Discussion 3.1

First, read the instructions for the Argument essay that concludes this unit.  This assignment and the others in this unit will all lead up to that essay.

As described in those instructions, you will need to choose a topic from the New York Times “Room for Debate” pages.  Once you have chosen a topic you will notice that there are several “debaters,” each of whom have written an article in response to the topic.  In your initial discussion board post, summarize all of the different articles/viewpoints from the room for debate page.  This is an important exercise in preparing any argument because you need to be familiar with different opinions surrounding issue. After your short summaries, write a paragraph explaining where you stand on the issue.  Finish your post by creating a working thesis statement.  Your thesis statement should clearly present an opinion and it should make a specific claim about the topic.

As you reply to your peers (2 replies, 150 words each), evaluate their thesis statements.  Are they clear, narrow and debatable?  Next,  provide at least two opposing viewpoints.  In other words, if you were to argue the opposite side of the issue, what reasons would you give to support your position. (It doesn’t matter whether or not you really disagree, you simply are helping your peers explore the debate.)

The purpose of this exercise is to begin a working thesis to help guide your final essay while also getting some input about opposing viewpoints.  

Discussion 4.1

Use the following questions to help you formulate your response to “The Science of Sarcasm” by Richard Chin.  You do not need to answer each question individually; they are here to help guide you.  Remember, all discussion boards require one initial post of at least 300 words, two replies of at least 150 words each. 

1. What are the differences between sarcasm, irony and satire?

2. Sarcasm involves saying one thing and meaning the opposite. How do people detect sarcasm?

3. Why are we more likely to use sarcasm with our friends than our enemies?

4. Do you find sarcasm funny or just rude?

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-science-of-sarcasm-yeah-right-25038/?all

Discussion 4.2

Read the material in Unit 4 about music and figurative language then listen to the music files located in the Music folder.  Choose one that interests, engages or confuses you the most. 

For this discussion, describe the music incorporating figurative language wherever possible.  Use vivid imagery, metaphors, similes, alliteration, onomatopoeia, personification, and hyperbole to help your reader understand your reaction to the music.  The highest grades will be given to students who can use an extended metaphor in their description.

Respond to your classmates’ posts (2 replies) by adding your own opinions and reactions to the music they chose to write about. 

rainbow flag

Charles Mingus “Duet and solo Dancers”

 https://open.spotify.com/track/7K5NiBQk7QJ0qehZ4e6LmB

A Hawk and a Hacksaw “For Slavoj”

 https://open.spotify.com/track/532Ku0lFgkHYjOr3BCVwnT

“Floe” by Philip Glass

 https://open.spotify.com/track/2ThXlHa71fMSsTinfTG0jr

“Sleeping (on trains)” by Carpet Musics

 https://open.spotify.com/track/77wQvnpnv2ZuVqYbaZUvoj

Music and Figurative Language

They say music is a universal language.  If so, why is it so hard to describe?  

The terms that musicians and composers use to discuss music can difficult for the layman to understand:  timbre, meter, tone, harmony, etc.   Therefore, when discussing music, many people rely on tired expressions like, “it has a good beat” or a “catchy melody”—terms that are vague and entirely a matter of personal taste.  

To really convey the sounds and effects of music, we have to work a little harder.  Fortunately, language gives us a means to describe things that are inherently difficult to describe: figurative language.

For centuries writers have used figurative language to describe things like love, hate, fear, jealously and compassion.   Shakespeare wrote, “Love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs.”   In describing anger, he also wrote,

Tears virginal
Shall be to me even as the dew to fire,
And beauty that the tyrant oft reclaims
Shall to my flaming wrath be oil and flax.
Henceforth I will not have to do with pity:
Meet I an infant of the house of York,
Into as many gobbets will I cut it
As wild Medea young Absyrtus did:
In cruelty will I seek out my fame.

Could love or anger be any better conveyed using everyday, literal language?  I think not.

Music, too, benefits from being described using figurative language.  In one of your readings from this section, music critic Roger Scruton describes a musical performance thusly: “They began with a yet more grotesque rendering of the national anthem, which sounded in their electric instrumentation like an amplified whisper from the grave.”

Figurative language, encompassing similes, metaphors, onomatopoeia, hyperboles and other devices, can aid us in describing things that straightforward, literal language cannot quite capture.  For your next assignment I will ask you to use figurative language to describe a piece of music.

Figurative Language

Discussion 5.1

Initial post of  at least 300 words / two replies of at least 100 words each.

Analyze and respond to Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings.”   Refer to the “Writing about Literature” links to help guide your response.  The prompts below can be used for brainstorming purposes.  No need to answer them all and, of course, you can devise your own prompt if you like.  Either way, be sure that your response is in short essay format (not just a string of short answers) with a clear thesis statement and supporting quotations.

1. If we consider the story to be an example of satire, then what idea, issue or situation is the target of the satire?

2 Why are the townspeople more interested in the Spider Woman than the angel?  What does this say about human nature?

3. The story is full of fantastic imagery.  Identify some of your favorites and explain how those images support a major theme of the story.   

After writing your response, make 2 replies (100 words or more) to posts by your classmates. Your replies should focus on the content of the posts, not the form–in other words, don’t bother pointing out errors in punctuation and grammar.  Instead, focus on areas of agreement or disagreement in the analysis of the story.

Discussion 5.2

Initial post of 300 words / two replies of 100 words each.

Respond to Albert Camus’ “The Guest.” You may use the following prompts to help you get started, or you may explore and interpretation of your own choosing.  Remember to use textual evidence to support your claims and interpretations.

1. Albert Camus, along with Jean-Paul Sartre, was a central figure in the existentialist movement.  What is existentialism and how might “The Guest” be an example of an existential crisis?

2. Was Daru’s decision to let The Arab choose his own destiny a heroic or cowardly decision? What is the ultimate result of this decision? What lesson or theme do you think Camus is trying to communicate through this encounter?

The Song Is Ended – analysis of pop music today

Roger Scruton

On a fine summer day the inhabitants of the Wiltshire valley where I live gathered in a neighbor’s garden to celebrate the Queen’s jubilee. There was beer, barbecue, flags — and, of course, the singing of our three national anthems: Welsh, Scottish, and British. The tuneless croaks of our neighbors, as they tried for the thousandth time to squeeze their patriotic sentiments into these quaint words and courtly rhythms, reminded me of how small a part music now plays in the social life of ordinary people. Singing is strange to them, instruments unknown, and most of the music they hear is not listened to but overheard, piped into their lives by the disc jockeys who control the musical diet of mankind, and who are busy replacing the solid protein of hymns and folksongs with the sugar, starch, and glutamate of pop.

After a beer or two, The Hot Tomatoes were announced: four middle-aged men in green-and-orange T-shirts, the lead guitarist bald on top but with wisps of graying hair tied in a ponytail. They began with a yet more grotesque rendering of the national anthem, which sounded in their electric instrumentation like an amplified whisper from the grave. And then, with wobbling paunches and the wiggling of arthritic hips, The Hot Tomatoes evoked the early days of Elizabeth’s reign in songs that spoke of the fun and frenzy of my youth; the songs of Bill Haley & His Comets, Little Richard, Elvis, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones sounded above the hayfields in a thin and ghostly imitation.

The Queen herself celebrated the jubilee with a public rendition of a Beatles song, and the aging Brian May played the national anthem on his electric guitar before a million loyal subjects. The Jubilee Honours List contained a knighthood for Mick Jagger. Yet, far from normalizing rock, these attempts to make it part of the establishment, and to decorate the old geezers who invented it, serve merely to emphasize its inseparable connection with the hormones of youth, and its utter absurdity when presented as the lingua franca of mature middle age.

Elvis, fortunately, had the good taste to die before growing up. As a rule, the modern rock star does not even attempt to grow up; hence the shock produced by Bruce Springsteen, awoken by 9/11 from the natural silence of the superannuated idol, revealing in his latest album that he is not a rebel but a farmer, family man, and patriot. More usually, if a pop star grows at all it is not up but sideways, like Mick Jagger or Michael Jackson, becoming waxy and encrusted as though covered by a much-repainted mask. There are exceptions, of course: Paul McCartney has, since his knighthood, devoted himself to writing tonal oratorios, while David Bowie has entered into a kind of postmodern partnership with Philip Glass. But these exceptions prove the rule. Most rock stars leave their youth only to enter a state of suspended animation, waiting to be dropped once again into the vitalizing fluid of publicity. And then they perform a thin, stiff version of those old and electrifying numbers, adding wrinkles to the music to match the wrinkles on the face.

Listening to The Hot Tomatoes perform the hits of my youth, I reflected on how little pop has developed since the days when it first entered our perceptions, and also how insulated it has become from the rest of our musical culture. The rhythms, instruments, melodic phrases, and core tonal harmonies that dominate the music of, say, Oasis were fully explored by Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones. Rhythm machines, synthesizers, and mixing have changed the sound, filling up the holes in the music and making a continuous background carpet in place of the measured stepping stones of the twelve-bar blues. But the raw materials are the same. Every now and then someone hits on a melody and finds a group of teenagers to mouth it. Subtract the work of the engineers, however, and the tune will turn out to have been done to death in several previous incarnations.

Popular music has not always been so static; nor has it been so resolutely unable to learn from those who really know. Jazz grew out of ragtime, which is downstream from the mazurkas of Chopin, and in Art Tatum you can hear echoes of Debussy, Delius, and Ravel. Gershwin and Tippett, Milhaud and Ravel, all learned from the blues, and Gershwin influenced the development of both jazz and popular song. Cole Porter and Duke Ellington were sophisticated composers, with an incalculable debt to the classical tradition; their harmonic language became the foundation of the Broadway musical. Terry Teachout’s recent articles in Commentary on the American popular song testify to a wonderfully rich tradition of melodic and harmonic inspiration, which is scarcely separable from the development of modern music generally.

The dynamic interaction between serious and popular music came to an abrupt end with rock. With a few exceptions, the only input into modern pop is pop: Oasis is downstream from no one save the Beatles. The musical language has remained fixed in the moment of the Sixties, gradually losing the life and the melodic invention of those years, to become a kind of mechanical parody of its own infertile repertoire.

But although the language has remained unchanged, the way of producing and consuming it has suffered a radical upheaval. Modern pop is essentially processed music, in which the major chord is engineered into fast-food flavors and packaged behind a juvenile face. The songs are machine-made, according to a standard specification, and the best that we can hope from them, musically speaking, is a catchy tune, as in the Spice Girls’ “Wannabe.” The music is often inseparable from the video, or impossible to perform without the engineers who are its true creators — as in the notorious case of Milli Vanilli, whose Grammy award of 1990 was quite unfairly rescinded when it was discovered that they did not perform the music that was recorded in their name.

Sometimes there is no music at all, but only packaging, as in rap or techno-rock. The successful pop star does not in fact need to perform his music, for he is not judged as a musician but as the center of a cult. We have witnessed a reversal of the traditional priorities of musical appreciation. Cole Porter was loved for his music, which lived on after his death, and can still be sung and played to its original effect. The modern pop star is not loved for his music: The music is loved for him. It is the background accompaniment to his incarnation on the video. The packaging has taken over from its contents, so as to address itself to the great religious deficit in the lives of the young. Modern pop offers the “real presence” of a divinity, and the fan is not so much a music lover as a member of a sect, whose identity is symbolized in the group or singer who recruits him.

At the same time, the natural rhythms of the human voice and the human performer have been driven out by a constant and unnuanced ostinato. Nor should we blame the old geezers for this. In the early days of their emancipation, rhythm was being discovered as a property of human life, a magic element that could be conjured from the inner reaches of the human body. Listen to the Elvis of “Jailhouse Rock,” or to any guitar solo by Eric Clapton, and you will hear what I mean. In the music of such great performers life is externalized as rhythm. Elvis relied on the micro-rhythms within his vocal line to infect the listener, and hardly needed percussion. Clapton defined the beat through the guitar solo, which the drums must then follow, not lead.

In modern pop songs the roles are reversed. Percussion does not obey the melodic line but commands it, and the drum-kit is fashioned into iron rail-tracks by the engineer. Hence the emergence of rap, from which the arts of melody and of song itself have been finally abolished. The words of a performer like Eminem belong with his art: They are a denial of music and of the human voice that speaks through music. The rap artist is really a ventriloquist’s dummy, and what speaks from his mouth is the machine.

Rap is simply the logical conclusion of pop. In almost all modern pop, rhythm is treated by the engineers as a repetitive frame, and the result is the death of rhythm. Real rhythm is a pattern rather than a frame, and patterns are significant when they are not stated but implied. In my view, this is the root cause of the sterility and vacuousness of pop. When the sap dried in the old geezers, the engineers took over, the voice became a face, and the music ossified. And now it thumps in the background of modern life, filling every silence, and reminding us that humanity has ceased to sing.

COPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group

A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings

by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Translated by Gregory Rabassa

On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad since Tuesday. Sea and sky were a single ash-gray thing and the sands of the beach, which on March nights glimmered like powdered light, had become a stew of mud and rotten shellfish. The light was so weak at noon that when Pelayo was coming back to the house after throwing away the crabs, it was hard for him to see what it was that was moving and groaning in the rear of the courtyard. He had to go very close to see that it was an old man, a very old man, lying face down in the mud, who, in spite of his tremendous efforts, couldn’t get up, impeded by his enormous wings.

Frightened by that nightmare, Pelayo ran to get Elisenda, his wife, who was putting compresses on the sick child, and he took her to the rear of the courtyard. They both looked at the fallen body with a mute stupor. He was dressed like a ragpicker. There were only a few faded hairs left on his bald skull and very few teeth in his mouth, and his pitiful condition of a drenched great-grandfather took away any sense of grandeur he might have had. His huge buzzard wings, dirty and half-plucked, were forever entangled in the mud. They looked at him so long and so closely that Pelayo and Elisenda very soon overcame their surprise and in the end found him familiar. Then they dared speak to him, and he answered in an incomprehensible dialect with a strong sailor’s voice. That was how they skipped over the inconvenience of the wings and quite intelligently concluded that he was a lonely castaway from some foreign ship wrecked by the storm. And yet, they called in a neighbor woman who knew everything about life and death to see him, and all she needed was one look to show them their mistake.

“He’s an angel,” she told them. “He must have been coming for the child, but the poor fellow is so old that the rain knocked him down.”

On the following day everyone knew that a flesh-and-blood angel was held captive in Pelayo’s house. Against the judgment of the wise neighbor woman, for whom angels in those times were the fugitive survivors of a celestial conspiracy, they did not have the heart to club him to death. Pelayo watched over him all afternoon from the kitchen, armed with his bailiff’s club, and before going to bed he dragged him out of the mud and locked him up with the hens in the wire chicken coop. In the middle of the night, when the rain stopped, Pelayo and Elisenda were still killing crabs. A short time afterward the child woke up without a fever and with a desire to eat. Then they felt magnanimous and decided to put the angel on a raft with fresh water and provisions for three days and leave him to his fate on the high seas. But when they went out into the courtyard with the first light of dawn, they found the whole neighborhood in front of the chicken coop having fun with the angel, without the slightest reverence, tossing him things to eat through the openings in the wire as if he weren’t a supernatural creature but a circus animal.

Father Gonzaga arrived before seven o’clock, alarmed at the strange news. By that time onlookers less frivolous than those at dawn had already arrived and they were making all kinds of conjectures concerning the captive’s future. The simplest among them thought that he should be named mayor of the world. Others of sterner mind felt that he should be promoted to the rank of five-star general in order to win all wars. Some visionaries hoped that he could be put to stud in order to implant the earth a race of winged wise men who could take charge of the universe. But Father Gonzaga, before becoming a priest, had been a robust woodcutter. Standing by the wire, he reviewed his catechism in an instant and asked them to open the door so that he could take a close look at that pitiful man who looked more like a huge decrepit hen among the fascinated chickens. He was lying in the corner drying his open wings in the sunlight among the fruit peels and breakfast leftovers that the early risers had thrown him. Alien to the impertinences of the world, he only lifted his antiquarian eyes and murmured something in his dialect when Father Gonzaga went into the chicken coop and said good morning to him in Latin. The parish priest had his first suspicion of an imposter when he saw that he did not understand the language of God or know how to greet His ministers. Then he noticed that seen close up he was much too human: he had an unbearable smell of the outdoors, the back side of his wings was strewn with parasites and his main feathers had been mistreated by terrestrial winds, and nothing about him measured up to the proud dignity of angels. Then he came out of the chicken coop and in a brief sermon warned the curious against the risks of being ingenuous. He reminded them that the devil had the bad habit of making use of carnival tricks in order to confuse the unwary. He argued that if wings were not the essential element in determining the different between a hawk and an airplane, they were even less so in the recognition of angels. Nevertheless, he promised to write a letter to his bishop so that the latter would write his primate so that the latter would write to the Supreme Pontiff in order to get the final verdict from the highest courts.

His prudence fell on sterile hearts. The news of the captive angel spread with such rapidity that after a few hours the courtyard had the bustle of a marketplace and they had to call in troops with fixed bayonets to disperse the mob that was about to knock the house down. Elisenda, her spine all twisted from sweeping up so much marketplace trash, then got the idea of fencing in the yard and charging five cents admission to see the angel.

The curious came from far away. A traveling carnival arrived with a flying acrobat who buzzed over the crowd several times, but no one paid any attention to him because his wings were not those of an angel but, rather, those of a sidereal bat. The most unfortunate invalids on earth came in search of health: a poor woman who since childhood has been counting her heartbeats and had run out of numbers; a Portuguese man who couldn’t sleep because the noise of the stars disturbed him; a sleepwalker who got up at night to undo the things he had done while awake; and many others with less serious ailments. In the midst of that shipwreck disorder that made the earth tremble, Pelayo and Elisenda were happy with fatigue, for in less than a week they had crammed their rooms with money and the line of pilgrims waiting their turn to enter still reached beyond the horizon.

The angel was the only one who took no part in his own act. He spent his time trying to get comfortable in his borrowed nest, befuddled by the hellish heat of the oil lamps and sacramental candles that had been placed along the wire. At first they tried to make him eat some mothballs, which, according to the wisdom of the wise neighbor woman, were the food prescribed for angels. But he turned them down, just as he turned down the papal lunches that the pentinents brought him, and they never found out whether it was because he was an angel or because he was an old man that in the end ate nothing but eggplant mush. His only supernatural virtue seemed to be patience. Especially during the first days, when the hens pecked at him, searching for the stellar parasites that proliferated in his wings, and the cripples pulled out feathers to touch their defective parts with, and even the most merciful threw stones at him, trying to get him to rise so they could see him standing. The only time they succeeded in arousing him was when they burned his side with an iron for branding steers, for he had been motionless for so many hours that they thought he was dead. He awoke with a start, ranting in his hermetic language and with tears in his eyes, and he flapped his wings a couple of times, which brought on a whirlwind of chicken dung and lunar dust and a gale of panic that did not seem to be of this world. Although many thought that his reaction had not been one of rage but of pain, from then on they were careful not to annoy him, because the majority understood that his passivity was not that of a hero taking his ease but that of a cataclysm in repose.

Father Gonzaga held back the crowd’s frivolity with formulas of maidservant inspiration while awaiting the arrival of a final judgment on the nature of the captive. But the mail from Rome showed no sense of urgency. They spent their time finding out if the prisoner had a navel, if his dialect had any connection with Aramaic, how many times he could fit on the head of a pin, or whether he wasn’t just a Norwegian with wings. Those meager letters might have come and gone until the end of time if a providential event had not put and end to the priest’s tribulations.

It so happened that during those days, among so many other carnival attractions, there arrived in the town the traveling show of the woman who had been changed into a spider for having disobeyed her parents. The admission to see her was not only less than the admission to see the angel, but people were permitted to ask her all manner of questions about her absurd state and to examine her up and down so that no one would ever doubt the truth of her horror. She was a frightful tarantula the size of a ram and with the head of a sad maiden. What was most heartrending, however, was not her outlandish shape but the sincere affliction with which she recounted the details of her misfortune. While still practically a child she had sneaked out of her parents’ house to go to a dance, and while she was coming back through the woods after having danced all night without permission, a fearful thunderclap rent the sky in two and through the crack came the lightning bolt of brimstone that changed her into a spider. Her only nourishment came from the meatballs that charitable souls chose to toss into her mouth. A spectacle like that, full of so much human truth and with such a fearful lesson, was bound to defeat without even trying that of a haughty angel who scarcely deigned to look at mortals. Besides, the few miracles attributed to the angel showed a certain mental disorder, like the blind man who didn’t recover his sight but grew three new teeth, or the paralytic who didn’t get to walk but almost won the lottery, and the leper whose sores sprouted sunflowers. Those consolation miracles, which were more like mocking fun, had already ruined the angel’s reputation when the woman who had been changed into a spider finally crushed him completely. That was how Father Gonzaga was cured forever of his insomnia and Pelayo’s courtyard went back to being as empty as during the time it had rained for three days and crabs walked through the bedrooms.

The owners of the house had no reason to lament. With the money they saved they built a two-story mansion with balconies and gardens and high netting so that crabs wouldn’t get in during the winter, and with iron bars on the windows so that angels wouldn’t get in. Pelayo also set up a rabbit warren close to town and gave up his job as a bailiff for good, and Elisenda bought some satin pumps with high heels and many dresses of iridescent silk, the kind worn on Sunday by the most desirable women in those times. The chicken coop was the only thing that didn’t receive any attention. If they washed it down with creolin and burned tears of myrrh inside it every so often, it was not in homage to the angel but to drive away the dungheap stench that still hung everywhere like a ghost and was turning the new house into an old one. At first, when the child learned to walk, they were careful that he not get too close to the chicken coop. But then they began to lose their fears and got used to the smell, and before they child got his second teeth he’d gone inside the chicken coop to play, where the wires were falling apart. The angel was no less standoffish with him than with the other mortals, but he tolerated the most ingenious infamies with the patience of a dog who had no illusions. They both came down with the chicken pox at the same time. The doctor who took care of the child couldn’t resist the temptation to listen to the angel’s heart, and he found so much whistling in the heart and so many sounds in his kidneys that it seemed impossible for him to be alive. What surprised him most, however, was the logic of his wings. They seemed so natural on that completely human organism that he couldn’t understand why other men didn’t have them too.

When the child began school it had been some time since the sun and rain had caused the collapse of the chicken coop. The angel went dragging himself about here and there like a stray dying man. They would drive him out of the bedroom with a broom and a moment later find him in the kitchen. He seemed to be in so many places at the same time that they grew to think that he’d be duplicated, that he was reproducing himself all through the house, and the exasperated and unhinged Elisenda shouted that it was awful living in that hell full of angels. He could scarcely eat and his antiquarian eyes had also become so foggy that he went about bumping into posts. All he had left were the bare cannulae of his last feathers. Pelayo threw a blanket over him and extended him the charity of letting him sleep in the shed, and only then did they notice that he had a temperature at night, and was delirious with the tongue twisters of an old Norwegian. That was one of the few times they became alarmed, for they thought he was going to die and not even the wise neighbor woman had been able to tell them what to do with dead angels.

And yet he not only survived his worst winter, but seemed improved with the first sunny days. He remained motionless for several days in the farthest corner of the courtyard, where no one would see him, and at the beginning of December some large, stiff feathers began to grow on his wings, the feathers of a scarecrow, which looked more like another misfortune of decreptitude. But he must have known the reason for those changes, for he was quite careful that no one should notice them, that no one should hear the sea chanteys that he sometimes sang under the stars. One morning Elisenda was cutting some bunches of onions for lunch when a wind that seemed to come from the high seas blew into the kitchen. Then she went to the window and caught the angel in his first attempts at flight. They were so clumsy that his fingernails opened a furrow in the vegetable patch and he was on the point of knocking the shed down with the ungainly flapping that slipped on the light and couldn’t get a grip on the air. But he did manage to gain altitude. Elisenda let out a sigh of relief, for herself and for him, when she watched him pass over the last houses, holding himself up in some way with the risky flapping of a senile vulture. She kept watching him even when she was through cutting the onions and she kept on watching until it was no longer possible for her to see him, because then he was no longer an annoyance in her life but an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea.

The Guest

by Albert Camus. Translated by Justin O’Brien.

1

The schoolmaster was watching the two men climb toward him. One was on
horseback, the other on foot. They had not yet tackled the abrupt rise leading to the
schoolhouse built on the hillside. They were toiling onward, making slow progress in the
snow, among the stones, on the vast expanse oft he high, deserted plateau. From time to
time the horse stumbled. Without hearing anything yet, he could see the breath issuing
from the horses nostrils. One of the men, at least, knew the region. They were following
the trail although it had disappeared days ago under a layer of dirty white snow. The
schoolmaster calculated that it would take them half an hour to get onto the hill. It was
cold; he went back into the school to get a sweater.

2

He crossed the empty, frigid classroom. On the blackboard the four rivers of France,
1 drawn with four different colored chalks, had been flowing toward their estuaries for
the past three days. Snow had suddenly fallen in mid-October after eight months of
drought without the transition of rain, and the twenty pupils, more or less, who lived in
the villages scattered over the plateau had stopped coming. With fair weather they would
return. Daru now heated only the single room that was lodging, adjoining the classroom
and giving also onto the plateau to the east. Like the class cows, his window looked to the
south too. On that side the school was a few kilometers from the point where the plateau
began to slope toward the south. In clear weather could be seen the purple mass of the
mountain range where the gap opened onto the desert.

2

Somewhat warmed, Daru returned to the window from which he had first seen the
two men. They were no longer visible. Hence they must have tackled the rise. The sky
was not so dark, for the snow had stopped falling during the night. The morning had
opened with a dirty light which had scarcely become brighter as the ceiling of clouds
lifted. At two in the after- noon it seemed as if the day were merely beginning. But still
this was better than those three days when the thick snow was falling amidst unbroken
darkness with little gusts of wind that rattled the double door of the class- room. Then
Daru had spent long hours in his room, leaving it only to go to the shed and feed the
chickens or get some coal. Fortunately the delivery truck from Tadjid, the nearest village
to the north, had brought his supplies two days before the blizzard. It would return in
forty-eight hours.

3

Besides, he had enough to resist a siege, for the little room was cluttered with bags of
wheat that the administration left as a stock to distribute to those of his pupils whose
families had suffered from the drought. Actually they had all been victims because they
were all poor. Every day Daru would distribute a ration to the children. They had missed
it, he knew, during these bad days. Possibly one of the fathers would come this afternoon
and he could supply them with grain. It was just a matter of carrying them over to the
next harvest. Now shiploads of wheat were arriving from France and the worst was over.
But it would be hard to forget that poverty, that army of ragged ghosts wandering in the
sunlight, the plateaus burned to a cinder month after month, the earth shriveled up little
by little, literally scorched, every stone bursting into dust under one’s foot. The sheep had
died then by thousands and even a few men, here and there, sometimes without anyone’s
knowing.

4

In contrast with such poverty, he who lived almost like a monk in his remote
schoolhouse, nonetheless satisfied with the little he had and with the rough life, had felt
like a lord with his whitewashed walls, his narrow couch, his unpainted shelves, his well,
and his weekly provision of water and food. And suddenly this snow, without warning,
without the foretaste of rain. This is the way the region was, cruel to live in, even without
men–who didn’t help matters either. But Daru had been born here Everywhere else, he
felt exiled.

5

He stepped out onto the terrace in front of the schoolhouse. The two men were now
halfway up the slope. He recognized the horseman as Balducci the old gendarme he had
known for a long time. Balducci was holding on the end of a rope an Arab who was
walking behind him with hands bound and head lowered. The gendarme waved a greeting
to which Daru did not reply, lost as he was in contemplation of the Arab dressed in a
faded blue jellaba, 2 his feet in sandals but covered with socks of heavy raw wool, his
head surmounted by a narrow, short cheche. They were approaching. Balducci was
holding back his horse in order not to hurt the Arab, and the group was advancing slowly.

6

Within earshot, Balducci shouted: “One hour to do the three kilometers from El
Ameur!” Daru did not answer. Short and square in his thick sweater he watched them
climb. Not once had the Arab raised his head. “Hello,” said Daru when they got up onto
the terrace. “Come in and warm up.” Balducci painfully got down from his horse without
letting go the rope. From under his bristling mustache he smiled at the schoolmaster. His
little dark eyes, deep-set under a tanned forehead, and his mouth surrounded with
wrinkles made him look attentive and studious. Daru took the bridle ]led the horse to the
shed, and came back to the two men, who were now waiting for him in the school. He led
them into his room “I am going to heat up the classroom,” he said. “We’ll be more
comfortable there.” When he entered the room again, Balducci was on the couch. He had

undone the rope tying him to the Arab, who had squashed near the stove. His hands still
bound, the cheche pushed back on his head, he was looking toward the window. At first
Daru noticed only his huge lips, fat, smooth, almost Negroid; yet his nose was straight,
his eyes were dark and full of fever. The cheche revealed an obstinate forehead and,
under the weathered skin now rather discolored by the cold, the whole face had a restless
and rebellious look that struck Daru when the Arab, turning his face toward him, looked
him straight in the eyes. “Go into the other room,” said the schoolmaster’ “and I’ll make
you some mint tea.” ”Thanks,” Balducci said. “what a chore! How I long for retirement.”
And addressing his prisoner in Arabic: “Come on, you.” The Arab got up and, slowly,
holding his bound wrists in front of him, went into the classroom.

7

With the tea, Daru brought a chair. But Balducci was already enthroned on the nearest
pupil’s desk and the Arab had squatted against the teacher’s platform facing the stove,
which stood between the desk and the window. When he held out the glass of tea to the
prisoner, Daru hesitated at the sight of his bound hands. “He might perhaps be untied.”
“Sure,” said Balducci. “That was for the trip.” He started to get to his feet. But Daru,
setting the glass on the floor, had knelt beside the Arab. Without saying anything, the
Arab watched him with his feverish eyes. Once his hands were free, he rubbed his
swollen wrists against each other, took the glass of tea, and sucked up the burning liquid
in swift little sips.

8

“Good,” said Daru. “And where are you headed?”
Balducci withdrew his mustache from the tea. “Here, Son.”
“Odd pupils! And you’re spending the night?”
“No. I’m going back to El Ameur. And you will deliver this fellow to Tinguit. He is
expected at police headquarters.”
Balducci was looking at Daru with a friendly little smile.
“What’s this story?” asked the schoolmaster. “Are you pulling my leg?”
“No, son. Those are the orders.”
“The orders? I’m not . . .” Daru hesitated, not wanting to hurt the old Corsican. 3
“I mean, that’s not my job.” “What! What’s the meaning of that? In wartime people do
all kinds of jobs.”
“Then I’ll wait for the declaration of war!”
Balducci nodded.
“O. K. But the orders exist and they concern you too. Things are brewing, it appears.
There is talk of a forthcoming revolt. We are mobilized,in away.
Daru still had his obstinate look.

9

Listen, Son,” Balducci said. “I like you and you must understand. There’s only a
dozen of us at El Ameur to patrol throughout the whole territory of a small department 4

and I must get back in a hurry. I was told to hand this guy over to you and return without
delay. He couldn’t be kept there. His village was beginning to stir; they wanted to take
him back. You must take him to Tinguit tomorrow before the day is over. Twenty
kilometers shouldn’t faze a husky fellow like you. After that, all will be over. You’ll come
back to your pupils and your comfortable life.”

10

Behind the wall the horse could be heard snorting and pawing the earth. Daru was
looking out the window. Decidedly, the weather was clearing and the light was increasing
over the snowy plateau. When all the snow had melted, the sun would take over again
and once more would burn the fields of stone. For days, still, the unchanging sky would
shed its dry light on the solitary expanse where nothing had any connection with man.

“After all,” he said, turning around toward Balducci, “what did he do?” And, before
the gendarme had opened his mouth, he asked: “Does he speak French?”
“No, not a word. We had been looking for him for a month, but they were hiding him.
He killed his cousin.”
“Is he against us?” 5

11

“I don’t think so. But you can never be sure.”
“Why did he kill?”
“A family squabble, I think one owned the other grain, it seems. It’s not all clear. In
short, he killed his cousin with a billhook. You know, like a sheep, kreeck!”
Balducci made the gesture of drawing a blade across his throat and the Arab, his
attention attracted, watched him with a sort of anxiety. Dam felt a sudden wrath against
the mall, against all men with their rotten spite, their tireless hates, their blood lust.
But the kettle was singing on the stove. He sened Balducci more tea hesitated, then
served the Arab again, who, a second time, drank avidly his raised arms made the jellaba
fall open and the schoolmastcr saw his thin, muscular chest.
“Thanks, kid,” Balducci said. “And now, I’m off.”
He got up and went toward the Arab, taking a small rope from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” Daru asked dryly.
Balducci, disconcerted, showed him the rope.
“Don’t bother.”
The old gendarme hesitated. “It’s up to you. Of course, you are armed?”
“I have my shotgun.”
“Where?”
“In the trunk.”

12

“You ought to have it near your bed.”
“Why? I have nothing to fear.”

“You’re crazy, son. If there’s an uprising, no one is safe, we’re all in the same boat.”
“I’ll defend myself. I’ll have time to see them coming.”
Balducci began to laugh, then suddenly the mustache covered the white teeth.
“You’ll have time? O.K. That’s just what I was saying. You have always been a little
cracked. That’s why I like you, my son was like that.”
At the same time he took out his revolver and put it on the desk.
“Keep it; I don’t need two weapons from here to El Ameur.”
The revolver shone against the black paint of the table. When the gendarme turned
toward him, the schoolmastcr caught the smell of leather and horseflesh. “Listen,
Balducci,” Daru said suddenly, “every bit of this disgusts me, and first of all your fellow
here. But I won’t hand him over. Fight, yes, if I have to. But not that.”
The old gendarme stood in front of him and looked at him severely.
“You’re being a fool,” he said slowly. “I don’t like it either. You don’t get used to
putting a rope on a man even after vears of it, and you’re even ashamedÑyes, ashamed.
But you can’t let them have their way.”
“I won’t hand him over,” Daru said again.
“It’s an order, son, and I repeat it.”
“That’s right. Repeat to them what l’ve said to you: I won’t hand him over.”

13

Balducci made a visible effort to reflect. He looked at the Arab and at Daru. At last he
decided.
“No, I won’t tell them anything. If you want to drop us, go ahead. I’ll not denounce
you. I have an order to deliver the prisoner and I’m doing so. And now you’ll just sign this
paper for me.”
“There’s no need. I’ll not deny that you left him with me.”
“Don’t be mean with me. I know you’ll tell the truth. You’re from hereabouts and you
are a man. But you must sign, that’s the rule.”
Daru opened his drawer, took out a little square bottle of purple ink, the red wooden
penholder with the “sergeant-major” pen he used for making models of penmanship, and
signed. The gendarme carfully folded the paper and put it into his wallet. Then he moved
toward the door.
“I’ll see you off,” Daru said.
“No,” said Balducci. “There’s no use being polite. You insulted me.”

14

He looked at the Arab, motionless in the same spot, sniffed peevishly, and turned
away toward the door. “Good-by, son,” he said. The door shut behind him. Balducci
appeared suddenly outside the window and then disappeared. His footsteps were muffled
by the snow. The horse stirred on the other side of the wall and several chickens fluttered
in fright. A moment later Balducci reappeared outside the window leading the horse by
the bridle. He walked toward the little rise without turning around and disappeared from
sight with the horse following him. A big stone could be heard bouncing down. Daru
walked back toward the prisoner, who, without stirring, never took his eyes off him.

“Wait,” the schoolmaster said in Arabic and went toward the bedroom. As he was going
through the door, he had a second thought, went to the desk, took the revolver, and stuck
it in his pocket. Then, without looking back, he went into his room.

15

For some time he lay on his couch watching the sky gradually close over, listening to
the silence. It was this silence that had seemed painful to him during the first days here,
after the war. He had requested a post in the little town at the base of the foothills
separating the upper platueas from the desert. There, rocky walls, green and black to the
north, pink and lavender to the south, marked the frontier of eternal summer. He had been
named to a post farther north, on the plateau itself. In the beginning, the solitude and the
silence had been hard for him on these wastelands peopled only by stones. Occasionally,
furrows suggested cultivation, but they had been dug to uncover a certain kind of stone
good for building. The only plowing here was to harvest rocks. Elsewhere a thin layer of
soil accumulated in the hollows would be scraped out to enrich palty village gardens.
This is the way it was: bare rock covered three quarters of the region. Towns sprang up,
flourished, then disappeared; men came by, loved one another or fought bitterly, then
died. No one in this desert, neither he nor his guest, mattered. And yet, outside this desert
neither or them, Daru knew, could have really lived.

16

When he got up, no noise came from the classroom. He was amazed at the unmixed
joy he derived from the mere thought that the Arab might have fled and that he would be
alone with no decision to make. But theprisoner was there. He had merely stretched out
between the stove and the desk. With eyes open, he was staring at the ceiling. In that
position, his thick lips were particularly noticeable, giving him a pouting look. “Come,”
said Daru. The Arab got up and followed him. In the bedroom, the schoolmaster pointed
to a chair near the table under the window. The Arab sat down without taking his eyes off
Daru.
“Are you hungry?”
“Yes,” the prisoner said.

17

Daru set the table for two. He took flour and oil, shaped a cake in a frying-pan, and
lighted the litde stove that functioned on bottled gas. While the cake was cooking, he
went out to the shed to get cheese, eggs, dates and condensed mflk. When the cake was
done he set it on the window sill to cool, heated some condensed milk diluted with water,
and beat up the eggs into an omelette. In one of his motions he knocked against the
revolver stuck m his right pocket. He set the bowl down, went into the classroom and put
the revolver in his desk drawer. When he came back to the room night was falling. He put
on the light and served the Arab. “Eat,” he said. The Arab took a piece of the cake, lifted
it eagerly to his mouth, and stopped short.
“And you?” he asked.

“After you. I’ll eat too.”
The thick lips opened slightly. The Arab hesitated, then bit into the cake
determinedly.
The meal over, the Arab looked at the schoolmaster. “Are you the judge?”
“No, I’m simply keeping you until tomorrow.”
“Why do you eat with me?”
“I’m hungry.”

18

The Arab fell silent. Daru got up and went out. He brought back a folding bed from
the shed, set it up between the table and the stove, perpendicular to his own bed. From a
large suitcase which, upright in a corner, served as a shelf for papers, he took two
blankets and arranged them on the camp bed. Then he stopped, felt useless, and sat down
on his bed. There was nothing more to do or to get ready. He had to look at this man. He
looked at him, therefore, trying to imagine his face bursting with rage. He couldn’t do so.
He could see nothing but the dark yet shining eyes and the animal mouth.
“Why did you kill him?” he asked in a voice whose hostile tone surprised him.
The Arab looked away.
“He ran away. I ran after him.”
He raised his eyes to Daru again and they were full of a sort of woeful interrogation.
“Now what will they do to me?”
“Are you afraid?”
He stiffened, turning his eyes away.
“Are you sorry?”
The Arab stared at him openmouthed. Obviously he did not understand. Daru’s
annoyance was growing. At the same time he felt awkward and self-conscious with his
big body wedged between the two beds.
“Lie down there,” he said impatiently. “That’s your bed.”

19

The Arab didn’t move. He called to Daru:
“Tell me!”
The schoolmaster looked at him.
“Is the gendarme coming back tomorrow?”
“I don’t know.”
“Are you coming with us?”
“I don’t know. Why?”
The prisoner got up and stretched out on top of the blankets, his feet toward the
window. The light from the electric bulb shone straight into his eyes and he closed them
at once.
“Why?” Daru repeated, standing beside the bed.
The Arab opened his eyes under the blinding light and looked at him, trying not to
blink.
“Come with us,” he said.

20

In the middle of the night, Daru was still not asleep. He had gone to bed after
undressing completely; he generally slept naked. But when he suddenly realized that he
had nothing on, he hesitated. He felt vulnerable and the temptation came to him to put his
clothes back on. Then he shrugged his shoulders; after all, he wasn’t a child and, if need
be, he could break his adversary in two. From his bed he could observe him, lying on his
back, still motionless with his eyes closed under the harsh light. When Daru turned out
the light, the darkness seemed to coagulate all of a sudden. Little bv little, the night came
back to life in the window where the starless skv was stirring gently. The schoolmaster
soon made out the body lying at his feet. The Arab still did not move, but his eyes
seemed open. A light wind was prowling around the schoolhouse. Perhaps it would drive
away the cIouds and the sin would reappear.

21

During the night the wind increased. The hens fluttered a little and then were silent.
The Arab turned over on his side with his back to Daru, who thought he heard him moan.
Then he listened for his guest’s breathing, become heavier and more regular. He listened
to that breath so close to him and mused without being able to go to sleep. In this room
where he had been sleeping alone for a year, this presence bothered him. But it bothered
him also by imposing on him a sort of brotherhood he knew well but refused to accept in
the present circumstances. Men who share the same rooms, soldiers or prisoners, develop
a strange alliance as if, having cast off their armor with their clothing, they fraternized
every evening, over and above their differences, in the ancient community of dream and
fatigue. But Daru shook himself; he didn’t like such musings, and it was essential to
sleep.

22

A little later, however, when the Arab stirred slightly, the schoolmaster was still not
asleep. When the prisoner made a second move, he stiffened, on the alert. The Arab was
lifting himself slowly on his arms with almost the motion of a sleepwalker. Seated
upright in bed, he waited motionless without turning his head toward Daru, as if he were
listening attentively. Daru did not stir; it had just occurred to him that the revolver was
still in the drawer of his desk. It was better to act at once. Yet he continued to observe the
prisoner, who, with the same slithery motion, put his feet on the ground, waited again,
then began to stand up slowly. Daru was about to call out to him when the Arab began to
walk, in a quite natural but extraordinarily silent way. He was heading toward the door at
the end of the room that opened into the shed. He lifted the latch with precaution and
went out, pushing the door behind him but without shutting it. Daru had not stirred. “He
is running away,” he merely thought. “Good riddance!” Yet he listened attentively. The
hens were not fluttering; the guest must be on the plateau. A faint sound of water reached
him, and he didn’t know what it was until the Arab again stood framed in the doorway,
closed the door carefully, and came back to bed without a sound. Then Daru turned his

back on him and fell asleep. Still later he seemed, from the depths of his sleep, to hear
furtive steps around the schoolhouse. “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” he repeated to
himself. And he went on sleeping.

23

When he awoke, the sky was clear; the loose window let in a cold, pure air. The Arab
was asleep, hunched up under the blankets now, his mouth open, utterly relaxed. But
when Daru shook him, he started dreadfully staring at Daru with wild eyes as if he had
never seen him and such a frightened expression that the schoolmaster stepped back.
“Don’t be afraid. It’s me. You must eat.” The Arab nodded his head and said yes. Calm
had returned to his face, but his expression was vacant and listless.

24

The coffee was ready. They drank it seated together on the folding bed as they
munched their pieces of the cake. Then Daru led the Arab under the shed and showed
him the faucet where he washed. He went back into the room, folded the blankets and the
bed, made his own bed and put the room in order. Then he went through the classroom
and out onto the terrace. The sun was already rising in the blue sky; a soft, bright light
was bathing the deserted plateau. On the ridge the snow was melting in spots. Ttlc stones
were about to reappear. Crouched on the edge of the plateau, the schoolmaster looked at
the deserted expanse. He thought of Balducci. He had hurt him, for he had sent him off in
a way as if he didn’t want to bc associated with him. He could still hear the gendarme’s
farewell and, without knowing why, he felt strangely empty and vulnerable. At that
moment, from the other side of the schoolhouse, the prisoner coughed. Daru listened to
him almost despite himself and then furious, threw a pebble that whistled through the air
before sinking into the snow. That man’s stupid crime revolted him, but to hand him over
was contrary to honor. Merely thinking of it made him smart with humiliation. And he
cursed at one and the same time his own people who had sent him this Arab and the Arab
too who had dared to kill and not managed to get away. Dary got up, walked in a circle
on the terrace, waited motionless, and then went back into the schoolhouse.

25

The Arab, leaning over the cement floor of the shed, was washing his teeth with two
fingers. Daru looked at him and said: “Come.” He went back into the room ahead of the
prisoner. He slipped a hunting-jacket on over his sweater and put on walking-shoes.
Standing, he waited until the Arab had put on his cheche and sandals. They went into the
classroom and the schoolmaster pointed to the exit, saying: “Go ahead.” The fellow didn’t
budge. “I’m coming,” said Daru. The Arab went out. Daru went back into the room and
made a package of pieces of rusk, dates, and sugar. In the classroom, before going out, he
hesitated a second in front of his desk, then crossed the threshold and locked the door.
“That’s the way,” he said. He started toward the east, followed by the prisoner. But, a
short distance from the schoolhouse, he thought he heard a slight sound behind them. He

retraced his steps and examined the surroundings of the house, there was no one there.
The Arab watched him without seeming to understand. “Come on,” said Daru.

26

They walked for an hour and rested beside a sharp peak of limestone. The snow was
melting faster and faster and the sun was drinking up the puddles at once, rapidly
cleaning the plateau, which gradually dried and vibrated like the air itself. When they
resumed walking, the ground rang under their feet. From time to time a bird rent the
space in front of them with a joyful cry. Daru breathed in deeply the fresh morning light.
He felt a sort of rapture before the vast familiar expanse, now almost entirely yellow
under its dome of blue sky. They walked an hour more, descending toward the south.
They reached a level height made up of crumbly rocks. From there on, the plateau sloped
down, eastward, toward a low plain where there were a few spindly trees and, to the
south, toward outcroppings of rock that gave the landscape a chaotic look.

27

Daru surveyed the two directions. There was nothing but the sky on the horizon. Not
a man could be seen. He turned toward the Arab, who was looking at him blankly. Daru
held out the package to him. “Take it,” he said. “There are dates, bread, and sugar. You
can hold out for two days. Here are a thousand francs too.” The Arab took the package
and the money but kept his full hands at chest level as if he didn’t know what to do with
what was being given him. “Now look,” the schoolmaster said as he pointed in the
direction of the east, “there’s the way to Tinguit. You have a two-hour walk. At Tinguit
you’ll find the administration and the police. They are expecting you.” The Arab looked
toward the east, still holding the package and the money against his chest. Daru took his
elbow and turned him rather roughly toward the south. At the foot of the height on which
they stood could be seen a faint path. “That’s the trail across the plateau. In a day’s walk
from here you’ll find pasturelands and the first nomads. They’ll take you in and shelter
you according to their law.” The Arab had now turned toward Daru and a sort of panic
was visible in his expression. “Listen,” he said. Daru shook his head: “No, be quiet. Now
I’m leaving you.” He turned his back on him, took two long steps in the direction of the
school, looking hesitantly at the motionless Arab and started off again. For a few minutes
he heard nothing but his own step resounding on the cold ground and did not turn his
head. A moment later however he turned around. The Arab was still there on the edge of
the hill his arms hanging now, and he was looking at the schoolmaster. Daru felt
something rise in his throat. But he swore with impatience, waved vaguely, and started
off again. He had already gone some distance when he again stopped and looked. There
was no longer anyone on the hill.

28

Daru hesitated. The sun was now rather high in the sky and was beginning to beat
down on his head. The schoolmaster retraced his steps at first somewhat uncertainly then
with decision. When he reached the little hill he was bathed in sweat. He climbed it as

fast as he could and stopped. Out of breath at the top. The rock-ficelds to the south stood
out sharply against the blue sky but on the plain to the east a steamy heat was already
rising. And in that slight haze Daru with heavy heart made out the Arab walking slowly
on the road to prison.

29

A little later standing before the window of thc classroom the school master was
watching the clear light bathing the whole surface of the plateau but he hardly saw it.
Behind him on the blackboard among the winding French rivers sprawled the clumsily
chalked-up words he had just read. “You handcd over our brothnr. You will pay for this.”
Daru looked at the sky, the plateau and beyond the invisible lands stretching all the way
to the sea. In this vast landscape he had loved so much, he was alone.

1. The Seine, Loire, Rhone, and Gironder rivers; French geography was taught in the
French colonies. Back to text
2. A long hooded robe worn by Arabs in North Africa. Cheche: Scarf; here wound as
a turban around the head.
3. Balducci is a native of Corsica, a French island north of Sardinia.
4. French administrative and territorial division: like a county.
5. Against the French colonial government