SAT阅读练习题:Reading Comprehension Test 6.

SAT阅读练习题 SAT Reading Comprehension Test 6

I have yet to meet a poetry-lover under thirty who was not an introvert, or an introvert who was not unhappy in adolescence. At school, particularly, maybe, if, as in my own case, it is a boarding school, he sees the extrovert successful, 5 happy, and good and himself unpopular or neglected; and what is hardest to bear is not unpopularity, but the consciousness that it is deserved, that he is grubby and inferior and frightened and dull. Knowing no other kind of society than the contingent, he imagines that this arrangement is part of the eternal scheme of 10 things, that he is doomed to a life of failure and envy. It is not till he grows up, till years later he runs across the heroes of his school days and finds them grown commonplace and sterile, that he realizes that the introvert is the lucky one, the best adapted to an industrial civilization the collective values of which are so 15 infantile that he alone can grow, who has educated his fantasies and learned how to draw upon the resources of his inner life. At the time, however, his adolescence is unpleasant enough. Unable to imagine a society in which he would feel at home, he turns away from the human to the nonhuman: homesick he will seek, 20 not his mother, but mountains or autumn woods, and the growing life within him will express itself in a devotion to music and thoughts upon mutability and death. Art for him will be something infinitely precious, pessimistic, and hostile to life. If it speaks of love it must be love frustrated, for all success seems to 25 him noisy and vulgar; if it moralizes, it must counsel a stoic resignation, for the world he knows is well content with itself and will not change.