English Recordings

For my brother’s fifth grade science project, he designed a BizWiz. Talk about pretending: this thing was a GPS velcroed to a cell phone velcroed to a Palm Pilot. Of course my father helped him with the idea, but getting an A+ turned out to do more harm than good. Prior to the project, my brother had been blind to my online activities. Preferring the Playstation console, television, or goofing off outside, he avoided anything that potentially involved reading or effort. I am not sure how it happened, but one day I bounded home from the bus to find my brother compromising the cushion of my swivel chair. I glimpsed the images on the screen for one instant before I yelped and he screamed and my mother appeared and yes, were we both grounded.
Even with my mother’s repeated attempts to add IE security controls and my constant criticism, my brother’s usage yield ravaged the system, wracked it with viruses, rendering it nearly intolerable. After repeated wails, bribes, cries, fits, and pleadings, my mother buckled and bought a brand new computer.
Her computer. She told my brother and me that it was only to be used for homework. If we wanted to do anything else with it, we’d have to use the old one. Obviously, threatening us with homelessness after a crippling identity theft sure-fated by our delinquencies did absolutely nothing. Her machine was instantly cheese-holed by Trojans, worms, and ad clients. My brother couldn’t resist, I couldn’t desist, could not cease to connect. Like history disappears into the fraying cobwebs of old, my mother’s “new” computer moved into the creaky attic just as had its predecessor.

My move to diverse media consumption was sparked by my first venture into a chat room at the tender age of thirteen. I had been poking around in forums, but they were too redundant for my tastes. I had overcome the frights of Y2K meltdown (I must have asked my mother fifty times a day if she were sure my “baby” was going to make it) and had begun to investigate e-mail. I didn’t know anyone with an e-mail address, let alone anyone that would be worth communicating with. In chat rooms, my identity was malleable from PM window to PM window. Not only could I delight in my own imaginary world, I was actually convincing another person, an older person, that my a/s/l was factual. I remember pretending to be seventeen and from France, thinking I was really pulling the wool, until I typed “wee wee”.
It made me feel powerful, exacerbating my grandiose feelings of skill and ability, until my mother found out what I was doing. She told me it was wrong, pretending to be someone I wasn’t, and forbade me to talk in any chat rooms. I’d better not disobey her, because she would be checking the browsing history. Completely unfazed, I gleefully deleted the cookies, temporary files, and any other record that I had been misbehaving. I was stupid to think my mother was clueless; nonetheless I made sure I visited a bunch of other pages to cover the hours I’d been holed up. I was leading a life where the truth could bend and a lie could win. I was completely obsessed and entirely naïve to the perils of pretending.

I had been including the computer as a daily activity – move-in day I demanded it be set up before my own bed – and I thought I was an expert, a consummate pro. On the blustery blizzarding days when Mom said it was too cold to play outside, great! I instantly gravitated to the glow of our new 1 Ghz HP with speakers attached right to the monitor. I boasted to schoolmates that ours had been upgraded from 256 megabytes of RAM to 512, the speakers were attached right at the monitor so you could hear it better, and it had the Internet.
“What’s that, you say? You’ve never used the Internet? Well then, you’re behind the times, you’re slacking, you’ve got to get online!” I would taunt my friends with updates from what I conceptualized as “the real world”, spewing random knowledge forth from my trivial pursuits. At school I would stare at the red second hand spiraling on the clock face as my professor’s Charlie Brown womp-womp voice droned endlessly. I was chomping at the bit to get on the bus, from which I would race up the driveway into the house, barreling up the stairs and sliding into my cushiony swivel chair where I would spend the next four or five hours. I was addicted to information.

I’ll admit it, I was spoiled. In my armoire, I had a Texas Instruments computer that I used to play games like Parsec and Alpiner. The facts that the main console didn’t have a mouse, was sold separately from the monitors, and were unable to connect to the Internet or other computers didn’t mean a thing to me. Today, I get hot and bothered over the lack of a video camera and Flash on the iPad. I was perfectly happy in this idyllic dream world of side-shooting and slaloming , until my Dad decided to purchase a real computer, a then top-of-the-line 100 Mhz NEC.
At the time, I thought all I could accomplish with the technology was play software games. Until I discovered I could listen to music; I was amazed it would let me play the same song as many times as I’d like. Clearly, I knew nothing about the Internet, or how it was used. Even after we moved into a townhouse in sweltering Longwood, Florida and I had hours alone to kill, I was still fixed on those damned software games. In my defense, these amusements had becoming increasingly more appealing since my upgrade from the floppy-driven Texas Instruments. [N.B. – Don’t play Doom right before bedtime.]
I did not become acquainted with the temptations and trifles of the Internet until 1999 when we moved into our current house in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. Old enough, I could recognize my parents had been alpha-nerds: my Mom had traipsed the country teaching healthcare professionals how to use CT (then, CAT) scanners. My father toiled traveling the world, innovating solutions for healthcare information technology and knowledge management. Yet, I still considered myself smarter than they were when it came to using the computer. Why?

Finding Me: The Journey of a Thousand Miles Starts with One Step
Once upon a time, there was a fundamental shift of focus from the flow of goods and operational efficiency to the flow of information and knowledge. As the sand sifts through the hourglass, this parable chronicles the evolution of my identity. I know where I am, but it’s meaningless if I’ve forgotten where I was and how far I’ve come.
This is the quintessential Kimberly Rose Waldbillig.
Instead of caring about buying the cereal with the coolest toy and finding the shortest, fastest route to the mall, I am completely immersed in learning and teaching. The passive-aggressive mentality proffered by academia has initiated this metamorphosis from child to adult. Chaos and crisis have characterized my experiences thus far. From cramming some semblance of a social life into an overload curriculum, managing and motivating free riders on group projects, to trying to find a decent job – the real world seems more harrowingly brutish now than it ever has.
Thinking about growing up in Savage, Minnesota sends me into nostalgic childhood reverie . Taking off my training wheels, ice skating (slamming into snow banks), belly-sliding on the front lawn down a thirty-foot ice slide, kissing my next door neighbor in his treehouse, finishing a 3D puzzle of Cinderella’s castle – it all seems so effortless, compared to today. I wish I had a mental archive of my thought processes from way back then. My hindsight is completely a blur . It’s wondrous to think that we all come out cognitively as blank slates, sponges waiting to soak up the wealth of the world. I might have been able to spell words like turmoil and strife, but by no means would I have used them to describe my life.

Wall street traders, bankers, and hedge fund managers are a hardcharing lot. The purssuit of financial gain is what they do for a living. Whether or not their vocation taints their character, their virtue is unlikely to rise or fall with the stock market. So if it's wrong to reward greed with big bailout bouses, isn't it also wrong to reward it with market largess? The public was outraged when, in 2008, Wall Street firms (some on taxpayer - subsidized life support)handed out $16billion in bonuses. But this figure was less than half the amounts paid out in 2006($34billion)and 2007(33billion). If greed is the reason they don't deserve the money now, on what basis can it be said they deserved the money then?
One obvious difference is that bailout bonuses come from the taxpayer while the bonuses paid in good times come from company earnings. If the outrage is based on the conviction that the bonuses are undeserved, however, the source of the payment is not morally decisive. But it does provide a clue: the reason the bonuses are coming from the taxpayer is that the companies have failed. This takes us to the heart of the complaint. The American public's real objection to the bonuses and the bailout is not that they reward greed but that they reward failure.

Americans are harder on failure than on greed. In market-driven societies, ambitious people are expected to pursue their interests vigorouusly, and the line between self-interest and greed often blurs. But the line between success and failure is etched more sharply. And the idea that people deserve the reward that succes bestows is central to the American dream.
Notwithstanding his passing reference to greed, President Obama understood that rewarding failure was the deeper source of dissonanace and outrage. In announcing limits on executive pay at companies receiving bailout funds, Obama identified the real source of bailout outrage:

This is America. We don't disparage wealth. We don't begrudge anybody for achieving success. And we certainly believe that success should be rewarded. But what gets people upset ---and rightfully so are executives being rewarded for failure, especially when those rewards are subsidized by U.S taxpayers.

One of the most bizarre statements about bailout ehics came from Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa), a fiscal conservative from the heartland. At the height of te bonus furor, Grassley said in an Iowa radio interview that what bothered him most was the refusal of the corporate executives to take any blame for their failures. He would " feel a bit better towards them if they would follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say "I'm sorry", and then either do one of two things-resign or go commit suicide."
Grassley later explained that he was not calling on the executives to commit suicide. But he did want them to accept responsibility for their failure, to show contrition, and to offer a public apology. "I haven't heard this from CEOs, and it just makes it very difficult for the taxpayers fo my district to just keep shoveling money out the door"
Grassley's comments ssupport my hunch that the bailout anger was not mainly about greed; what most offended Americans' sense of justice was that their tax dollars were being used to reward failure.

Habermas, the Last European
A Philosopher's Mission to Save the EU. Part 2: A Vision of Europe at the Crossroads.
(By Georg Diez).

This also explains why he gazed happily at the audience on this mid-November evening in Paris. Habermas is a fairly tall, lanky man. As he stepped onto the stage, his relaxed gait gave him a slightly casual air. With his legs stretched out under the table, he seemed at home. Whether he's at a desk or not, this is his profession: communicating and exchanging ideas in public.

He was always there when it was a question of putting Germany back on course, in other words, on his course -- toward the West, on the path of reason: during the vitriolic debate among German historians in 1986 that focused on the country's approach to its World War II past; following German reunification in 1990; and during the Iraq War. It's the same story today as he sits here, at a table, in a closed room in the basement of the Goethe Institute, and speaks to an audience of 200 to 250 concerned, well-educated citizens. He says that he, the theorist of the public sphere, doesn't have a clue about Facebook and Twitter -- a statement which, of course, seems somewhat antiquated, almost even absurd. Habermas believes in the power of words and the rationality of discourse. This is philosophy unplugged.

While the activists of the Occupy movement refuse to formulate even a single clear demand, Habermas spells out precisely why he sees Europe as a project for civilization that must not be allowed to fail, and why the "global community" is not only feasible, but also necessary to reconcile democracy with capitalism. Otherwise, as he puts it, we run the risk of a kind of permanent state of emergency -- otherwise the countries will simply be driven by the markets. "Italy Races to Install Monti" was a headline in last week's Financial Times Europe.

On the other hand, they are not so far apart after all, the live-stream revolutionaries from Occupy and the book-writing philosopher. It's basically a division of labor -- between analog and digital, between debate and action. It's a playing field where everyone has his or her place, and it's not always clear who are the good guys and who are the bad guys. We are currently watching the rules being rewritten and the roles being redefined.

A Dismantling of Democracy

"Sometime after 2008," says Habermas over a glass of white wine after the debate, "I understood that the process of expansion, integration and democratization doesn't automatically move forward of its own accord, that it's reversible, that for the first time in the history of the EU, we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn't think this was possible. We've reached a crossroads."

It also has to be said: For being Germany's most important philosopher, he is a mind-bogglingly patient man. He is initially delighted that he has managed at last to find a journalist whom he can tell just how much he abhors the way certain media ingratiate themselves with Merkel -- how he detests this opportunist pact with power. But then he graciously praises the media for finally waking up last year and treating Europe in a manner that clearly demonstrates the extent of the problem.

"The political elite have actually no interest in explaining to the people that important decisions are made in Strasbourg; they are only afraid of losing their own power," he says, before being accosted by a woman who is not entirely in possession of her faculties. But that's how it is at such events -- that's how things go with coercion-free discourse. "I don't fully understand the normative consequences of the question," says Habermas. The response keeps the woman halfway at a distance.

He is, after all, a gentleman from an age when having an eloquent command of the language still meant something and men carried cloth handkerchiefs. He is a child of the war and perseveres, even when it seems like he's about to keel over. This is important to understanding why he takes the topic of Europe so personally. It has to do with the evil Germany of yesteryear and the good Europe of tomorrow, with the transformation of past to future, with a continent that was once torn apart by guilt -- and is now torn apart by debt.

Without Complaint

In the past, there were enemies; today, there are markets -- that's how the historical situation could be described that Habermas sees before him. He is standing in an overcrowded, overheated auditorium of the Université Paris Descartes, two days before the evening at the Goethe Institute, and he is speaking to students who look like they would rather establish capitalism in Brussels or Beijing than spend the night in an Occupy movement tent.

After Habermas enters the hall, he immediately rearranges the seating on the stage and the nametags on the tables. Then the microphone won't work, which seems to be an element of communicative action in practice. Next, a professor gives a windy introduction, apparently part of the academic ritual in France.

Habermas accepts all this without complaint. He steps up to the lectern and explains the mistakes that were made in constructing the EU. He speaks of a lack of political union and of "embedded capitalism," a term he uses to describe a market economy controlled by politics. He makes the amorphous entity Brussels tangible in its contradictions, and points to the fact that the decisions of the European Council, which permeate our everyday life, basically have no legal, legitimate basis. He also speaks, though, of the opportunity that lies in the Lisbon Treaty of creating a union that is more democratic and politically effective. This can also emerge from the crisis, says Habermas. He is, after all, an optimist.

Then he's overwhelmed by the first wave of fatigue. He has to sit down. The air is stuffy, and it briefly seems as if he won't be able to continue with his presentation. After a glass of water, he stands up again.

He rails against "political defeatism" and begins the process of building a positive vision for Europe from the rubble of his analysis. He sketches the nation-state as a place in which the rights of the citizens are best protected, and how this notion could be implemented on a European level.

Reduced to Spectators

He says that states have no rights, "only people have rights," and then he takes the final step and brings the peoples of Europe and the citizens of Europe into position -- they are the actual historical actors in his eyes, not the states, not the governments. It is the citizens who, in the current manner that politics are done, have been reduced to spectators.

His vision is as follows: "The citizens of each individual country, who until now have had to accept how responsibilities have been reassigned across sovereign borders, could as European citizens bring their democratic influence to bear on the governments that are currently acting within a constitutional gray area."

This is Habermas's main point and what has been missing from the vision of Europe: a formula for what is wrong with the current construction. He doesn't see the EU as a commonwealth of states or as a federation but, rather, as something new. It is a legal construct that the peoples of Europe have agreed upon in concert with the citizens of Europe -- we with ourselves, in other words -- in a dual form and omitting each respective government. This naturally removes Merkel and Sarkozy's power base, but that's what he's aiming for anyway.

Then he's overwhelmed by a second wave of fatigue. He has to sit down again, and a professor brings him some orange juice. Habermas pulls out his handkerchief. Then he stands up and continues to speak about saving the "biotope of old Europe."

There is an alternative, he says, there is another way aside from the creeping shift in power that we are currently witnessing. The media "must" help citizens understand the enormous extent to which the EU influences their lives. The politicians "would" certainly understand the enormous pressure that would fall upon them if Europe failed. The EU "should" be democratized.

His presentation is like his book. It is not an indictment, although it certainly does at times have an aggressive tone; it is an analysis of the failure of European politics. Habermas offers no way out, no concrete answer to the question of which road democracy and capitalism should take.

A Vague Future and a Warning from the Past

All he offers is the kind of vision that a constitutional theorist is capable of formulating: The "global community" will have to sort it out. In the midst of the crisis, he still sees "the example of the European Union's elaborated concept of a constitutional cooperation between citizens and states" as the best way to build the "global community of citizens."

Habermas is, after all, a pragmatic optimist. He does not say what steps will take us from worse off to better off.

What he ultimately lacks is a convincing narrative. This also ties Habermas once again to the Occupy movement. But without a narrative there is no concept of change.

He receives a standing ovation at the end of his presentation.

"If the European project fails," he says, "then there is the question of how long it will take to reach the status quo again. Remember the German Revolution of 1848: When it failed, it took us 100 years to regain the same level of democracy as before."

A vague future and a warning from the past -- that's what Habermas offers us. The present is, at least for the time being, unattainable.

Translated from the German by Paul Cohen.
(From http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,799237-2,00.html)

Habermas, the Last European.
A Philosopher's Mission to Save the EU
(By Georg Diez)

Jürgen Habermas has had enough. The philosopher is doing all he can these days to call attention to what he sees as the demise of the European ideal. He hopes he can help save it -- from inept politicians and the dark forces of the market.
Jürgen Habermas is angry. He's really angry. He is nothing short of furious -- because he takes it all personally.

He leans forward. He leans backward. He arranges his fidgety hands to illustrate his tirades before allowing them to fall back to his lap. He bangs on the table and yells: "Enough already!" He simply has no desire to see Europe consigned to the dustbin of world history.
"I'm speaking here as a citizen," he says. "I would rather be sitting back home at my desk, believe me. But this is too important. Everyone has to understand that we have critical decisions facing us. That's why I'm so involved in this debate. The European project can no longer continue in elite modus."

Enough already! Europe is his project. It is the project of his generation.

Jürgen Habermas, 82, wants to get the word out. He's sitting on stage at the Goethe Institute in Paris. Next to him sits a good-natured professor who asks six or seven questions in just under two hours -- answers that take fewer than 15 minutes are not Habermas' style.

Usually he says clever things like: "In this crisis, functional and systematic imperatives collide" -- referring to sovereign debts and the pressure of the markets.

Sometimes he shakes his head in consternation and says: "It's simply unacceptable, simply unacceptable" -- referring to the EU diktat and Greece's loss of national sovereignty.

'No Convictions'

And then he's really angry again: "I condemn the political parties. Our politicians have long been incapable of aspiring to anything whatsoever other than being re-elected. They have no political substance whatsoever, no convictions."

It's in the nature of this crisis that philosophy and bar-room politics occasionally find themselves on an equal footing.

It's also in the nature of this crisis that too many people say too much, and we could definitely use someone who approaches the problems systematically, as Habermas has done in his just published book.

But above all, it is in the nature of this crisis that the longer it continues, the more confusing it gets. It becomes more difficult to follow its twists and turns and to see who is responsible for what. And the whole time, alternatives are disappearing before our very eyes.

That's why Habermas is so angry: with the politicians, the "functional elite" and the media. "Are you from the press?" he asks a man in the audience who has posed a question. "No? Too bad."

Habermas wants to get his message out. That's why he's sitting here. That's why he recently wrote an article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper, in which he accused EU politicians of cynicism and "turning their backs on the European ideals." That's why he has just written a book -- a "booklet," as he calls it -- which the respected German weekly Die Zeit promptly compared with Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch."

But does he have an answer to the question of which road democracy and capitalism should take?

A Quiet Coup d'État

"Zur Verfassung Europas" ("On Europe's Constitution") is the name of his new book, which is basically a long essay in which he describes how the essence of our democracy has changed under the pressure of the crisis and the frenzy of the markets. Habermas says that power has slipped from the hands of the people and shifted to bodies of questionable democratic legitimacy, such as the European Council. Basically, he suggests, the technocrats have long since staged a quiet coup d'état.

"On July 22, 2011, (German Chancellor) Angela Merkel and (French President) Nicolas Sarkozy agreed to a vague compromise -- which is certainly open to interpretation -- between German economic liberalism and French etatism," he writes. "All signs indicate that they would both like to transform the executive federalism enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty into an intergovernmental supremacy of the European Council that runs contrary to the spirit of the agreement."

Habermas refers to the system that Merkel and Sarkozy have established during the crisis as a "post-democracy." The European Parliament barely has any influence. The European Commission has "an odd, suspended position," without really being responsible for what it does. Most importantly, however, he points to the European Council, which was given a central role in the Lisbon Treaty -- one that Habermas views as an "anomaly." He sees the Council as a "governmental body that engages in politics without being authorized to do so."

He sees a Europe in which states are driven by the markets, in which the EU exerts massive influence on the formation of new governments in Italy and Greece, and in which what he so passionately defends and loves about Europe has been simply turned on its head.

A Rare Phenomenon

At this point, it should be mentioned that Habermas is no malcontent, no pessimist, no prophet of doom -- he's a virtually unshakable optimist, and this is what makes him such a rare phenomenon in Germany.

His problem as a philosopher has always been that he appears a bit humdrum because, despite all the big words, he is basically rather intelligible. He took his cultivated rage from Marx, his keen view of modernity from Freud and his clarity from the American pragmatists. He has always been a friendly elucidator, a rationalist and an anti-romanticist.

Nevertheless, his previous books "Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere" and "Between Facts and Norms" were of course somewhat different than the merry post-modern shadowboxing of French philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Jean Baudrillard. What's more, another of Habermas' publications, "Theory of Communicative Action," certainly has its pitfalls when it comes to his theory of "coercion-free discourse" which, even before the invention of Facebook and Twitter, were fairly bold, if not perhaps naïve.
Habermas was never a knife thrower like the Slovenian thinker Slavoj Žižek, and he was no juggler like the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. He never put on a circus act, and he was always a leftist (although there are those who would disagree). He was on the side of the student movement until things got too hot for him. He took delight in the constitution and procedural matters. This also basically remains his position today.

Habermas truly believes in the rationality of the people. He truly believes in the old, ordered democracy. He truly believes in a public sphere that serves to make things better.
(From http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,799237,00.html)

• Hello everyone,♡how are you all?
The following entry is from my entry yesterday in Chinese and English.
• (The entry below is from my Chinese entry from yesterday.)
• I tried to describe a thing that I saw on my way home in English.Thanks for reading. Have a good Friday!

--(Feb 23th 2012)---------------------------------------------
I`ll talk about one thing which/that I saw on my way home this evening.
When I was on the way home, I found a car stopped on the road/ street when I tried to turn left at a traffic light.
• -(when I tried to turn left at the traffic light, I found a car stopped in the road/street.
• As you can see from my picture taken today, the front bumper of that car`s front bumper fell off and tumbled down the street.
• It seems that when this car tried to turn right, a pickup truck hit it straight on, which caused the car`s front bumper to fall.
• I also wanted to make a left turn, so I waited briefly before I turned at the traffic lights.
• The second picture is from today`s lunch, which I took with some students.
• The third picture is Betty, which I took yesterday.
• Yesterday she gazed at me for a while and I felt that her eyes were really charmingly clear, so I took a picture of her eyes.
• (Thanks for reading. Please correct my mistkaes. ~^.^~ )

"Here, take your pineapple juice," gently persuaded Koppel, the male nurse.

"No!" said Collis P. Ellsworth firmly.

"But it’s good your you, sir."

"No!"

"It’s the doctor’s orders."

"No!"

Koppel heard the front door bell and was glad to leave the room. He found Doctor Caswell in the hall downstairs. "I can’t do a thing with him," he told the doctor. "He won’t take his pineapple juice. He doesn’t want me to read to him. He hates the radio. He doesn’t like anything."

Doctor Caswell received the information with his usual professional calm. He had done some thinking since his last visit. This was no ordinary case. The old gentleman was in pretty good shape for a man of seventy-six years. But he had to be prevented from buying things. He had suffered his last heart attack after his disastrous purchase of that small railroad out in Iowa. The attack before that came from the excitement caused by the failure of the chain of grocery stores which he had previously bought at a very high price. All of his purchases of recent years had to be liquidated at a great sacrifice both to his health and his pocketbook. Though he was still very wealthy, his health had begun to show serious effects from these various business operations.

Collis P. Ellsworth sat in a huge armchair by the window. He looked around as Doctor Caswell asked, "Well, how’s the young man today?"

"Umph!" said the figure in the chair in a rather disagreeable tone.

"I hear that you haven’t been obeying orders," the doctor said.

"Who’s giving me orders at my time of life?"

The doctor drew up his chair and sat down close to the old man. "I’ve got a suggestion for you," he said quietly.

Old Ellsworth looked suspiciously over his eyeglasses. "What is it, more medicine, more automobile rides, more foolishness to keep me away from my office?"

"How would you like to take up art?" The doctor had his stethoscope ready in case the suddenness of the suggestion proved too much for the patient’s heart.

But the old man’s answer as a strong "Foolishness!"

"I don’t mean seriously," said the doctor, relieved that nothing had happened. "Just play around with chalk and crayons. It’ll be fun."

"Foolishness!"

"All right." The doctor stood up. "I just suggested it, that’s all."

Collis P. paused a moment. The wrinkles in his forehead deepened a little. "Where’d you get this crazy idea, anyway?"

"Well, it’s only a suggestion--"

"But, Caswell, how do I start playing with the chalk—that is, if I’m foolish enough to start?"

"I’ve thought of that, too. I can get a student from one of the art schools to come here once a week and show you. If you don’t like it after a while, you can throw him out."

Doctor Caswell went to his friend, Judson Livingston, head of the Atlantic Art Institute, and explained the situation. Livingston had just the young man—Frank Swain, eighteen years old and an excellent student. He needed the money. He ran an elevator at night to pay for his schooling. How much would he get?" Five dollars a visit. Fine.

The next afternoon young Swain was shown into the big living room. Collis P. Ellsworth looked at him suspiciously. "Let’s try and draw that vase over there on the table," he suggested.

"What for? It’s only a bowl with some blue stains on it. Or are they green?"

"Try it, Mr. Ellsworth, please."

"Umph!" The old man took a piece of crayon in a shaky hand and drew several lines. He drew several more and then connected these crudely. "There it is, young man," he said with a tone of satisfaction. "Such foolishness!" Frank Swain was patient. He needed the five dollars. "If you want to draw you will have to look at what you’re drawing, sir."

Ellsworth looked. "Gosh, it’s rather pretty. I never noticed it before."

Koppel came in with the announcement that his patient had done enough for the first lesson.

"Oh, it’s pineapple juice again," Ellsworth said. Swain left.

<hr>

When the art student came the following week, there was a drawing on the table that had a slight resemblance to a vase. The wrinkles deepened at the corners of the old gentleman’s eyes as he asked, "Well, what do you think of it?"

"Not bad, sir," answered Swain. "But it’s not quite straight."

"Gosh," old Ellsworth smiled, "I see. The halves don’t match." He added a few lines with a shaking hand and colored the open spaces blue like a child playing with a picture book. The he looked towards the door. "Listen, young man," he whispered, "I want to ask you something before old pineapple juice comes back."

"Sure, Mr. Ellsworth."

"Good. Let’s make it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Four o’clock."

Kopple entered and was gently surprised when his patient took his pineapple juice without protest.

As the weeks went by Swain’s visit grew more frequent. He brought the old man a box of water colors and some tubes of oils.

When Doctor Caswell called, Ellsworth would talk about the graceful lines of the chimney. He would mention something about the rich variety of color in a bowl of fruit. He proudly showed the various stains of paint on his dressing gown. He would not allow his servant to send it to the cleaner’s. He wanted to show the doctor how hard he’d been working.

The treatment was working perfectly. No more trips downtown to his office for the purpose of buying some business that was to fail later. No more crazy financial plans to try the strength of his tried old heart. Art was a complete cure for him.

The doctor thought it safe to allow Ellsworth to visit the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and other exhibitions with Swain. An entirely new world opened up its mysteries to him. The old man showed a tremendous curiosity in the art galleries and in the painters who exhibited in them. How were the galleries run? Who selected the pictures for the exhibitions? An idea was forming in his brain.

When the late spring began to cover the fields and gardens with color Ellsworth painted a simply horrible picture of which he called, "Trees Dressed in White." Then he made a surprising announcement. He was going to exhibit the picture in the summer show at the Lathrop Gallery.

For the summer show at the Lathrop Gallery was the biggest art exhibition of the year—in quality, if not in size. The lifetime dream of every important artist in the United States was a prize for this exhibition. Among the paintings of this distinguished group of artists Ellsworth was now going to place his "Trees Dressed in White," which resembled a handful of salad dressing thrown violently against the side of the house.

"If the newspapers hear about this, everyone in town will be laughing at Mr. Ellsworth. We’ve got to stop him," said Kopple.

"No," warned the doctor. "We can’t interfere with him now and take a chance of ruining all the good work which we have done."

To the complete surprise of all three—and especially Swain—"Trees Dressed in White" was accepted for the Lathrop show. Not only was Mr. Ellsworth crazy, thought Koppel, but the Lathrop Gallery was crazy, too.

Fortunately the painting was hung in an inconspicuous place where it did not draw any special notice or comment. Young Swain slipped into the museum one afternoon and blushed to the top of his ears when he saw "Trees Dressed in White," a loud, ugly picture on a wall otherwise covered with paintings of beauty and harmony. As two laughing students stopped before a strange picture Swain left hurriedly. He could not bear to hear what they had to say.

During the course of the exhibition the old man kept on taking lessons, seldom mentioning his picture in the exhibition. He was unusually cheerful. Every time Swain entered the room he found Ellsworth laughing to himself. Maybe Koppel was right. The old man was crazy. But it seemed equally strange that the Lathrop committee should encourage his craziness by accepting his picture.

Two days before the close of the exhibition a special messenger brought a long official-looking envelope to Collis P. Ellsworth while Swain, Kopple, and the doctor were in the room. "Read it to me," said the old man. "My eyes are tired from painting."

It gives the Lathrop Gallery great pleasure to announce that the First Prize of $1,000 had been awarded to Collis P. Ellsworth for his painting, "Trees Dresses in White."

Swain and Kopple were so surprised that they could not say a word. Doctor Caswell, exercising his professional self-control with a supreme effort, said: Congratulations, Mr. Ellsworth. Fine, fine….Of course, I didn’t expect such great news. But, but—well, now, you’ll have to admit that art is much more satisfying than business."

"Art has nothing to do with it," said the old man sharply. "I bought the Lathrop Gallery last month."