughly 1300 to 1800) began, for the first time in large numbers, to investigate more of the preindustrial European population than the 2 or 3 percent who comprised the political and social elite (精华) : the kings, generals, judges, nobles, bishops, and local magnates (要人) who had hitherto (迄今) usually filled history books.

The historian Frederick J. Tuner wrote in the 1890’s that the agrarian(农民) discontent (不满) that had been developing steadily in the United States since about 1870 had been precipitated (加速) by the closing of the internal frontier—that is , the depletion (枯竭) of available new land needed for further expansion of the American farming system.

Fallois proposed that Proust had tried to begin a novel in 1908, abandoned it for what was to be a long demonstration of Saint-Beure’s blindness to the real nature of great writing, found the essay giving rise to personal memories and fictional developments, and allowed these to take over in a steadily developing novel.