Eleven Ways to Begin

Eleven Ways to Begin The Anecdote My eight-year-old daughter and I were walking our dog the other day when the dog saw a cat and bolted across a busy street. The dog didn't get hit by and was waiting when we arrived to grab her leash. We were delighted the dog hadn't been killed. My daughter, television's child as much as mine, remarked: "Plop. Plop. Fizz. Fizz. Oh, what a relief it is." My daughter, thinking in jingles? I was appalled, of course, but was also secretly satisfied. Part of me hates and fears television, and what could be better evidence of its malevolent effects on the youth of America? Contrary to widespread claims and parents worries, violence and sex are not what's wrong with television. Johnny Mack Brown and Lash Larue, the old-time Saturday afternoon Western heroes, wasted their enemies with even less compunction than Baretta or Kojack show on the tube. There always have been more cheap sexual thrills available to even the semi-literature in True Confessions -never mind Penthouse or Hustler than will ever get past the FCC. Television's real crime is not that it incites passion, but that it purveys pabulum, intellectual paste and emotional purec. (M. M. K., "Just for You, Barbara," The New Republic 10 Dec. 1977) There are some people who never leam to stand up for themselves. I know a woman who underwent unnecessary surgery because she did not wish to inconvenience her revered physician. No matter how great her misgivings, how racked with indecision she was, how indefinite the evidence that surgery was necessary, she could not bring herself to postpone or cancel the operation. To have done so would have been against hospital policy, and she was very intimidated by policies, So on a dreary, cold March morning she allowed herself to be wheeled into an operating room where she allowed her doctor to carve away what later proved to be a perfectly healthy breast. In her indecisiveness, in her suffering, in her stoic endurance of the life that others have determined for her, my friend reminds me of Reverend Jones in Joy Williams" story "Taking Care." -Chris Lindley The Setting or Background There are some fifty square blocks of pre-World War II apartment buildings in what used to be one of the most genteel neighborhoods of New York City, near Columbia University, where things have gone slightly, delicately, to seed. The area is called Morningside Heights, and many old ladies live there. Inside front hallways, the polished tables are scratched and the Tiffany lampshades have a panel or two of their stained glass missing. On the outside, the creamwhite stones have graffiti on them and the wrought-iron railings of the buildings are surrounded by weeds. The old ladies' apartments are all different, but all alike multi-roomed, dark, large, meticulously kept, the way professional people lived forty years ago; not an appliance less than thirty years old, walls hung with prints of Bavaria in the 1890's, or of India, or Japan, and the dark corners crowded with knickknacks; shells, Mexican rattles, Japanese netsukes, oils by artists whose careers never flowered, oak music boxes, bronze vases, porcelain peasant children; dark shelves with yellow postcards, art prints, polished wood; 1 dusty books, letters, photographs, souvenirs. The smell of their apartments is of good, clean dust relieved by an occasional whiff of perfume or beeswax polish. (Paul Malamod, "Rented Rooms," The Atlantic July 1978) In Medias Res ("in the Middle of Things") The money looked good. There were tall stacks of it, mostly tens and twenties, just for the taking. There was no casing of the joint and no gunplay. The job was done in less than 60 second, and the total take came to $1,444. Not bad wages for one minute's work. Of course, it also cost me another two years in prison, as well as additional time for my parole violation. The fact that this is my third prison stint shouldn't pose any problem. But it gets harder, especially now that my wife has told me to make arrangements t have my things moved out of the house. She cannot take it any longer, and I do not blame her. (Marcus W. Koechig, "Paying My Debt to Society," Newsweek 15 Nov. 1983) Sensational Details My father died when his heart could no longer manage to pump through his embolismic lungs. He had a pulmonary embolism because most of his lungs' healthy tissue was covered with a swamp of killer cells. My father was not without blame for this, as he had smoked a pack of cigarettes a day for thirty-five years. He gave up smoking thirteen years ago because he was by then convinced that it wasn't good for him. (Eric Lax, "The Death of My Father," The Atlantic July 1978) A Well-known or Appropriate Question "Hypocrisy," said La Rochefoucauld [the seventeenth-century French author] a long time ago, "is the homage that vice pays to virtue." And so it is with language - for those groups that are the most ruthless in their acts are also the most devious in their speech. Totalitarian governments do not "kill" dissenters and heretics; they "liquidate" them. Goering did not speak of "gassing" the German Jews; he spoke of "the final solution" to the Jewish problem. The fine art of double-talk has been raised to the ultimate degree by modern communist and fascist governments; and the more vicious their policies, the more they seem to feel the need to use the soft word. (Sydney J. Harris, "Guilt Gives Rise to Double Talk," The Best of Sydney J. Harris [Boston, Houghton. 1975]) "Our wills conflict head-on. No chance of reconciliation." These two sentences, spoken by Antigone to Creon, are the threads from which are woven Sophocles' tragedy Antigone. The two main characters, Antigone and Creon, are the tragic protagonist and antagonist. They are tragic in the sense that one leads to the other's destruction, whether directly or indirectly. The warp and woof of every episode of the play is their violent struggle: between the supposedly subservient woman and the supposedly superior man, between the representative of divine laws and the representative of man-made laws, between Antigone's love and Creon's arrogance. Loretta Nuesslein