"New Concept English"

[fiefoe]

When I read these passages the first time many years ago, I was probably too distracted by the effort required to parse the sentences to really appreciate the sentiments within.

Book IV Lesson 14
    But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble.
The best way to overcome it - so at least it seems to me----is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.
An individual human existence should be like a river--small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.

Book IV Lesson 6
    For one thing, being a problem gives you a certain identity, and that is one of the things the young are busily engaged in seeking.
I find young people exciting. They have an air of freedom, and they have not a dreary commitment to mean ambitions or love of comfort. They are not anxious social climbers, and they have no devotion to material things. All this seems to me to link them with life, and the origins of things. It's as if they were in some sense cosmic beings in violent and lovely contrast with us suburban creatures.

Other topics:

• How it came about that snakes manufactured poison is a mystery. Poison to a snake is merely a luxury; it enables it to get its food with very little effort, no more effort than one bite. And why only snakes?
• From the seventeenth-century empire of Sweden, the story of a galleon that sank at the start of her maiden voyage in 1628 must be one of the strangest tales of the sea.
• At the age of twelve years, the human body is at its most vigorous.
• In mediaeval times rivers were the veins of the body politic as well as economic.
• Oxford has been ruined by the motor industry.
• What characterizes almost all Hollywood pictures is their inner emptiness.
• A gentleman is, rather than does.
  

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