Samuel Johnson Is Indignant Read Online Free Page A

about myself in that instant. I was behaving as though I had no responsibility to anyone or anything, and that made me feel as though I existed outside society, some kind of criminal, or didn’t exist at all. I was annihilating myself even more than him. It was an awful violation.”
    She paused, thoughtful. We were sitting inside now, because it was raining. We had come inside to sit in a sort of lounge or recreation room provided for guests of that lakeside camp. The rain fell every afternoon there, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. Across the water, the white pines and spruces were very still against the gray sky. The water was silver. We did not see any of the water birds we sometimes saw paddling around the edges of the lake—teals and loons. Inside, a fire burned in the fireplace. Over our heads hung a chandelier made of antlers. Between us stood a table constructed of a rough slab of wood resting on the legs of a deer, complete with hooves. On the table stood a lamp made from an old gun. She looked away from the lake and around the room. “In that book about the Adirondacks I was reading last night,” she remarked, “he says this was what the Adirondacks was all about, I mean the Adirondacks style: things made from things.”
    A month or so later, when I was home again and she was back in the city, we were talking on the telephone and she said she had been hunting through one of the old diaries she had on her shelf there, that might say exactly what had happened—though of course, she said, she would just be filling in the details of something that did not actually happen. But she couldn’t find this incident written down anywhere, which of course made her wonder if she had gotten the dates really wrong and she wasn’t even in boarding school anymore by then. Maybe she was in college by then. But she decided to believe what she had told me. “But I’d forgotten how much I wrote about boys,” she added. “Boys and books. What I wanted more than anything else at the age of sixteen was a great library.”

Examples of Remember
    Remember that thou art but dust.
    I shall try to bear it in mind .

Old Mother and the Grouch
    â€œMeet the sourpuss,” says the Grouch to their friends.
    â€œOh, shut up,” says Old Mother.
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    The Grouch and Old Mother are playing Scrabble. The Grouch makes a play.
    â€œTen points,” he says. He is disgusted.
    He is angry because Old Mother is winning early in the game and because she has drawn all the s’s and blanks. He says it is easy to win if you get all the s’s and blanks. “I think you marked the backs,” he says. She says a blank tile doesn’t have a back.
    Now he is angry because she has made the word qua . He says qua is not English. He says they should both make good, familiar words like the words he has made— bonnet, realm , and weave —but instead she sits in her nasty corner making aw, eh, fa, ess , and ax . She says these are words, too. He says even if they are, there is something mean and petty about using them.

    Now the Grouch is angry because Old Mother keeps freezing all the food he likes. He brings home a nice smoked ham and wants a couple of slices for lunch but it is too late—she has already frozen it.
    â€œIt’s hard as a rock,” he says. “And you don’t have to freeze it anyway. It’s already smoked.”
    Then, since everything else he wants to eat is also frozen, he thinks he will at least have some of the chocolate ice cream he bought for her the day before. But it’s gone. She has eaten it all.
    â€œIs that what you did last night?” he asks. “You stayed up late eating ice cream?”
    He is close to the truth, but not entirely correct.
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    Old Mother cooks dinner for friends of theirs. After the friends have gone home, she tells the Grouch the meal was a failure: the salad dressing had too much salt in