LỜi giới thiệU

At seventeen we were disillusinoned and weary. In the midst of basketball puppylove and discussions of life - washed down with chocolate sodas o warm afternoons we had come to question almost everything we were taught at home and in school. Religion we had argued about it so much, Catholics against agnostics against luthereans against Christian Scientists, that we were all converted to indifferentism. MOrality, which we indentifield with chasteness, was a lie told to our bodies. Our studies were useless or misdirected, especially our studies in English lietrature: the authors we were unpleasant to our palate: the had the taste of chlorinated water.

We were still too immature to understand the doctrine of complete despair about the modern world that would later, be advanced by the followers of T.S. Eliot, but we shared in the mood that lay behind them. During the brief moments we devoted to the fate of mankind in general, we suffered from a sense of oppression. We felt that the world was rigorously controlled by scientific laws of which we had no grasp, that our lives were directed by Puritan Standards that were not our own, that society in General was terribly secure, unexciting, middle class, a vast reflection of the families from which we came. Society obeyed the impersonal law of progress. Cities expanded relentlessly year by year, fortunes grew larger, more and more automobiles appeared in the streets; people were wiser and better than their ancestors - eventually, by automatic stages, we should reach an intolerable utopia of dull citizens, without crime or suffering or drama. The progression, of course, might be reversed. The period in which we were living might be reversed. But the decay of society was psychologically equivalent to tis progress: both were automatic processes that we our selves could neither hasten nor retare. Society was something alien, which our lives and writings could never affect "it was a sort of parlor can in which we rode, over smooth trackd, toward a destination we should never have chosen for ourselves.

(Cf. MALCOLM COWLEY)

Friends again, yet aware that they could meet no more, Aziz and Fielding went for their last ride in the Mau jungles. The floods had abaated and the Rajah was officially dead, so the Guest House party were depart-ing next morning, as decorum repuired. What with the mourning and the festival, the visit was a failure. Fielding had scarcely seen Godbole, who promised every day to show him over the King-Emperor George Fifth Highschool, his main objective, but always made some excuse. . This sfternoon Aziz let out what had happened: the King Emperor had been converted into a granory, and the Miniser of Education did not like to admit this to his foremr Principal. The school had been opened last year by the Agent to the Goent to the Governor - General, and it stull flourushed on phper; he hoped to startit aganin before ots absende was remarked and to collect its scholara before they produced chidren of energy, but he did not travel as lightly as in the past education was a continuous concern to him, because his income and the comfort of his family depended on it. He knew that few Indians think education good in itself and he deplored this now on the wdest grounds He began to say something heavy on the subject of Native States, but the friendliness of Aziz distracted him. This reconciliation was a success, anyhow After the funny shipwreck there had been no more nonsense or bitterness, and they went back laughingly to their old relationship as if nothing had happened.

The mystery of the primeral world! She could feel it now in all its shadowy, furious magnificence. She knew now what was the black, glinting look in Cipriano's elyes. She could understand marrying him, now. In the shadowy world wher men were visionless, and winds of fury rose up form the earth, Cipriano was still a power. Once you entered his mystery the scale of all things changed, and he became a living male power, undefined, and unconfined. The smallness, the limitations ceased to esist. In his black, glinting eyes the power was limitless, and it was as if, from him from his body of blood could rise up that pillar of coud which swayed and swung, like a rearing serpent or a rising tree, till it swept thw zenith, and all the earth below was dark and prone, and consummated. Those small hands, that little natural turt of black goats' beard hanging light from his chin, the tilt of his brows and the slight slant of his eyes, the domed Indian head with its thick black hair, they were like symbols to her, of another mystery, the bygone mystery of the twilit, primitive world, where shapes that are small suddenly loom up huge, gigantic on the shadow, and a face like Cipriano's is the face at once of a god and a devil, the undying Pan face. The bygone mystery, that has in deed gone, by but has not passed away.Never shall pass away.

As he sat in silence, casting the old, twilit Panpower over her, she felt herself submitting, succumbing. He was once more the old dominant male, shadowy intangible, looming suddenly tall, and covering the sky, making a darkness that was himself and nothing but himself, the Pan male. And she was swooned prone beneath, perfect in her pronenss.

(Cf. D. H. LAWRENCE, The Plumed Serpent, 1966)

"Yes, of couse, if it's fine tomorrow,"said Mrs. Ramsay. "But you'll have to be up with the lark " she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after night's after a night's darkness and a day's sail, withim touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actuallys at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallize and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures form the inlustrated catalogye of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator as his mother spoke with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the law mower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead, and his fierce blue eyes, impccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imgined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

(Cf. VIRGINIA WOOLF, To the Lighthous)

After a while, however, in the midwatches of the night, behind thick walls and bolted doors and shuttered windows, it Cameron to me full flood at last in confessions of unutterable despair. I don't know why it was that people so unburdened themselves to me, a stanger, unless it was because they knew the love I bore them and their land. They seemed to feel a desperate need to tald to someone who would understand. The thing was pent up in them, and my sympathy for all things German had burst the dam of their reserve and caution. Their tales of woe and fear un - speakable gushed forth and beat upon my ears. They told me stories of their friends and relatives who had said unguarded things in public and disappeared without a trace, stories of the Gestapo stories of neighbor's quarrels and petty personal spite turned into political persecution stories of concentration camps and pogroms, stories of rich Jews stripped and beaten and robbed of everything they had curd then denied the right to earn a pauper's wage, stories of well - bred Jewesses despoiled and turned out of their homes and forced to kneel and scrub off anti - Nazi slogans scribbled on the side walks while young barbarians dressed like soldiers fromed a ring and prodded them with bayonets and made the quiet places echo with the shameless laughter of their mockery. It was a picture of the Dark Ages come agam - shocking beyond belief but true as the hell that man forever created for himself.

Thus it was that the corruption of man's living faith and the inferno of his buried anguish came to me and I recognized at last, in all its frightful aspects, the spiritual disense which was poisoning unto death, a noble and a might people.

(Cf. THOMAS WOLFE, You can't go home Again)

He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged selfassertion which had nothing aggressive in it . It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as shipchandler's waterclerk he was very popular.

A water - clerk need not pass an examination in anything under the sun, but he must have ability in the abstract and demonstrate it practically. His work consists in racing under sail, steam? Or oars against other water - clerks for any ship about to anchor, greeting her captain cheerily, forcing upon him a card - the business card of the shipchandler- and on his firs visit on shoer piloting him firmly but without ostentation to a vast, cavern-like shop which is full, of things that are eaten and drunk on board ship where you can get everything to make her seaworthy and beautiful, from aset of chain - hooks for cable to a book of gold-leafdor the carvings of her stern and where com-mander is received like a brothr by a shipchandler he has never seen before. There is a cool pareour, easy-chairs, bottles, cigars, writing implements, a copy that melts the salt of a three months' passage out of a seaman's heart. The connection thus bogun is kept up, as long as the ship remains in harbour, by the daily visits of the water - clerk. To the captian he is faithful like a friend and attentive like a son, with the patience of Job, the unselfish devotion of a woman, and the jollity of a boon companion.

(Cf. JOSEPH CONRAD, Lord Jim )

He squatted beside the window, staring out, and behind his back came.

The muffled sound of small girls going to bed. It brought it home to one - to have had a hero in the house, thought it had only been for twentyfour hours. And he was the last. There were no more priests and no more heroes. He listened resentfully to the sound of booted feet coming up the pavement. Ordinary life pressed round him. He got down from the window - seat and picked up his candle - Zapata. Villa, Madero and the rest, they were all dead, and its was people like the man out there who killed them. He felt deceived.

The lieutenant came along the pavement: there was something brsk and stubborn about his walk, as if he was saying at every step. "I have done what I have done". He looked in at the boy holding the candle with a look of indecrsive recognition. He said to himself. "I would do much more for him and them, much more, life is never going to be again for them what it as for me," but the dynamic love which used to move his trigger-finger felt flat and dead. Of course, he told himself, it willcome back. It was like love of a woman and went in cycles he had satisfed himself that morning, that was all. This was satiety. He smiled painfully at the child through the window and said, "Buenas noches."

The boy was looking at his revolver - holsteer and he remembered an incident in the plaza when he had allowed a child to touch his gun - perhaps this boy. He smiled again and touched it too - to show he remem - bered, and the boy crinkied up his face and spat through the wundow bare , accurately, so that a little blob of spittle lay on the revolver-butt.

(CF. GRAHAM GREENE, THE POWER and The Glory)

I spent my Saturday nights in New York, because those gleaming, dazzling parties of his were with me so vividly I could still hear the music and the laughter, faint and incessant from his garden, and the cars going up and down his drive. One night I did hear a materialcar there, and saw its lightss sto at his front steps. But Ididn't investigate. Probablyit was some final guest who had been away at the ends of the earth and didn't know that the pharty was ocer.

On the last night, wuth may trunk packd and my car sold to thegrocer, I went over and looked at the huge incoherent failure of a house once more. On the while steps an obscene word, scrawled-by some boy wuth a piece of brich stood out clearlyin the moon light, and I erased it, drawing my shoe raspingly along the stone. Then I wandered down to the beach and sprawled out on the sand.

Most of the big shore phlaces were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the sound. And as the moon rose hi gher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradully I became aware of the old sinland here that dlowered on ce for Dutch sailors' eyes-a fresh, grees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the las and greatest of all human dreams fof a transiory enchanted mo-ment man must have held his breath in the presence lf this contiment, compelled into an aesthetic con-templation he neither understood nor desired, face for the last time in history somthing commen surate to his capacity for wonder.

She played the Nocturne in E major, opus 9, number 2. If her playing had really lost very much then she must originally have been a consummate artist. The piano was mediocre, but after the first few notes she learned to control it. She displayed a neivous feeling for modulations of timbre and a joy in mobility of rhythm that amounted to the fantastic. Her attack was at once firm and soft. Under her hands the very last drop of sweetness was wrung from the melody; the embellishments seemed to cling with slow grace about her limbs.

He sat beside her, bent forward, his hand between his knees, his head bowed. She played the beginning with exaggerated tormenting slowness, with painfully long pauses between the single figures. The Sehnsuchtsmotiv roving lost and forlorn like a voice in the night, lifted its trembling question. Then silence, a waiting. And lo, an answer: the same timorous, lonely note, only clearer, only tenderer. Silence, again. And the, with that marvellous muted sforzando like mounting passion, the love - motif came in, reared and sared and yearned ecstatically upward to its consummation, sank back, was resolved the cellos taking up the melody to carry it on with their deep heavy notes of rapture and despair.

Not uncuccessfully did the player seek to suggest the orchestral effects upon the poor instrument at her command. The violin runs of the great climax rang out with brilliant precision. She played with a fastidiuos reverence, lingering on each figure, bringing out each detail, with the self - forgotten concentration of the priests who lifts the Host above his head. Here two forces, two beings, strove towards each - other, in transports of joy and pain here they embraced and became one in delirious yearing after eternity and the absolute. The prelude flamed up and died away. She stoped at the point where the curtains past, and sat speechless, staring at the keys.

To squat	ngồi xổm, ngồi chồm hổm
To stare out	nhìn chăm chăm ra ngoài
The muffled sound	âm thanh tắc nghẹn, âm thanh thì thầm
Resentfully	một cách giận dữ
booted feet	những bàn chân đi ủng
To press	ép chặt, đè nén
Window - seat	bục cửa sổ
Deceived	bì lừa gạt
Brisk and stubborn	mạnh mẽ và bướng bỉnh
A look of indecisive recognition	một cái nhìn ngờ ngợ
dynamic love	cái tình yêu cuộc sống (chơi chữ ở đây, vì "dynamite" có nghĩa là mìn)
trigger - finger	ngón tay bóp cò súng
to feel flat and dead	rũ rượi như chết rồi
to go in cycles	chuyển động theo vòng tròn
satiefy	sự thừa mứa
Buenas noches	chúc ngủ ngon (Tiếng Tây Ban Nha)
revolver - holster	bao đựng súng
plaza	quảng trường
to crinkle up his face	nhăn mặt để hù doạ
to spit	khạc nhổ
window bars	chấn song cửa sổ
a lettle blob of spittle	một cục nước bọt nhỏ
revolver - butt	bá súng

gleaming	rực rỡ ánh đèn
dazzling	chói lọi , huy hoàng
vividly	sống động, linh động
faint	yếu ớt, xa xôi, mơ hồ
incessant	liên miên, bất tận
drive	lối đi của xe hơi
a material car	một cái xe thực sự (chứ không phải tưởng tượng)
to investigate	chịu khó tìm hiểu, điều tra
trunk	hành lý, rương, hòm
huge, incoherent failure of a house	sự tàn tạ của một căn nhà to lớn ngổn ngang
an obscene word	một chữ tục tiũ
to scrawl	(viết nguệch ngoạc)
to stand out clearly	nổi bật lên rõ ràng
to erase	xoá đi
to draw my shoe raspingly	miết đôi giầy xoèn xoẹt
to sprawl out	nằm xoài ra một cách thoải mái
shore places	những nơi nghỉ mát trên bãi biển
shadowy	lờ mờ
moving	chuyển động
glow	ánh sáng yếu ớt
ferry boat	phà
inessential houses	những căn nhà hư ảo
to melt away	tan biến đi
to flower	nở hoa, bừng sáng lên
Dutch sailor's eye	con mắt của các thuỷ thủ Hà Lan (những người đến hòn đảo đầu tiên)
vanished	biến mất
to make way for	chạy dài về phía
to pander in whispers	bằng những lời thì thầm đã ngoan ngoãn chiều theo
transitory enchanted moment	một giây phút mê ly ngắn ngủi
to hold one's breath	nín thở vì kinh ngạc
to be compelled into an aesthetic contemplation	ngưỡng có tính chất nghệ thuật
commensurate	phù hợp với, tương ứng với
capacity for wonder	khả năng kinh ngạc

Nocturne	dạ khúc một thể loại âm nhạc
in E major	cung Mi trưởng
opus 9, number 2	bản số 2, tác phẩm 9
consummate artist	một nghệ sĩ toàn diện
nervous feeling	một sự nhạy cảm sắc bén
modulations of timbre	những tiết tấu của âm sắc
mobility of rhythm	tính chất uyển chuyển của nhịp điệu
fantastic	hoang đường, kỳ quặc, phóng khoáng
attack	bắt đầu gõ vào phím đàn
to be wrung	được vắt ra
embellishments	những giai điệu xinh đẹp
to cling	bám lấy, vây quanh
with slow grace	với một sự thong thả duyên dáng
her limbs	thân hình
exggerated tormenting slowness	một sự chậm rãi lê thê khiến người nghe phải đau đớn
figures	âm hình
Sehnsuchtsmotiv	mô típ nhục cảm ( tiếng Ðức)
to rove lost and forlorn	chơi vơi, lạc lõng
timorous	rụt rè, e ấp
marvellous	kỳ diệu
muted	câm lặng
sforzando	nhấn mạnh (tiếng ý)
mounting passion	nỗi đam mê vươn cao
love - motif	mô típ tình yêu
reared	ngóc đầu lên
soared	bay cao
yearned	khao khát vươn đến
ecstatically	say sưa, ngây ngất
consummation	sự viên mãn
resloved	hoà tan ra
the cellos	đàn viôlôngxen, nhạc cụ trầm của "gia đình viôlông"
to take up	bắt lấy, giữ lại
rapture	khoái lạc tột đỉnh, hoan lạc mê ly
despair	tuyệt vọng
the orchestral effect	hiệu ứng giống như của nguyên một dàn nhạc
at her command	theo sự điều khiển của nàng
climax	tột điểm, cao điểm
fastidious reverence	một sự tôn trọng kiêu kỳ
to linger on	láy luyến, lưu luyến
to bring out	nhấn mạnh, làm nổi bật
self - forgotten concentration	sự tập trung cao độ, quên mất cả bản thân
the Host	bình đựng bí tích (trong bí tích mình thánh Chúa)
to strive towards	hướng về phía
transports of joy and pain	từng cơn vui và niềm đau đã cuốn họ đến với nhau
to embrace	ôm choàng lấy
delirious wearinng after	sự khao khát như điên dại vươn đến
eternity	sự vĩnh cửu
the absolute	cái tuyệt đối
prelude	khúc nhạc prêluýt
to flame up	bừng cháy lên
speechless	nín thing, câm lặng
thekeys	phím đàn