smurfsUnit 10
or orThe Idiocy of Urban Life
Henry Fairlie pet
1 Between about and the life of the city is civil. Occasionally the lone footsteps of someone walking to or from work echo along the sidewalk. All work that has to be done at tho hours is uful －雅思真题下载 in bakeries, for example. Even the newspaper press stop turning forests into lies. Now and then a car comes out of the silence and cruis easily through the blinking traffic lights. The natural inhabitants of the city come out from damp baments and cellars. With their pink ears and paws, sleek, well-groomed, their whiskers combed, rats are true city dwellers. Urban life, during the hours when they reign, is urbane.
2 The rats are social creatures, as you can tell if you look out on the city street during an insomniac night. But after , the two-legged, daytime creatures of the city begin to s
tir; and it is they, not the rats, who bring the rat race. You might think that human beings congregate in large cities becau they are gregarious. The opposite is true. Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities are not social places.
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3 The lunacy of modern city life lies first in the fact that most city dwellers try to live outside the city boundaries. So the two-legged creatures have created suburbs, exurbs, and finally rururbs (rubs to some). Disdaining rural life, they try to create simulations of it. No effort is spared to let city dwellers imagine they are living anywhere but in a city: patches of grass in the more modest suburbs, broader spreads in the richer ones further out; prim new trees planted along the streets; at the foot of the larger backyards, a preten to bosky woodlands.
3． www。exitoh/ov。com/teach/student/shougong/4 The professional people buy cond homes in the country as soon as they can afford them, and as early as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created. The New York intellectuals and artists quaintly say they are “going to the country” for the weekend or the summer, but in fact they have created a little Manhattan-by-the-Sea aroucbo
nd the Hamptons, spreading over the Long Island6 potato fields who earlier solitude was presumably the reason why they first went there. City dwellers take the city with them to the country, for they will not live without its pamperings. The main streets of America’s small towns, which ud to have hardware and dry goods stores, are now strips of boutiques. Old-fashioned barbers become unix hairdressing salons. The brown rats stay in the cities becau of the filth the humans leave during the day. The rats clean it up at night. Soon the countryside will be just as nourishing to them, as the city dwellers take their filth with them.
5 Work still gives meaning to rural life, the family, and churches. But in the city today work and home, family and church, are parated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of their home life. At the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of their work hours in their hours off. They rush from the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool, to work at their play with the same joylessness.
6 Even though the offices of today’s business in the city are themlves moving out
to the suburbs, this does not necessarily bring the workers back clor to their workplace. It merely means that to the rush-hour traffic into the city there is now added a rush-hour traffic out to the suburbs in the morning, and back around and across the city in the evening. As the farmer walks down to his farm in the morning, the city dweller is dressing for the first idiocy of his day, which he not only accepts but even eks － the journey to work.
7 In the modern office building in the city there are windows that don’t open. This is perhaps the most symbolic lunacy of all. Outdoors is something you can look at through glass but not to touch or hear. The windows are a scandal becau they endanger the lives of office workers in ca of fire. But no less grievous, even on the fairest spring or fall day the workers cannot put their heads outside. Thus it is not surprising that the urban worker has no knowledge of the asons. He is aware simply that in some months there is air conditioning, and in others through the same vents come fetid central heating. Even outside at home in their suburbs the city dwellers may know that sometimes it’s hot, and sometimes it’s cold, but no true n of the rhythms of the asons is to be had from a l
awn in the backyard and a few spindly trees struggling to survive.
8 The city dweller reels from unreality to unreality through each day, always trying to recover the rural life that has been surrendered for the city lights. No city dweller, even in the suburbs, knows the wonder of a pitch-dark country lane at night. Nor does he naturally get any exerci from his work.
“星期三的战争漂亮女生”号称全国连锁店，相信他们有统一的进货渠道。店内到处贴着“10元以下任选”，价格便宜到令人心动。但是转念一想，发夹2.8元，发圈4.8元，皮夹子9.8元，好像和平日讨价还价杀来的心理价位也差不多，只不过把一只20go away元的发夹还到5元实在辛苦，现在明码标价倒也省心省力。9 Every European points out that Americans are the most round-shouldered people in the world. Few of them carry themlves with an upright stance, although a correct stance is the first precondition of letting your lungs breathe naturally and deeply. Electric typewriters cut down the amount of physical exertion needed to hit the keys; the buttons of a word processor need even less effort, as you can tell from the posture of tho who u them. They rush out to jog or otherwi Fonda-ize their leisure to try to repair the damage done during the day.
