Katherine Anne Porter

Pre-reading

Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890-September 18, 1980) was American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. She is regarded as one of the most brilliant practitioners of the art of the short story. In 1930, she published her first short story collection,Flowering Judas and Other Stories. Though a masterly collection of short stories, it met with only modest sales. An expanded edition of this collection was published in 1935 and received such critical acclaim that it alone virtually assured her place in American literature. Her novel Ship of Fools (1962) topped the New York Times Fiction Best Sellers list that year, remaining the longest on top for exactly half a year — from April to November. In 1966, she was awarded Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and National Book Award (1966) for The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter (1965). Her career was also honored with three nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Her works, particularly her short stories and essays, received great critical acclaim for her penetrating insight into the dark side of the average individuals who are impoverished by the modern environment, and her use of dark themes including guilt, betrayal, isolation, death, spiritual denial and the origin of human evil. Her style is marked by superb clarity and objectivity without sacrificing sensitivity. Her flawless pen and harsh criticism of not only her times, but of human society, made Porter a major voice in twentieth century American literature.

Apart from teaching, in the late 1940s and 1950s, Porter taught at Stanford University, the University of Michigan, Washington and Lee University, and the University of Texas, where her undisciplined, unconventional manner of teaching made her extremely popular with students. She also occasionally appeared on television in the 1950s and 1960s on programs discussing literature.

The following essay The future is now was first published in Mademoiselle in 1950, and collected in The Days Before (1952).

Prompts for Your Reading

1.What seemingly disconnected details bring the author to the thoughts about the future?

2.In which Paragraph does the author begin to express her thoughts and ideas about the future?

3.How is Paragraph 6 related to the previous paragraphs?

4.What is the belief that Western Europeans and Americans have been brought up with for many generations? What do you feel is the author’s attitude towards this belief?

5.What do you think the author mean by “the amelioration of the hard human lot”(Paragraph 7)?

6.Is the ancient Oriental belief concerning life fundamentally different from its counterparts in the west?

7.What does the “visible evidence” (in Paragraph 8) show about the contradiction in mankind’s progress?

8.What does the author mean by “man has obviously outreached himself” (in Paragraph 9)?

9.According to the author, is the bombing of Hiroshima more criminal than other less progressive acts of killing? Why or why not?

[1] Not so long ago I was reading in a magazine with an enormous circulation some instructions as to how to behave if and when we see that flash brighter than the sun which means that the atom bomb has arrived. I read of course with the intense interest of one who has everything to learn on this subject; but at the end, the advice dwindled to this: the only real safety seems to lie in simply being somewhere else at the time, the farther away the better; the next best, failing access to deep shelters, bombproof cellars and all, is to get under a stout table — that is, just what you might do if someone were throwing bricks through your window and you were too nervous to throw them back.

[2] This comic anticlimax1 to what I had been taking as a serious educational piece surprised me into real laughter, hearty and carefree. It is such a relief to be told the truth, or just even the facts, so pleasant not to be coddled with unreasonable hopes. That very evening I was drawn away from my work table to my fifty-story window by one of those shrill terror-screaming sirens which our excitement-loving city government used then to affect for so many occasions: A fire? Police chasing a gangster? Somebody being sent to the hospital in a hurry? Some distinguished public guest being transferred from one spot to another? Strange aircraft coming over, maybe? Under the lights of the corner crossing of the great avenue, a huge closed vehicle whizzed past, screaming. I never knew what it was, had not in fact expected to know; no one I could possibly ask would know. Now that we have bells clamoring away instead for such events, we all have one doubt less, if perhaps one expectancy more. The single siren’s voice means to tell us only one thing.

[3] But at that doubtful moment, framed in a lighted window level2 with mine in the apartment house across the street, I saw a young man in a white T-shirt and white shorts at work polishing a long, beautiful dark table top. It was obviously his own table in his own flat, and he was enjoying his occupation. He was bent over in perfect concentration, rubbing, sandpapering, running the flat of his palm over the surface, standing back now and then to get the sheen of light on the fine wood. I am sure he had not even raised his head at the noise of the siren, much less had he come to the window. I stood there admiring his workmanlike devotion to a good job worth doing, and there flashed through me one of those pure fallacies of feeling which suddenly overleap reason: surely all that effort and energy so irreproachably employed were not going to be wasted on a table that was to be used merely for crawling under at some unspecified date. Then why take all those pains to make it beautiful? Any sort of old board would do.

[4] I was so shocked at this treachery of the lurking Foul Fiend3 (despair is a foul fiend, and this was despair) I stood a moment longer, looking out and around, trying to collect my feelings, trying to think a little. Two windows away and a floor down in the house across the street, a young woman was lolling in a deep chair, reading and eating fruit from a little basket. One the sidewalk, a boy and a girl dressed alike in checker-board cotton shirts and skin-tight blue denims, a costume which displayed acutely the structural differences of their shapes, strolled along with their arms around each other. I believe this custom of lovers walking enwreathed4 in public was imported by our soldiers of the First World War from France, from Paris indeed. “You didn’t see that sort of thing here before,” certain members of the older generation were heard to remark quite often, in a tone of voice. Well, one sees quite a lot of it now, and it is a very pretty, reassuring sight. Other citizens of all sizes and kinds and ages were crossing back and forth; lights flashed red and green, punctually. Motors zoomed by, and over the great city — but where am I going? I never read other people’s descriptions of great cities, more particularly if it is a great city I know. It doesn’t belong here anyway, except that I had again that quieting sense of the continuity of human experience on this earth, its perpetual aspirations, set-backs, failures and re-beginnings in eternal hope; and that, with some appreciable differences of dress, customs and means of conveyance, so people have lived and moved in the cities they have built for more millennia than we are yet able to account for, and will no doubt build and live for as many more.

[5] Why did this console me? I cannot say; my mind is of the sort that can often be soothed with large generalities of that nature. The silence of the space between the stars does not affright me, as it did Pascal5, because I am unable to imagine it except poetically; and my awe is not for the silence and space of the endless universe but for the inspired imagination of man, who can think and feel so, and turn a phrase like that to communicate it to us. Then too, I like the kind of honesty and directness of the young soldier who lately answered someone who asked him if he knew what he was fighting for. “I sure do,” he said,“I’m fighting to live.” And as for the future, I was once reading the first writings of a young girl, an apprentice author, who was quite impatient to get on with the business and find her way into print. There is very little one can say of use in such matters, but I advised her against haste — she could so easily regret it. “Give yourself time,” I said, “the future will take care of itself.” This opinionated young person looked down her little nose at me and said, “The future is now.” She may have heard the phrase somewhere and liked it, or she may just have naturally belonged to that school of metaphysics; I’m sure she was too young to have investigated the thought deeply. But maybe she was right and the future does arrive every day and it is all we have, from one second to the next.

[6] So I glanced again at the young man at work, a proper-looking candidate for the armed services, and realized the plain, homely fact: he was not preparing a possible shelter, something to cower under trembling; he was restoring a surface to put his books and papers on, to serve his plates from, to hold his cocktail tray and his lamp. He was full of the deep, right, instinctive, human belief that he and the table were going to around together for a long time. Even if he is off to the army next week, it will be there when he comes back. At the very least, he is doing something he feels is worth doing now, and that is no small thing.

[7] At once the difficulty, and the hope, of our special time in this world of Western Europe and America is that we have been brought up for many generations in the belief, however tacit, that all humanity was almost unanimously engaged in going forward, naturally to better things and to higher reaches. Since the 18th century at least when the Encyclopedists6 seized upon the Platonic theory that the highest pleasure of mankind was pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful, progress, precisely the sense of perpetual, gradual amelioration of the hard human lot, has been taught popularly not just as theory of possibility but as an article of faith and the groundwork of a whole political doctrine. Mr. Tonybee7 has even simplified this view for us with picture diagrams of various sections of humanity, each in its own cycle rising to its own height, struggling beautifully on from craggy level to level, but always upward. Whole peoples are arrested at certain points, and perish there, but others go on. There is also the school of thought, Oriental and very ancient, which give to life the spiral shape, and the spiral moves by nature upward. Even adherents of the circular or recurring-cycle school, also ancient and honorable, somehow do finally allow that the circle is a thread that spins itself out one layer above another, so that even though it is perpetually at every moment passing over a place it has been before, yet by its own width it will have risen just so much higher.

[8] These are admirable attempts to get a little meaning and order into our view of our destiny, in that same spirit which moves the artist to labor with his little handful of chaos, bringing it to coherency within a frame; but on the visible evidence we must admit that in human nature the spirit of contradiction more than holds its own. Mankind has always built a little more than he has hitherto been able to or willing to destroy; got more children than he has been able to kill; invented more laws and customs than he had any intention of observing; founded more religions than he was able to practice or even to believe in; made in general many more promises than he could keep; and has been know more than once to commit suicide through mere fear of death. Now in our time, in his pride to explore his universe to its unimaginable limits and to exceed his possible powers, he has at last produced an embarrassing series of engines too powerful for their containers and too tricky for their mechanicians; millions of labor-saving gadgets which can be rendered totally useless by the mere failure of the public power plants, and has reduced himself to such helplessness that a dozen of less of the enemy could disable a whole city by throwing a few switches8. This paradoxical creature has committed all these extravagances and created all these dangers and sufferings in a quest — we are told — for peace and security.

[9] How much of this are we to believe, when with the pride of Lucifer9, the recklessness of Icarus10, the boldness of Prometheus11 and the intellectual curiosity of Adam and Eve (yes, intellectual; the serpent promised them wisdom if12...) man has obviously outreached himself, to the point where he cannot understand is own science or control his own inventions. Indeed he has become as the gods, who have over and over again suffered defeat and downfall at the hands of their creatures. Having devised the most exquisite and instantaneous means of communication to all corners of the earth, for years upon years friends were unable even to get a postcard message to each other across national frontiers. The newspapers assure us that from the kitchen tap there flows a chemical13, cheap and available, to make a bomb14 more disturbing to the imagination even than the one we so appallingly have; yet no machine has been invented to purify the water so that it will not spoil even the best tea or coffee. Or at any rate, it is not in use. We are the proud possessors of rocket bombs that go higher and farther and faster than any ever before, and there is some talk of a rocket ship shortly to take off for the moon. (My plan is to stow away.) We may indeed reach the moon some day, and I dare predict that will happen before we have devised a decent system of city garbage disposal.

[10] This lunatic atom bomb has succeeded in rousing the people of all nations to the highest point of unanimous moral dudgeon; great numbers of persons are frightened who never really had much cause to be frightened before. This world has always been a desperately dangerous place to live for the greater part of the earth’s inhabitants; it was, however reluctantly, endured as the natural state of affairs. Yet the invention of every new weapon of war has always been greeted with horror and righteous indignation, especially by those who failed to invent it, or who were threatened with it first ... bows and arrows, stone cannon balls, gunpowder, flintlocks, pistols, the dumdum bullet15, the Maxim silencer16, the machine gun, poison gas, armored tanks, and on and on to the grand climax — if it should prove to be — of the experiment on Hiroshima. Nagasaki was bombed, too, remember? Or were we already growing accustomed to the idea? And as for Hiroshima, surely it could not have been the notion of sudden death of others that shocked us. How could it be, when in two great wars within one generation we have become familiar with millions of shocking deaths, by sudden violence of most cruel devices, and by agonies prolonged for year in prisons and hospitals and concentration camps. We take with apparent calmness the news of the deaths of millions by flood, famine, plague — no, all the frontiers of danger are down now, no one is safe, no one, and that, alas, really means all of us. It is our own deaths we fear, and so let’s out with it17 and give up our fine debauch of moralistic frenzy over Hiroshima. I fail entirely to see why it is more criminal to kill a few thousand persons in one instant than it is to kill the same number slowly over a given stretch of time. If I have a choice, I’d as lief18 be killed by an atom bomb as by a hand grenade or a flame thrower. If dropping the atom bomb is an immoral act, then the making of it was too; and writing of the formula was a crime, since those who wrote it must have known what such contrivance was good for. So morally speaking, the bomb is only a magnified grenade, and the crime, if crime it is, is still murder. It was never anything else. Our proto-criminal then was the man who first struck fire from flint, for from that moment we have been coming steadily to this day and this weapon and this use of it. What would you have advised instead? That the human race should have gone on sitting in cave gnawing raw meat and beating each other over the head with the bones?

[11] And yet it may be that what we have is a world not on the verge of flying apart, but an uncreated one — still in shapeless fragments waiting to be put together properly. I imagine that when we want something better, we may have it: at perhaps no greater price than we have already paid for the worse.

Notes

1.anticlimax: An anticlimax is a disappointing decline after a previous rise, or a change from a serious subject to a disappointing one. It is something that is much less exciting or dramatic than it is expected to be, like a dull or disappointing ending or result in a movie or drama. You can describe something as an anticlimax if it disappoints you because it happens after something very exciting, or because it is not as exciting as you expect.反**，指令人感到失望或令人扫兴的冲突解决办法或事件结果。

2.level: If one thing is level with another thing, it is at the same height as it.（与……）等高的，齐平的

3.Foul Fiend: In John Bunyan’s hymn To be a Pilgrim, the hobgoblin, a friendly but troublesome creature, is coupled with “a foul fiend” as two monstrous beings who try but fail to “daunt the Pilgrim’s spirit”.

4.enwreathed: wreath 本意是花环 (a circular band of foliage or flowers for ornamental purposes); enwreathed指恋人相互抱着对方的腰，好似成环状。

5.Pascal: (1623-1662) French mathematician and philosopher who invented an adding machine and contributed (with Fermat) to the theory of probability

6.Encyclopedists: The encyclopedists refer to a group of 18th century writers in France who compiled and wrote the Encyclopédie. Though not a unified group either in ideology or social class, the encyclopedists represented the intellectual group who promoted the advancement of science and secular thought and supported tolerance, rationality, and open-mindedness of the Enlightenment.

7.Mr. Tonybee: Here the author refers to Arnold Joseph Toynbee (April 1889-October 1975), British historian, philosopher of history and author of numerous books. He is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History, through which he examined the rise and fall of 26 civilizations in the course of human history.

8.throw a few switches: turn or flip a few switches 扳动开关

9.Lucifer: Christian tradition uses the Latin word for “morning star”, Lucifer, as a proper name for the Devil, or Satan as he was before his fall. As a result, Lucifer has become a by-word for Satan or the Devil in the Church and in popular literature.

10.Icarus: In Greek mythology, Icarus is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, the creator of the Labyrinth. Icarus and his father attempt to escape from Crete by means of wings that his father constructed from feathers and wax. In spite of his father’s warnings not to fly either too low or too high, and not to fly too close to the sun, Icarus flew too close to the sun and the wax melted and he fell into the Aegean and drowned.

11.Prometheus: In Greek mythology, Prometheus is the Titan who stole fire from Olympus and gave it to mankind. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a rock where an eagle gnawed at his liver until Hercules rescued him. Prometheus is known as the benefactor to mankind.

12.the serpent promised them wisdom if...: According to the Bible, God warned Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, “for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” The serpent tempted Eve to eat from the Tree, saying that she would not surely die and that if she ate the fruit of the tree “then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” Eve ate the fruit and gave it to Adam and he also ate it. God found out and prevented Adam and Eve from eating the fruit of the Tree of Life and living forever. Adam and Eve were banished from Eden. The serpent was punished for its role in their fall by being made to crawl on its belly in the dust.

13.chemical: Here it refers to hydrogen, which is an element in water (H2O). Hydrogen is the most common substance in the universe.

14.bomb: Here it refers to hydrogen bomb which employs hydrogen fusion.

15.dumdum bullet: The dumdum bullet is an expanding bullet designed to expand on impact through increasing the diameter of the wound.

16.Maxim silencer: The Maxim Silencer was the first commercially successful firearm sound suppressor.

17.let’s out with it: Let’s be honest about it.

18.would as lief: would rather同样乐意，宁愿……，宁可……

Questions for Further Thinking

1.Why do you think the author responded differently to the siren from other people —the young man and the young woman across the street, and the lovers strolling on the sidewalk?

2.What do the concentration, effort and energy of the table-polishing young man mean to author? What revelation of truth does the young man’s action bring to the author?

3.What is the author’s reaction to mankind’s“going forward” and the “admirable attempts to get a little meaning and order into our view of destiny”? Is she critical, sympathetic, skeptical or approving?

4.What is the author’s attitude towards the “unanimous moral dudgeon” concerning the bombing of Hiroshima? What does author believe to be the nature of such crime of murder?

5.Does this essay have a thesis statement which specifies its main point? If yes, which sentence is the thesis statement? If no, can you compose a thesis statement for this essay?

6.Do you feel the author reveals an optimistic or a pessimistic attitude towards the future of mankind?

7.Is it easy to follow the author’s train of thought in this essay? Why or why not?

After-reading Assignment

Oral Work

1.The author believes that we are brought up in the belief that man should go forward and move higher in order to get some meaning and order into our view of our destiny. Is this the way you have been brought up and taught to maximize the meaning of your existence? What have you been told, or what have you found that can bring meaning to a person’s destiny? Share your ideas with your classmates in a 3-minute presentation.

2.Based on the previous argument of this essay, discuss with your partner(s) and decide how you would interpret the concluding sentence: I imagine that when we want something better, we may have it: at perhaps no greater price than we have already paid for the worse. Summarize your ideas and report them to your class.

3.A rhetoric question is a question asked to imply a definite answer though no explicit answer is expected. The reader or the listener is expected to know the actual answer from the context or from the tone of voice of the writer or speaker. As a rhetorical device, rhetoric questions are used for emphasis and provocation. In this essay, the following questions can be regarded as rhetoric questions:

Then why take all those pains to make it beautiful? (Paragraph 3)

How much of this are we to believe, when ... (Paragraph 9)

Or were we already growing accustomed to the idea? (Paragraph 10)

What would you have advised instead? That the human race should have gone on sitting in cave gnawing raw meat and beating each other over the head with the bones? (Paragraph 10)

Study these rhetoric questions and work out the answer to them through exploring their context.Then present your answers to your class.

4.The statement “The future is now” is interpreted by the author in the sense that the future arrives every day and it is all we have, from one second to the next (see Paragraph 5). Can you draw any practical life lessons from this poetic interpretation? Talk with your partner(s) honestly about what you have learned as an individual from this essay.

Written Work

1.The author explored history, now and future in terms of human progress. In today’s world, from what other meaningful perspectives can you define the connection between now and future? You may approach this topic in terms of education, environment protection, personal development, investment, etc. Compose a short speech titled The future is now and deliver it in class.

2.Based on the results of your discussion (in Oral Work 2), write an essay of around 400 words reflecting on the concluding statement of this essay: I imagine that when we want something better, we may have it: at perhaps no greater price than we have already paid for the worse.

3.Compare and contrast the variety of evidence used and the different ways of presenting argument in “De-massifying the media” and “The Future is now”. Think about their advantages and limitations. Then make a list of your preferred ways presenting evidence and argument. Keep this list for future reference for your writing tasks.

Further Readings

Future Shock by Alvin Toffler

The Future by Al Gore

Learning with Big Data: The Future of Education byViktor Mayer-Sch?nberger