You experienced slow thinking as you proceeded through a sequence of steps. You 5 first retrieved from memory the cognitive program for multiplication that you learned in school, then you implemented it. Carrying out the computation was a strain. You felt the burden of holding much material in memory, as you needed to keep track of where you were and of where you were going, while holding on to the intermediate result. The process was mental work: deliberate, effortful, and orderly—a prototype
1. This work of ours entitled On Christian Doctrine was at the beginning divided into two parts. For after the Prologue in which I replied to those who would criticize it, I wrote, "There are two things necessary to the treatment of the Scriptures: a way of discovering those things which are to be understood, and a way of teaching what we have learned. We shall speak first of discovery and second of teaching." Since
I am twelve. When relatives come to visit I hide in my room. My cousin Brenda, just my age, whose father works in the post office and whose mother is a nurse, comes to find me. "Hello,'' she says. And then she asks, looking at my recent school picture, which I did not want taken, and on which the "glob," as I think of it, is clearly visible, "You still can't see out of that eye?"
"No," I say, and flop back on the bed over my book.
That night, as I do almost every night, I abuse my eye. I rant and rave at it, in 30 front of the mirror. I plead with it to clear up before morning. I tell it I hate and despise it. I do not pray for sight. I pray for beauty.
"You did not change," they say.
[1] Li: a traditional Chinese unit of distance; about one-third of a mile.
[1] Book of Documents: the Shu Ching, a collection of speeches, legal codes, government actions, and other reputedly primary texts from pre-Confucian Chinese dynasties.
[2] Spring and Autumn Annals: the Ch'un Ch'iu, a work of ancient history, traditionally thought to have been compiled by Confucius.
[3] This sentence is quoted from Analects XIV,
25, where it is attributed to Confucius. [Transla
tor's note]
[6] Chieh and Chou or Robber Chih: tradi- band of nine thousand criminals who terrorized tional figures in Chinese history. Cheih and all of China. Chou were tyrannical kings; Robber Chih led a
[7] . . . Free man: The word for "free man" in Latin is liber, the root word of liberal.
[8] Sappho (circa 630-circa 570 BCE): a Greek poet from the isle of Lesbos who was reputed to have loved both men and women. Homer's origin: Very little was known about Homer, the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Aeneas's real mother: Aeneas, the hero of Virgil's epic
[9] Protagoras (490-420 BCE): an early Sophist philosopher.
[10] Nausiphanes (circa 325 BCE): a Greek philosopher and scientist.
[11] Parmenides (fifth century BCE): an early
Greek philosopher whose belief that truth can
be derived only from reason, and not through the senses, was a significant influence on Plato.
[14] Elclass="underline" an archaic unit of measurement equal to forty-five inches. The saying "give him an inch and he will take an ell" is the forerunner of the
[15] Sheridan's: Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816) was a well-known Irish playwright and advocate for Catholic civil rights.
[16] Viz.: namely. under Difficulties (1866), by the American essayist
[17] Cicero: Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 bce),
Roman orator and statesman. The quotation below comes from his work De Officiis, or "On Duties" (44 bce).
[19] The palestra: in ancient Greece, the site of wrote a series of works on the history of Athens boxing, wrestling, and other physical competitions. during his own times. His best-known work, the
[20] Xenophon: a student (circa 431—circa 352 bce) Anabasis, tells of his travels through the Persian of Socrates and contemporary of Plato who Empire.
[21] This quotation comes from the fifth chapter of the first book of Aristotle's Rhetoric.
[22] Professor Trevelyon: George Macaulay 2. Stuarts: The kings and queens who ruled Trevelyan (1876—1962) was a British historian. England for most of the seventeenth century. His History of England was published in 1926, three years before A Room of One's Own.
[23] The Verneys and the Hutchinsons were both prominent families during the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. Frances Parthenope Verney (1819—1890) wrote Memoirs of the Verney Family during the 17th Century; which was published posthumously in 1904 (and which gained some fame in connection with Frances's younger sister, Florence Nightingale). Lucy Hutchinson (1620—1681) wrote the biography of her husband, John Hutchinson, in Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, which was not published until 1806. Lucy Hutchinson also produced the first known English translation of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura.
* "It remains a strange and almost inexplicable fact that in Athena's city, where women were kept in almost Oriental suppression as odalisques or drudges, the stage should yet have produced figures like Clytemnestra and Cassandra, Atossa and Antigone, Phedre and Medea, and all the other heroines who dominate play after play of the "misogynist" Euripides. But the paradox of this world where in real life a respectable woman could hardly show her face alone in the street, and yet on the stage woman equals or surpasses man, has never been satisfactorily explained. In modern tragedy the same predominance exists. At all events, a very cursory survey of Shakespeare's work (similarly with Webster, though not with Marlowe or Jonson) suffices to reveal how this dominance, this initiative of women, persists from Rosalind to Lady Macbeth. So too in Racine; six of his tragedies bear their heroines' names; and what male characters of his shall we set against Hermione and Andromaque, Berenice and Roxane, Phedre and Athalie? So again with Ibsen; what men shall we match with Solveig and Nora, Hedda and Hilda Wangel and Rebecca West?"—F. L. Lucas, Tragedy, pp. 114—15. [Author's note]
[24] Joanna Baillie: Scottish poet and playwright in their lifetimes for their literary achievements, (1762—1851); Mary Russell Mitford: English rare examples, for Woolf, of women writers whose poet (1787—1855). Both women were celebrated lives and writings are well known to the public.
[25] Maxwell's equations: equations that describe the properties of electric and magnetic fields.
[26] Diamagnetic substance: a substance that creates a magnetic field when another magnetic field is applied externally.
[27] James Wolfensohn: Australian banker (b. 1933) and president of the World Bank from 1995 to 2005.
[28] Congress Party: One of India's two major political parties.
[29] Spellings Commission Report: A 2006 report by the Commission on the Future of Higher Education, chaired by then Secretary
[30] Ephialtes and Otos: giants and sons of Poseidon who attacked Mt. Olympus and were tricked into killing each other.