After Sam Wollaston, Guardian, May 26, 2001

Listening

A genius - but you wouldn't want to marry him

Dennis Overbye tells the story of the Einstein's first marriage.

Observer, May 13, 2001

Einstein in Love

His face is on tea towels and mugs and posters and T-shirts; an image fixed in the brain. An old man, with clouds of white hair and dark, expressive eyes that had seen the mysteries of the universe, shrewd and innocent and beyond us.

Albert Einstein invented relativity, with its elastic view of time and space. With pure thought, he changed our perception of reality.

Marilyn Monroe called him the sexiest man on earth - and, like Marilyn Monroe, Hitler perhaps, he is one of the icons[1] of the twentieth century. Less well-known, in spite of the numerous biographies of him, is the younger Albert Einstein. The face stares from the cover of Dennis Overbye's biography: dark-haired and neat and conventionally posed beside the intense, dark-haired woman who was for many years his melancholy[2] wife: Mileva Maric.

The author has set out to write about the man behind the image, and so give him back his humanity: the restless son of a conventional family, the 'young brawler, the flirt, the violinist, the dreamer, the man in love, the man in flight from love's demands. His book proceeds like leapfrog: a chapter or so on physics; a chapter or so on Einstein's love adventures, his passionate relationship with his mother, his marriage that started so ardently but eventually collapsed in bitterness and grief.

Einstein was born at the end of the 1880s. He discovered relativity and quantum physics before he was 40. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics, though the vast implications of his discovery unfolded gradually thereafter.

The personal life is not simple at all; no harmony there.

The book almost starts off as a dual biography, of Einstein and Maric, whom he met when they were students. She was also a physicist, one of the rare female students to study pure science. And clearly one of the things that drew Einstein to her was her difference. He was outgoing and charming; she was solitary, intense, silent and insecure.

He adored her for a bit, wooed[3] her passionately, loved her more passionately when they were separated, and, it seems, married her at last out of duty, when the love was already fading. He passed his exams with flying colours. She failed hers, partly because she was already pregnant with their first child.

They married at last, to the horror of both families, and she had two more children, sons whom Einstein loved and neglected. He had affairs, she had illnesses. He had triumphs, intellectual excitements, praise. She became less important; sat at home while he roamed Europe and fell in love with another woman.

Eventually Mileva and Einstein are divorced, bitterly, in a dispute that lasts about the same amount of time as the First World War. Her identity was scarcely known during his famous later life, because he never talked about her and she remained, as always, silent.

Mileva never comes to life: she is too much of a cliché of the pensive and melancholy Serb. Mileva's story is the familiar, depressing one of a woman adored when young and pretty and strange, who gives up her work and her country for the man she loves, but is left behind. She is an emblematic[4] betrayed wife.

Einstein's story has a heroic continuation beyond the marriage; Mileva's story comes to a dreary end.

The author strains too much for effect. He wants to restore Einstein to his humanity - to make him credible and explicable; the young scuffler abroad. But what Einstein did in his life remains hardly credible[5], always inexplicable, deeply mysterious - an icon forever.

2 10. Match the appropriate words and word combinations to form meaningful phrases as they appear in the text. Then cite their context in the text above.

e.g. “shorthand male identities” – The researcher explained that all those shorthand male identities have become clichés, caricatures and jokes.

3 17. Match the left and right parts of word combinations to restore their original meanings as they appear in the text. Comment on the context where the word-combination is used.

Listening

Breaking the waves

After Sam Wollaston, Guardian, May 26, 2001

When Ellen MacArthur recently sailed round the world, alone in her boat Kingfisher , she always knew exactly where she was. An electronic device hooked her up to eight satellites and constantly updated her position, telling her to within a few metres which point on the earth's watery surface she had reached. Not only did she know where she was, but everyone else did too - the organisers of the race, her family, newspaper readers, visitors to her Web site. You could even watch her on the Internet. MacArthur, too, could browse the Internet, check where her competitors had got to, phone home, receive weather forecasts by fax. If she'd got into trouble, help would have been only a few hours in coming. She didn't get into trouble, of course, but sailed home and into the nation's hearts: a courageous captain indeed, but far from mad.

Just 33 years ago, to sail solo round the world was a very different kind of deal. In 1968 nine men set out to be the first to sail single-handed non-stop round the world in what was dubbed[6] the Golden Globe race. A Voyage for Madmen , Peter Nichols calls his book, and he's not wrong. Most were woefully[7] ill-prepared.

One competitor, Chay Blyth, had never sailed before; the moment he lost sight of land, he was lost. There were no Web cameras then, or satellite navigation. Radios generally broke down, and though some of these sailors knew more or less where they were, there were long periods when no one else did.

There wasn't much in the way of sponsorship in those days either, though Nigel Tetley got some money from Music for Pleasure, a company that marketed cassettes, plus a whole lot of tapes. So Tetley could advertise music to the waves and fish and ease the pain of loneliness. He had the best-stockedkitchen, too: prawns, lobster, asparagus, oysters, pheasant and cases of fine[8] wine.

The race was won by Robin Knox-Johnston, a "distressingly normal" man, according to the psychiatrist sent to check him out before the race. In fact, of the nine, he was the only man to finish. Others had faster boats, but those broke up or their skippers broke down, and they limped into ports while Knox-Johnston ploughed[9] doggedly[10] on, fuelled by the classics of English literature. Ellen MacArthur took 94 days to sail round the world. Robin Knox-Johnston got back home in a little over 10 months.

But the story belongs to the other, more eccentric men. Mad, even. Those such as Frenchman Bernard Moitessier: "You do not ask a tame seagull why it needs to disappear from time to time toward the open sea. It goes, that's all." Moitessier had spent his life sailing the oceans of the world, usually running away from something. He was one of the few who knew his boat and how to deal with really extreme conditions. He could have won, but after rounding Cape Horn he decided he wasn't ready to face real life yet, so instead of turning north for Plymouth he just kept on going, sailing round the world again, searching for his soul.

Most of all, though, the story belongs to Donald Crowhurst, a brilliant electronics engineer who had been dismissed from his job for bad behaviour. Charming and enthusiastic, Crowhurst had never been successful at anything; his life up to the voyage had been all crushed aspirations. The signs were there from the beginning that this wasn't to be his race: the champagne bottle failed to smash at the launch of his boat, then a burn to the hand erased the lifeline on his palm (sailors are a superstitious lot). After he had finally set off, just hours before the deadline, a box was found on the quay[11], full of vital repair equipment.

Crowhust soon realised that he was not equipped to sail round the world, but instead of abandoning the race and limping home in shame he hatched a bizarre plan to hang around in the Atlantic, hidden from the rest of the world, before rejoining the race and sailing home to fame and victory.

So for months he zigzagged aimlessly about the Atlantic, lost in self-doubt and his obsession with electronics. He kept two log books, one which was to do the trick and make him a hero; and another one, which told the truth. Both were found when a mail ship discovered his boat, abandoned. The cabin was a terrible mess of dirty dishes and electric wires.

As the time to turn back for home approached, Crowhurst's writing had become the mad scribbling of a man who could no longer live with his deception. In the end he lowered himself over the side and slipped silently into the Atlantic, while his boat drifted on without him.

Peter Nichols hadn't taken much interest in the Golden Globe race when it happened; he was a schoolboy at the time. But when he later found he had saltwater in his blood, he became obsessed by the story of those nine men and the silly risks they took, risks that don't seem to be taken any more, and he was inspired to set off alone across the Atlantic in a little wooden boat. I suspect he has much more in common with those early pioneers than with the Ellen MacArthurs of this world. He failed, of course

A Voyage for Madmen is a book about boats and the sea, about wind and waves and frightening, lonely places. But more than that, it is about sad, heroic characters, and Nichols does characters like a novelist does. There have been other books about this race, but those were written by sailors for sailors. But this one is different: an outsider's view, but that of an outsider with a healthy obsession with his subject. It is a wonderful yarn[12], told with passion.

4 Translate the sentences below incorporating the vocabulary from the previous exercise.

1. Now, caught red-handed and charged with shoplifting, the boys were sitting in the corner, looking pretty pathetic. 2. We all have our little foibles. 3. I concede that she is a good runner, but I still think I can beat her. 4. The reporters tried to tape an interview after the race, but he was absolutely inarticulate and needed some time to catch his breath. 5. It's a delicate matter, sir, which must be handled with the utmost discretion. 6. Eliza had impeccable manners. 7. Ferdinand Clegg was a lonely, painfully shy character, inhibited with women. 8. During the conversation with the detective his inconsistent statement aroused suspicion. 9. In her version, her husband was a thoughtless and frivolous man, who did not care about the children. 10. He is frightfully rigid and old fashioned in his tastes. 11. After the accident the child became withdrawn and needed psychiatric help. 12. Her vivacious and outgoing personality attracted new people for the charity campaign. 13. His usual ploy is to pretend he is ill. 14. At the destination we were met by an agreeable young man. 15. The deputation was made up of self-assertive men, who would not shy away when the strikers' interests were trespassed/infringed. 16. She was a strong character, very forceful and determined. 17. The coach was detained at the customs because of a conceited little so-and-so. 18. He had the arrogance of someone who had always been accustomed to deference. 19. She made a rather faint-hearted attempt to stop him from leaving. 20. When the young couple found jobs and rented accommodation, they became largely self-sufficient.

5 Here come two descriptions of people. Read them and guess who these two portrayals belong. Explain your choice.

James de Witt and Frances Peverell

6 This exercise lists cliché phrases to say in times of trouble in a number of categories. However, the categories are listed separately. Label each phrase with the number of the situation the phrase is most appropriate for.

Source: http://utopia.knoware.nl/users/sybev/cliche/ugly.shtml

The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) suggests the following guidelines:

Generic Use

Although MAN in its original sense carried the dual meaning of adult human and adult male, its meaning has come to be so closely identified with adult male that the generic use of MAN and other words with masculine markers should be avoided.

Occupations

Avoid the use of MAN in occupational terms when persons holding the job could be either male or female.

Date: 2016-03-03; view: 846