"THE UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS" - читать интересную книгу автора (Parlette Ralph)

"Father of Waters"--Go on south forever!


X. GOING UP LIFE'S MOUNTAIN--The defeats that are victories--
Climbing Mount Lowe--Getting above the clouds into the sunshine--
Each day we rise to larger vision--Getting above the night into
the eternal day--Going south is going upward

* * *



Some Preliminary Remarks

LADIES and Gentlemen:
I do not want to be seen in this lecture. I want to be heard. I am
only the delivery wagon. When the delivery wagon comes to your house,
you are not much interested in how it looks; you are interested in
the goods it brings you. You know some very good goods are sometimes delivered
to you in some very poor delivery wagons.

So in this lecture, please do not pay any attention to the delivery
wagon--how much it squeaks and wheezes and rattles and wabbles. Do
not pay much attention to the wrappings and strings. Get inside to
the goods.

Really, I believe the goods are good. I believe I am to recite to
you some of the multiplication table of life--not mine, not yours
alone, but everybody's.

* * *

I Can Only Pull the Plug!


Every audience has a different temperature, and that makes a
lecture go differently before every audience. The kind of an
audience is just as important as the kind of a lecture. A cold
audience will make a good lecture poor, while a warm audience will
make a poor lecture good.

Let me illustrate:

When I was a boy we had a barrel of sorghum in the woodshed. When
mother wanted to make ginger-bread or cookies, she would send me to
the woodshed to get a bucket of sorghum from that barrel.

Some warm September day I would pull the plug from the barrel and
the sorghum would fairly squirt into my bucket. Later in the fall
when it was colder, I would pull the plug but the sorghum would not