Exploration

    Extract No. 02 Page No. 67/68  [Line, “But for the rest…………with tenderness”]   Read the extract and do all the activities that follow .        But for the rest of us, the  sovereign freedom of travelling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and stands everything you took for granted on its head. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through hard realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism). And the first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provisional and provincial  are the things we imagine to be universal.         We travel, then, in part just to shake up our  complacencies   by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas , that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow’s headlines. When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, for example, where there is almost no paving your  notions  of

   Extract No. 01 Page No. 66 / 67 [Lines, ‘ We travel……..the same’] Read the extract and do all the activities that follow: We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose  riches are differently   dispersed . And we travel, in essence, to become young fools again-to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love once more. The beauty of this whole process was best described, perhaps, before people even took to frequent flying, by George Santayana in his lapidary essay, “The Philosophy of Travel.” We “need sometimes,” the Harvard philosopher wrote, “to escape into open  solitudes , into aimlessness, into the moral holiday of running some pure hazard , in order to sharpen the edge of life, to taste hardship, and to be  compelled to  work desperately for a moment at no matter what.”  Few of us ever forget the connection between “travel” and “ travail ,” Travel in that sense guides us toward a better balance of wisdom and compas

    Extract No. 04 Page No. 49/50  [Lines, “Her wretched ……….twenty years” Read the first activity, the extract and do all the activities that follow.        Her wretched self again, no doubt! She had always been a fretful, weak, unsatisfactory mother, a  wobbly  wife, lolling about in a kind of twilight existence with nothing very clear or very bold, or more one thing than another, like all her brothers and sisters, except perhaps Herbert- they were all the same poor water-veined creatures who did nothing. Then in the midst of this creeping, crawling life, suddenly she was on the crest of a wave. Wretched  fly - where had she read the story that kept coming into her mind about the fly and the saucer? -struggled out. Yes, she had those moments. But now that she was forty, they might come more and more seldom. By degrees she would cease to struggle any more. But that was deplorable ! That was not to be endured! that made her feel ashamed of herself !        She would go to the London Li

The New Dress Extract Number 03 Page No. 46/47 [Lines, “I Feel like…… with tears”] Read the extract and do all the activities that follow. A1. Web :                                       (02)  Complete the web by writing down what Mable feel about herself. (This is a practice Activity) “ I feel like some  dowdy , decrepit, horribly dingy old fly,” she said, making Robert Haydon stop just to hear her say that, just to reassure herself by  furbishing  up a poor weak-kneed phrase and so showing how detached she was, how witty, that she did not feel in the least out of anything. And, of course, Robert Haydon answered something, quite polite, quite insincere, which she saw through instantly, and said to herself, directly he went(again from some book), “Lies, lies, lies!” For a party makes things either much more real, or much less real, she thought; she saw in a flash to the bottom of Robert Haydon’s heart; she saw through everything. She saw the truth. This was true, this drawing-room, thi