R.C. HUTCHINSON, a British novelist, exhibits an exceptional flair for touching the sensitive issues of the contemporary society – with all its contradictions and paradoxes. In ‘The Pace for Living’, R.C. Hutchinson captures the agony of modern man. He brings out how the fast movement of men, things and objects hurts the normal rhythm and exerts undue pressure on men, women and children.
I saw a play in Dublin not long ago in which the chief character was an elderly corn-merchant in a small Irish country town. He was a man of many anxieties-his heart was dicky, his nephew was cheating him, his wife had the fantastic notion of spending £10 on a holiday. Altogether the pace of life was getting too much for him, and in a moment of despair he uttered a great cry from the heart: “They tell me there’s an aeroplane now that goes at 1,000 miles an hour. Now that’s too fast!”
For me that was the most enchanting line in the play – the man’s complaint was so gloriously irrelevant to his own situation. And besides being comic, it struck me as a perfect illustration of the way the Irish get at subtle truths by the most unlikely approaches. You saw what the old fool meant.
Not that I have any dislike of rapid movement myself. I enjoy going in a car at ninety miles an hour – so long as I am driving and so long as it is not my car. I adore the machines that hurl you about at Battersea. To dine in London and lunch in New York next day seems to me a most satisfactory experience: I admit it excludes all the real pleasures of travel – the sort of fun you get from a country bus in Somerset or Spain – but it gives you a superficial sense of drama; it was a sort of excitement our ancestors had to do without, and we might just as well accept it gratefully. No, where speed becomes something unfriendly to me is where the mental activities of our time tend – as they naturally do – to follow the pace of the machines.
I speak with prejudice, because I belong to the tribe of slow thinkers, those who are cursed with l’esprit de l’escaliert: people who light on the most devastating repartee about four hours after the party’s over. I am one of those who are guaranteed to get the lowest marks in any intelligence test, because those tests or all the ones I have come across seem to be designed to measure the speed of your mind more than anything else. Obviously we slow thinkers are terribly handicapped in the business of getting a living. But what I am thinking about just now is not so much the practical use of one’s mind as its use for enjoyment.
As an example, when I go to the cinema I find myself in a hopeless fog, and after two or three minutes I have to turn to my wife for enlightenment. I whisper: “Is this the same girl as the one we saw at the beginning ?”And she whispers back: “No, there are three girls in this film – a tall blonde, a short blonde, and a medium-sized brunette. Call them A, B, and C. The hero is that man who takes his hat off when he comes indoors. He is going to fall in love with girls B, C, A in that order.”And so it proves to be. There you have a mind which has trained itself to work in high gear-though as a matter of fact it can work in other gears just as well. But my point is that most of my fellow-patients in the cinema do think fast enough to keep up comfortably with rapid changes of scene and action. They think much faster than people did thirty years ago: possibly because those who do not think fast in the High Street nowadays may not get another chance in this world to think at all.
PANORAMA ENGLISH BOOK PART 2 CLASS 10 PROSE
Chapter 1 The Pace for Living
Chapter 2 Me and The Ecology Bit
Chapter 3 Gillu
Chapter 4 What is Wrong with Indian Film
Chapter 5 Acceptance Speech
Chapter 6 Once Upon A Time
Chapter 7 The Unity of Indian Culture
Chapter 8 Little Girl Wiser Than Man
PANORAMA ENGLISH BOOK PART 2 CLASS 10 POETRY
Chapter 1 God Made The Country
Chapter 2 Ode On Solitude
Chapter 3 Polythene Bag
Chapter 4 Thinner Than a Crescent
Chapter 5 The Empty Heart
Chapter 6 Koel (The Black Cuckoo)
Chapter 7 The Sleeping Porter
Chapter 8 Martha
PANORAMA ENGLISH READER PART 2 CLASS 10TH SOLUTIONS BIHAR BOARD
Chapter 1 January Night
Chapter 2 Allergy
Chapter 3 The Bet
Chapter 4 Quality
Chapter 5 Sun and Moon
Chapter 6 Two Horizons
Chapter 7 Love Defiled
BIHAR BOARD CLASS 10TH ENGLISH WRITING
Unseen Passage for Comprehension Literary
Unseen Passage for Comprehension Factual
Letter Writing
Essay Writing
Paragraph Writing
Short Writing
Notice Writing
BIHAR BOARD CLASS 10TH ENGLISH GRAMMAR
Tenses
Modal Auxiliaries
Active and Passive Voice
Clauses
Narration Direct and Indirect Speech
Prepositions
Subject-Verb Concord
Determiners
Idioms and Phrases
Translation
