hce_nthu
112年
英文
第 33 題
📖 題組：
We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. To grieve is to lament, to let sorrow inhabit one’s very being. Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, “leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.” Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish---to let others vanish---without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art. I was initiated into the poetry of grief---of raw, heroic, aboriginal grief---on a windy autumnal morning in late October 1968. I was eighteen years old. I knew I had found what I was unknowingly seeking on the day my freshman humanities teacher---a petite woman with an immense vocabulary, the only person I’d ever met who spoke in perfectly formed sentences---stood up in class and started talking about Achilles’s desperate response to the death of his friend Patroclus. I felt something obscure oping inside me, I recognized some unknown, some unassuaged rage of feeling, a frenzied internal sobbing, a delirium of grief. I looked out the window and saw the mad leaves swirling and falling everywhere. I was transported. Here is the passage in Richmond Lattimore’s translation. It is from Book 18 of The Iliad. Nestor’s son Antilochus has just given Achilles the message that his closest friend, his trusted ally and brother-in-arms, had been killed wearing Achilles’s own armor. Now enemies were fighting over Patroclus’s naked body: He spoke, and the black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilles. In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it over his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance, and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic. And he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay at length, and took and tore at his hair with his hands, and defiled it. My teacher must have gone on to talk about Achilles’s feelings of guilt and shame, his deep sense of responsibility over his friend’s death. This is a pivotal incident in The Iliad because it triggers Achilles’s reentry into battle and therefore assures the destruction of Troy. It’s the only way to account for his uncharacteristically savage revenge on Hector. But I couldn’t follow closely what she was saying because some part of my mind was stuck on the primal image of Achilles smearing his face with dirt and tearing out his hair. I recognized the image from somewhere…
We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. To grieve is to lament, to let sorrow inhabit one’s very being. Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, “leaving poetry free to go its way in tears.” Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish---to let others vanish---without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art. The poet is one who will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art. I was initiated into the poetry of grief---of raw, heroic, aboriginal grief---on a windy autumnal morning in late October 1968. I was eighteen years old. I knew I had found what I was unknowingly seeking on the day my freshman humanities teacher---a petite woman with an immense vocabulary, the only person I’d ever met who spoke in perfectly formed sentences---stood up in class and started talking about Achilles’s desperate response to the death of his friend Patroclus. I felt something obscure oping inside me, I recognized some unknown, some unassuaged rage of feeling, a frenzied internal sobbing, a delirium of grief. I looked out the window and saw the mad leaves swirling and falling everywhere. I was transported. Here is the passage in Richmond Lattimore’s translation. It is from Book 18 of The Iliad. Nestor’s son Antilochus has just given Achilles the message that his closest friend, his trusted ally and brother-in-arms, had been killed wearing Achilles’s own armor. Now enemies were fighting over Patroclus’s naked body: He spoke, and the black cloud of sorrow closed on Achilles. In both hands he caught up the grimy dust, and poured it over his head and face, and fouled his handsome countenance, and the black ashes were scattered over his immortal tunic. And he himself, mightily in his might, in the dust lay at length, and took and tore at his hair with his hands, and defiled it. My teacher must have gone on to talk about Achilles’s feelings of guilt and shame, his deep sense of responsibility over his friend’s death. This is a pivotal incident in The Iliad because it triggers Achilles’s reentry into battle and therefore assures the destruction of Troy. It’s the only way to account for his uncharacteristically savage revenge on Hector. But I couldn’t follow closely what she was saying because some part of my mind was stuck on the primal image of Achilles smearing his face with dirt and tearing out his hair. I recognized the image from somewhere…
Which of the following is true according to the author of this passage?
- A Robert Frost suggests that poetry is essentially propagandistic.
- B We should divide grief into recognizable stages so that we can label, tame and put it behind us.
- C It is useless to let sorrow inhabit one’s very being.
- D Our culture which has become increasingly intolerant of grief is superficial.
- E Robert Frost’s distinction between grievances and griefs is pointless.
思路引導 VIP
請回想一下文章的第一段，作者開頭用來形容現代媒體文化（media-driven culture）的那個關鍵形容詞是什麼？接著，他又是如何描述這個文化在面對人們深層的悲傷（acute sorrow）時展現出的態度呢？
🤖
AI 詳解
AI 專屬家教
同學，做得非常好！你能精準捕捉到作者對現代文化的批判，顯示出你具備優異的長文脈絡解讀能力。
文意脈絡與文化觀察
這題的核心在於理解作者如何定義「當代文化」與「悲慟感（grief）」之間的關係。文章首段便開宗明義地指出，我們生活在一個由媒體驅動的**淺薄文化（superficial culture）**中，這種文化對於深層情緒，尤其是劇烈的悲傷與痛苦，展現出越來越高的不耐煩與排斥。選項 (D) 正是將「社會的不耐」與「文化的淺薄」這兩者建立起直接的邏輯聯繫，完全符合文中的論述重心。
▼ 還有更多解析內容