2. 职称英语
  3. He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body — a sickly

He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body — a sickly

游客2024-11-27  1
问题     He was an undersized little man, with a head too big for his body — a sickly little man. His nerves were bad. He had skin trouble. It was agony for him to wear anything next to his skin coarser than silk. And he had delusions of grandeur.
    He was a monster of conceit. Never for one minute did he look at the world or at people, except in relation to himself. He was the only most important person in the world, to himself; in his own eyes he was the only person who existed. He believed himself to be one of the greatest dramatists in the world, one of the greatest thinkers, Beethoven, and Plato, rolled into one. And you would have had no difficulty in hearing him talk. He was one of the most exhausting conversationalists that ever lived. An evening with him was an evening spent in listening to a monologue. Sometimes he was brilliant; sometimes he was maddeningly tiresome. But whether he was being brilliant or dull, he had one sole topic of conversation: himself. What he thought and what he did.
    He had a mania for being in the right. The slightest hint of disagreement, from anyone, on the most trivial point, was enough to set him off on a harangue that might exhausting volubility, and that in the end his hearer, stunned and deafened, would agree with, for the sake of peace.
    It never occurred to him that he and his doing were not of the most intense and fascinating interest to anyone with whom he came in contact. He had theories about almost any subject under the sun, including vegetarianism, the drama, politics, and music; and in support of these theories he wrote pamphlets, letters, books...thousands upon thousands of words, hundreds and hundreds of pages. He not only wrote these things, and published them — usually at somebody else’s expense — but he would sit and read them aloud, for hours, to his friends and his family.
    He had the emotional stability of a six-year-old child. When he felt out of sorts, he would rave and stamp, or sink into suicidal gloom and talk darkly of going to the East to end his days as a Buddhist monk. Ten minutes later, when something pleased him, he would rush out of doors and run around the garden, or jump up and down on the sofa, or stand on his head.
    He was almost innocent of any sense of responsibility. Not only did he seem incapable of supporting himself, but it never occurred to him that he was under any obligation to do so. He was convinced that the world owed him a living. In support of this belief, he borrowed money from everybody who was good for a loan — men, women, friends, or strangers. He wrote begging letters by the score, sometimes groveling without shame, at others loftily offering his intended benefactor the privilege of contributing to his support, and being mortally offended if the recipient declined the honor. I have found no record of his ever paying or repaying money to anyone who did not have a legal claim upon it.
    The name of this monster was Richard Wagner. Everything that I have said about him you can find on record: in newspapers, in police reports, in the testimony of people who knew him, in his own letters, between the lines of his autobiography. And the curious thing about this record is that it doesn’t matter in the least. Because this undersized, sickly, disagreeable, fascinating little man was right all the time. The joke was on us. He was one of the world’s greatest dramatists; he was a great thinker; he was one of the most stupendous musical geniuses that, up to now, the world has ever seen. The world did owe him a living.
    When you consider what he wrote — thirteen operas and music dramas, eleven of them still holding the stage, eight of them unquestionably worth ranking among the world’s great musical-dramatic masterpieces — when you listen to what he wrote, the debts and heartaches that people had to endure from him don’t seem much of a price. Think of the luxury with which for a time, at least, fate rewarded Napoleon, the man who mined France and looted Europe; and then perhaps you will agree that a few thousand dollars’ worth of debts were not too heavy a price to pay for the Ring trilogy.
    Listening to his music, one does not forgive him for what he may or may not have been. It is not a matter of forgiveness. It is a matter of being dumb with wonder that poor brain and body didn’t burst under the torment of the demon of creative energy that lived inside him, struggling, clawing, scratching to be released; tearing, shrieking at him to write the music that was in him. The miracle is that what he did in the little space of seventy years could not have been done at all, even by a great genius. Is there any wonder that he had no time to be a man? [br] Those who first argued against Wagner finally agreed with him because they
选项 A、were worn out by his long speech.
B、were convinced by his sound argument.
C、were forced to keep silent.
D、loved him too much to argue with him any longer
答案 A
解析 事实细节题。第三段第二句说到，“任何人在最无足轻重的问题上露出丝毫的异议，都会激得他强烈谴责。他可能会一连好几个小时滔滔不绝，千方百计地证明自己如何如何正确。有一种使人耗尽心力的雄辩本事，听者最后都被他弄得头昏脑胀，耳朵发聋，为了图个清静，只好同意他的说法。”可见听者最后赞同瓦格纳是因为受不了他长篇大论的谈话，故答案为[A]。[B]“被他有力的论断说服”、[D]“太爱他而不愿跟他继续争辩”都和原文相去甚远，皆可排除。听者是为了图个耳根清净勉强同意他的看法，而不是被迫保持沉默，故排除[C].
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