Charlotte Brontë, The Professor

 This passage is from Charlotte Brontë, The Professor,
originally published in 1857.
No man likes to acknowledge that he has made a
mistake in the choice of his profession, and every
man, worthy of the name, will row long against wind
and tide before he allows himself to cry out, “I am
baffled!” and submits to be floated passively back to
land. From the first week of my residence in X—
felt my occupation irksome. The thing itself—the
work of copying and translating business-letters—
was a dry and tedious task enough, but had that been
all, I should long have borne with the nuisance; I am
not of an impatient nature, and influenced by the
double desire of getting my living and justifying to
myself and others the resolution I had taken to
become a tradesman, I should have endured in
silence the rust and cramp of my best faculties; I
should not have whispered, even inwardly, that I
longed for liberty; I should have pent in every sigh by
which my heart might have ventured to intimate its
distress under the closeness, smoke, monotony, and
joyless tumult of Bigben Close, and its panting desire
for freer and fresher scenes; I should have set up the
image of Duty, the fetish of Perseverance, in my
small bedroom at Mrs. King’s lodgings, and they two
should have been my household gods, from which
my darling, my cherished-in-secret, Imagination, the
tender and the mighty, should never, either by
softness or strength, have severed me. But this was
not all; the antipathy which had sprung up between
myself and my employer striking deeper root and
spreading denser shade daily, excluded me from
every glimpse of the sunshine of life; and I began to
feel like a plant growing in humid darkness out of the
slimy walls of a well.
Antipathy is the only word which can express the
feeling Edward Crimsworth had for me—a feeling, in
a great measure, involuntary, and which was liable to
be excited by every, the most trifling movement,
look, or word of mine. My southern accent annoyed
him; the degree of education evinced in my language
irritated him; my punctuality, industry, and
accuracy, fixed his dislike, and gave it the high
flavour and poignant relish of envy; he feared that I
too should one day make a successful tradesman.
Had I been in anything inferior to him, he would not
have hated me so thoroughly, but I knew all that he
knew, and, what was worse, he suspected that I kept
the padlock of silence on mental wealth in which he
was no sharer. If he could have once placed me in a
ridiculous or mortifying position, he would have
forgiven me much, but I was guarded by three
faculties—Caution, Tact, Observation; and prowling
and prying as was Edward’s malignity, it could never
baffle the lynx-eyes of these, my natural sentinels.
Day by day did his malice watch my tact, hoping it
would sleep, and prepared to steal snake-like on its
slumber; but tact, if it be genuine, never sleeps.

تعليقات

إرسال تعليق

المشاركات الشائعة من هذه المدونة

Sat 2018 October passage 1 2 3

  This passage is adapted from Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance. ©1995 by Rohinton Mistry. Maneck Kohlah, a teenager from a remote mountain village in India, has been away at boarding school. A new road has just been built to the village, where Maneck’s famliy owns a store. The promised rewards began rolling up the road into the mountains. Lorries big as houses transported goods from the cities and fouled the air with their exhaust. Service stations and eating places sprouted along the routes to provide for the machines and their men. And developers began building luxury hotels. That year, when Maneck came home for the holidays, he was puzzled (and later alarmed) to discover his father perpetually irritable. They found it impossible to get through the day without quarrelling, breaking into argument even in the presence of customers. “What’s the matter with him?” Maneck asked his mother. “When I’m here, he ignores me or fights with me. When I’m at school, he writes letters saying how...
قراءة المزيد

Daniyal Mueenuddin

  This passage is adapted from Daniyal Mueenuddin, “Nawabdin Electrician.” ©2009 by Daniyal Mueenuddin. Another man might have thrown up his hands—but not Nawabdin. His twelve daughters acted as a spur to his genius, and he looked with Line satisfaction in the mirror each morning at the face of a warrior going out to do battle. Nawab of course knew that he must proliferate his sources of revenue—the salary he received from K. K. Harouni for tending the tube wells would not even begin to suffice. He set up a little one-room flour mill, run off a condemned electric motor—condemned by him. He tried his hand at fish-farming in a little pond at the edge of his master’s fields. He bought broken radios, fixed them, and resold them. He did not demur even when asked to fix watches, though that  enterprise did spectacularly badly, and in fact earned him more kicks than kudos, for no watch he took apart ever kept time again. K. K. Harouni rarely went to his farms, but lived mostly in Lah...
قراءة المزيد

MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist

This passage is adapted from MacDonald Harris, The Balloonist. ©2011 by The Estate of Donald Heiney. During the summer of 1897, the narrator of this story, a fictional Swedish scientist, has set out for the North Pole in a hydrogen-powered balloon. My emotions are complicated and not readily verifiable. I feel a vast yearning that is simultaneously a pleasure and a pain. I am certain of the consummation of this yearning, but I don’t know yet what form it will take, since I do not understand quite what it is that the yearning desires. For the first time there is borne in upon me the full truth of what I myself said to the doctor only an hour ago: that my motives in this undertaking are not entirely clear. For years, for a lifetime, the machinery of my destiny has worked in secret to prepare for this moment; its clockwork has moved exactly toward this time and place and no other. Rising slowly from the earth that bore me and gave me sustenance, I am carried helplessly toward an uninhabit...
قراءة المزيد