Chapter 5: Shipwreck (Кораблекрушение) 8 страница

Of course, almost everyone understands why so many people want to believe in heaven, even now, even in the face of all the evidence, and all reason. It is a way – however futilely – of trying to escape the awful emptiness of death.

So yes, there is pain in seeing the truth about Heaven – but there is also a liberation in seeing beyond the childhood myths of our species. In The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in Babylon 4,000 years ago, the eponymous hero travels into the gardens of the gods in an attempt to discover the secret of eternal life. His guide tells him the secret – there is no secret. This is it. This is all we're going to get. This life. This time. Once. "Enjoy your life," the goddess Siduri tells him. "Love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace." It's Lennon's dream, four millennia ahead of schedule: above us, only sky. Gilgamesh returns to the world and lives more intensely and truly and deeply than before, knowing there is no celestial after-party and no forever. After all this time, can't we finally follow Gilgamesh to a world beyond heaven?

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/joh..

 

 

Приложение 3

EXERCISES O  N COMPREHE  NSION

Exercises C  hapter 1 T  he stowaway (Безбилетник)

1. Translate the following sentences from English into Russian:

1) In the beginning, the Ark consisted of eight vessels: Noah's galleon, which towed the stores ship, then four slightly smaller boats, each captained by one of Noah's sons, and behind them, at a safe distance (the family being superstitious about illness) the hospital ship. 2) There were other dangers on the Voyage apart from that of being turned into lunch. 3) Voyage. He also cracked the secret of long life, which has subsequently been lost to your species. 4) What would God think? That was the question always on his lips. 5) At this point we leave the harbour of facts for the high seas of rumour (that's how Noah used to talk, by the way). 6) I don't need to tell you that the animals were pretty divided about what to believe. 7) We weep when she finds no rest for the sole of her foot; we rejoice when she returns to the Ark with an olive leaf. 8) There were seven of us stowaways, but had we been admitted as a seaworthy species only two boarding-passes would have been issued; and we would have accepted that decision. 9) Now, it's true Noah couldn't have predicted how long his Voyage was going to last, but considering how little we seven ate in five and a half years, it surely would have been worth the risk letting just a pair of us on board. 10) And after all, it's not our fault for being woodworm.

2. Explain the meaning of the words and phrases:

mucking-out, squeamish, dressed for dinner, willy-nilly, grabbiest, read between the lines, smug, trying to hollow out a priest’s hole, that’s no way to go on, conservationist, a brutally intrusive nature, wipe and slate clean, the cradle, obliged to advertise, mange, keel-hauled, role-model, alkie, simians, shift the goalposts.

3. Make up a summary of the article:

Mount Ararat

Mount Ararat volcanic massif in extreme eastern Turkey, overlooking the point at which the frontiers of Turkey, Iran, and Armenia converge. Its northern and eastern slopes rise from the broad alluvial plain of the Aras River, about 3,300 feet (1,000 metres) above sea level; its southwestern slopes rise from a plain about 5,000 feet (1,500 metres) above sea level; and on the west a low pass separates it from a long range of other volcanic ridges extending westward toward the eastern Taurus ranges. The Ararat Massif is about 25 miles (40 km) in diameter.

Ararat consists of two peaks, their summits about 7 miles (11 km) apart. Great Ararat, which reaches an elevation of 16,945 feet (5,165 metres) above sea level, is the highest peak in Turkey. Little Ararat, rises in a smooth, steep, nearly perfect cone to 12,782 feet (3,896 metres). Both Great and Little Ararat are the product of eruptive volcanic activity. Neither retains any evidence of a crater, but well-formed cones and fissures exist on their flanks. Towering some 14,000 feet (4,300 metres) above the adjoining plains, the snowcapped conical peak of the Great Ararat offers a majestic sight. The snowline varies with the season, retreating to 14,000 feet above sea level by the end of the summer. The only true glacier is found on the northern side of the Great Ararat, near its summit. The middle zone of Ararat, measuring from 5,000 to 11,500 feet (1,500 to 3,500 metres), is covered with good pasture grass and some juniper; there the local Kurdish population graze their sheep. Most of the Great Ararat is treeless, but Little Ararat has a few birch groves. Despite the abundant cover of snow, the Ararat area suffers from scarcity of water.

Ararat traditionally is associated with the mountain on which Noah’s Ark came to rest at the end of the Flood. The name Ararat, as it appears in the Bible, is the Hebrew equivalent of Urardhu, or Urartu, the Assyro-Babylonian name of a kingdom that flourished between the Aras and the Upper Tigris rivers from the 9th to the 7th century BCE. Ararat is sacred to the Armenians, who believe themselves to be the first race of humans to appear in the world after the Deluge. A Persian legend refers to the Ararat as the cradle of the human race. There was formerly a village on the slopes of the Ararat high above the Aras plain, at the spot where, according to local tradition, Noah built an altar and planted the first vineyard. Above the village Armenians built a monastery to commemorate St. Jacob, who is said to have tried repeatedly but failed to reach the summit of Great Ararat in search of the Ark. In 1840 an eruption and landslide destroyed the village, the monastery of St. Jacob, and a nearby chapel of St. James, and it also killed hundreds of villagers. Local tradition maintained that the Ark still lay on the summit but that God had declared that no one should see it. In September 1829, Johann Jacob von Parrot, a German, made the first recorded successful ascent. Since then Ararat has been scaled by several explorers, some of whom claim to have sighted the remains of the Ark.

Written by «The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica».

 

Exercises C  hapter 2: T  he visitors (  Гости)

1. Translate the following sentences:

1) He was a tall, fleshy man somewhere in his forties, with pale gold hair and a reddish complexion which the envious put down to drink and the charitable to an excess of sun; his face seemed familiar in a way which made you forget to ask whether or not you judged it good-looking. 2). Nowadays Franklin travelled on a green Irish passport with a gold harp on the cover, which made him feel like a Guinness rep every time he produced it. 3) There was always at least one of them, playing the puzzled yet reasonable amateur; unfooled by received opinion, he - or she - knew that historians were full of bluff, and that complicated matters were best understood using zestful intuition untainted by any actual knowledge or research. 4) The second half of this gesture was not strictly necessary. 5) They waited for half an hour in a silence that smelt of urine before the leader of the visitors returned. 5) `When will that be?' Franklin felt himself a little carried away by his self-appointed role. 6) Ten minutes later an Arab they had not seen before came in and whispered to Hughes. 7) Occupants of the same cabin are to identify themselves as such. 8) They will be allowed to talk to one another for five minutes at each hour. 9) The good part was that so far they had been treated with reasonable civility; no-one had yet been beaten up or shot, and their captors didn't seem to be the hysterical butchers they might have expected. 10) Neither the leader nor the second-in-command survived, so there remained no witness to corroborate Franklin Hughes's story of the bargain he had struck with the Arabs.

2. Match a word or a phrase and its meaning:

3. Write an essay on any of the suggested topics:

1) How to fight terrorism?

2) Is terrorism a frequent phenomenon in our days?

3) What is terrorism?

 Exercises Chapter 3 The wars of religion (Религиозные войны)

1. Translate the following words and phrases:

the ecclesiastical court; woodworm; malevolent day; non-appearance; this court has no power and jurisdiction; traitors; the fish of the sea; the work was diabolically inspired.

2. Explain your point of view about the fairness of the ecclesiastical court. Is it true that animals should serve man or everyone has equal rights? Why?

3. Make a rendering of this excerpt from Chapter 3 “The wars of religion”.

Source; the Archives Municipales de Besançêon. The following case, hitherto unpublished, is of particular interest to legal historians in that the procureur pour les insectes was the distinguished jurist Bartholomé Chassenée (also Chassanée and Chasseneux), later first president of the Parlement de Provence. Born in 1480, Chassenée made his name before the ecclesiastical court of Autun defending rats which had been charged with feloniously destroying a crop of barley. The following documents, from the opening ptition des habitans to the final judgment of the court, do not represent the entire proceedings - for instance, the testimony of witnesses, who might be anything from local peasants to distinguished experts on the behavioural patterns of the defendants, has not been recorded - but the legal submissions embody and often specifically refer to the evidence, and thus there is nothing absent from the essential structure and argument of the case. As was normal at the time, the pleas and the conclusions du procureur épiscopal were made in French, while the sentence of the court was solemnly delivered in Latin.

The manuscript is continuous and all in the same hand. Thus we are not dealing with the original submissions as penned by each lawyer's clerk, but with the work of a third party, perhaps an official of the court, who may have omitted sections of the pleas. Comparison with the contents of boîtes 371-379 suggests that the case as it exists in this form was perhaps part of a set of exemplary or typical proceedings used in the training of jurists. This conjecture is supported by the fact that only Chassenée among the participants is identified by name, as if students were being directed to examine the instructive dexterity of a distinguished defence counsel, regardless of the result of the case. The handwriting belongs to the first half of the sixteenth century, so that if, as may be, the document is a copy of someone else's version of the trial, it is still contemporary. I have done my best to render the sometimes extravagant style of pleading - especially of the unnamed procureur des habitans - into a comparable English.

 

Exercises C  hapter 4: T  he Survivo  r (Уцелевш  ая)

1. Explain the meaning of the following phrases: antlers, to put all your eggs in one busket, the level of radioactivity, becquerels, sheeny, mossy branches, tangled horns, the lichen, cartoonists, becquerels, a reindeer, a corpse, to give up eating meat, a hoax on TV, pay-night, a bell-bull, to row about smth, to reckon, valves, the zinc cream, a know-all, verdure, nuclear war, persistent victim syndrome.

2. Translate the following sentences into Russian:

1) It wasn't a very serious accident, they said, not really, not like a bomb going off. 2) There was a cloud of poison, and everyone tracked its course like they'd follow the drift of quite an interesting area of low pressure on the weather map. 3) Then cartoonists started making jokes, about how the reindeer were so gleaming with radioactivity that Father Christmas didn't need headlights on his sleigh. 4) So, they raised the permitted limit for reindeer meat to 6,000 becquerels. 5) Greg said I ought to get him fixed so he'd be less aggressive and stop scratching the furniture. 6) Nowadays even fish are exploited, she thought. 7) Exploited, and then poisoned. She got close enough to see mangroves and palms, then the fuel ran out and the winds carried her away. 8) Anyone would think, looking at us, that Greg was the fitter to survive: he's bigger, stronger, more practical in our terms anyway, more conservative, more easy-going. 9) `Would we be right in thinking that with Greg you sort of were putting all your eggs in one basket? 10) We find that those with persistent victim syndrome often experience acute guilt when they finally take flight.