Close Work with the text. 1. What two ways of breaking a horse does Lincoln Steffens describe?

Meaning

1. What two ways of breaking a horse does Lincoln Steffens describe?

2. How did Steffens regard his sisters? Why do you think they were so content to do his bedding? Would girls of today act the same way?

3. Why did he prefer his father’s method of punishment to his mother’s?

Method

1. Why do you suppose Steffens included this narrative in his Autobiography? Was it to show an important event in his boyhood, or was it to show what the possession of the colt taught him? Explain your answers.

2. Steffens says he “learned what tyranny is and the pain of being misunderstood and wronged, or, if you please, understood and set right: they are pretty much the same.” Is he correct? Explain your answer.

3. The incidents narrated in this chapter from Lincoln Steffens’s Autobiography took several months to occur. Nevertheless, the narrative moves at a fast pace. How do Steffens’s vocabulary and sentence structure help achieve this pace?

LANGUAGE: IDIOMS

G.Antrushina states,that idioms (phraeological units,) as they are called by most western scholars, represent what can probably be described as the most picturesque, colourful and expressive part of the language's vocabulary.

Phraseology is a kind of picture gallery in which are collected vivid and amusing sketches of the nation's customs, traditions and prejudices, recollections of its past history, scraps of folk songs and fairy-tales. Quotations from great poets are preserved here alongside the dubious pearls of philistine wisdom and crude slang witticisms, for phraseology is not only the most colourful but probably the most democratic area of vocabulary and draws its resources mostly from the very depths of popular speech.

So, idioms are expressions in a language that are unique to that language and cannot easily be translated into another language - for example, to put up with. Some idioms are not even grammatically correct, but they have become acceptable through use.

The title of the selection you have just read contains the idiom break in. Look up break in in a dictionary. Write a sentence for at least eight of the idiomatic phrases. You will find at the end of the entry for break.

Discovering Rhetorical Strategies

1. What tone did L.Steffens establish in his autobiography? What is his reaction towards creating this particular tone? What is your reaction to it?

2. What words did the L.Steffens use to describe the horse?

3. What did the colt meant to the author? Explain your answer.

Composition

If you have ever trained an animal, write an essay explaining exactly what you set out do, the step-by-step training program, and the new results of your efforts. If you have not, write about how you learned to do something - such as skate, swim, or ride a bicycle.

SUSAN SONTAG

(born 1933)

ON AIDS

Just as one might predict for a disease that is not yet understood as well as extremely obstinate to treatment, the advent of this terrifying new disease, new at least in its form, has provided a large-scale occasion for the metaphorizing of illness.

Strictly speaking, AIDS — acquired immune deficiency syndrome—is not the name of an illness at all. It is the name of a medical condition, whose consequences are a spectrum of illnesses. In contrast to syphilis and cancer, which provide; types for most of the images and metaphors attached to the very definition of AIDS requires the presence of other illnesses, so-called opportunistic infections and malignancies[30]. But though not in that sense a single disease, AIDS lends itself to being regarded as one — in part because, unlike cancer an syphilis, it is thought to have a single cause.

AIDS has a dual metaphoric genealogy. As a microprocess, it is described as cancer: an invasion. When the focus is transmission of the disease, an older metaphor, reminiscent[31]of syphilis, is invoked: pollution. (One gets it from the blood or sexual fluids of infected people or from contaminated blood products). But the military metaphors used to describe AIDS have a somewhat different focus from those used in describing cancer. With cancer, the metaphor scants the issue of causality (still a murky topic in cancer research) and picks up at the point at which rogue cells inside the body mutate, eventually moving out from an original site or organ to overrun other organs or systems — a domestic subversion. In the description of AIDS the enemy is what causes disease, an infectious agent that comes from the outside: The invader is tiny, about one sixteen-thousandth the size of the head of a pin….. Scouts of the body's immune system, large cells called macrophages, sense the presence of the diminutive foreigner and promptly alert the immune system. It begins to mobilize an array of cells that, among other things, produce antibodies to deal with the threat. Single-mindedly, the AIDS virus ignores many of the blood cells in its path, evades the rapidly advancing defenders and homes in on the master coordinator of the immune system, a helper T cell…

This is the language of political paranoia, with its characteristic distrust of a pluralistic world. A defense system consisting of cells “that, among other things, produce antibodies to deal with the threat” is, predictably, no match for an invader who advances “single-mindedly”. And the science-fiction flavor, already present in cancer talk, is even more pungent[32] in accounts of AIDS — this one comes from Time magazine in late 1986 — with infection described like the high-tech warfare for which we are being prepared by the fantasies of our leaders and by video entertainments. In the era of Star Wars and Space Invaders, AIDS has proved an ideally comprehensible illness: On the surface of that cell, it finds a receptor into which one of its envelope proteins fits perfectly, like a key into a lock. Docking with the cell, the virus penetrates the cell membrane and is stripped of its protective shell in the process...

Next the invader takes up permanent residence, by a form of alien takeover familiar in science-fiction narratives. The body's own cells become the invader. With the help of an enzyme the virus carries with it, the naked AIDS virus converts its RNA into… DNA, the master molecule of life. The molecule then penetrates the cell nucleus, inserts itself into a chromosome and takes over part of the cellular machinery, directing it to produce more AIDS viruses. Eventually, overcome by its alien product, the cell swells and dies, releasing a flood of new viruses to attack other cells....

As viruses attack other cells, runs the metaphor, so “a host of opportunistic diseases, normally warded off by a healthy immune system, attacks the body”, whose integrity and vigor have been shattered by the sheer replication of “alien product” that follows the collapse of its immunological defenses. “Gradually weakened by the onslaught, the AIDS victim dies, sometimes in months, but almost always within a few years of the first symptoms”. Those who have not already succumbed[33] are described as “under assault, showing the telltale symptoms of the disease”, while the million of others “harbor the virus, vulnerable at any time to attack”.

Cancer makes cells proliferate; in AIDS, cells die. An original model of AIDS (the mirror image of leukemia) has been altered, descriptions of how the virus does its work continue to echo the way the illness is perceived as infiltrating the society. “AIDS Virus Found to Hide in Cells, Eluding Detection by Normal Tests” was the headline of a recent front-page story in the New York Times announcing the discovery that the virus can “lurk”[34] for years in the macrophages — disrupting their disease-fighting function without killing them, “even when the macrophages are filled almost to bursting with virus”, and without producing antibodies, the chemicals the body makes in response to “invading agents” and whose presence has been regarded as an infallible marker of the syndrome. That the virus isn't lethal for all the cells where it takes up residence, as it is now thought.

What makes the viral assault so terrifying is that contamination, and therefore vulnerability, is understood as permanent. Even if someone infected were never to develop any symptoms – that is, the infection remained, or could by medical intervention be rendered, inactive — the viral enemy would be forever within. In fact, so it is believed, it is just a matter of time before thing awakens it, before the appearance of “the telltale symptoms”. Like syphilis, known to generations of doctors as “the great masquerader”, AIDS is a clinical construction, an inference[35]. It takes its identity from the presence of some among a long; and lengthening, roster of symptoms (no one has everything that AIDS could be), symptoms which “mean” that what the patient has is this illness. The construction of the illness rests on invention not only of AIDS as a clinical entity but of a kind of junior AIDS, called AIDS-related complex (ARC), to which people are assigned if they show “early” and often intermittent symptoms of immunological deficit such as fevers, weight loss etc. AIDS is progressive, a disease of time. Once a certain density of symptoms is attained, the course of the illness can be swift and brings atrocious suffering. Besides the commonest “presenting” illnesses (some hitherto unusual, at least in a fatal form, such as a rare skin cancer and a rare form of pneumonia), a plethora[36] of disabling, disfiguring, and humiliating symptoms make the AIDS patient steadily more infirm, helpless, tunable to control or take care of basic functions and needs.

The sense in which AIDS is a slow disease makes it more like syphilis, which is characterized in terms of “stages”, than like cancer. Thinking in terms of “stages” is essential to discourse about AIDS. Syphilis in its most dreaded form is “tertiary syphilis”, syphilis in its third stage. What is called AIDS is generally understood as the last of three stages — the first of which is infection with a human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) and early evidence of inroads on the immune system — with a long latency period between infection and the onset of the “telltale” symptoms. (Apparently not as long as syphilis, in which the latency period between secondary and tertiary illness might be decades. But it is worth noting that when syphilis first appeared in epidemic form in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century, it was a rapid disease, of an unexplained virulence that is unknown today, in which death often occurred in the second stage, sometimes within months or a few years). Cancer grows slowly: It is not thought to be, for a long time, latent. (A convincing account of a process in terms of “stages” seems invariably to include the notion of a normative delay or halt in the process, such as is supplied by the notion of latency). True, a cancer is “staged”. This is a principal tool of diagnosis, which means classifying it according to its gravity, determining how “advanced” it is. But it is mostly a spatial[37] notion: that the cancer advances through the body, traveling or migrating along predictable routes. Cancer is first of all a disease of the body's geography, in contrast to syphilis and AIDS, whose definition depends on constructing a temporal sequence of stages.

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