English mock exam

ENGLISH WRITTEN EXAM Read the article below (it is an interview with Andrew Keen, author of The Internet is not the Answer) and then answer the three questions at the end Watching the Ashley Madison hack unfold would make even Pollyanna doubt human virtues The Internet service itself—a tool for partners to cheat on their significant others—was bad enough But then hackers stole and leaked private data of 30 million users, leaving an aftermath of shattered families, unconfirmed suicides and devastated careers Extortionists are now adding fuel to the inferno, falsely promising to expunge records for AM users who haven’t yet been outed The scenario highlights the digital dark side that author and entrepreneur Andrew Keen criticizes in his latest book The Internet Is Not the Answer Keen, who reaped the Web’s benefits as the founder of Audiocafe.com and an employee at various technology companies, has turned sour on Internet culture “Rather than making us happy,” he writes, “it’s compounding our rage.” Keen is director of FutureCast, a series of salon-style discussions with tech influencers, and hosts Internet chat show “Keen On,” where he bills himself as the “Antichrist of Silicon Valley.” While Keen takes big swipes at the Net’s impact on humanity, he doesn’t completely sidestep tech’s benefits; rather, he wants humans to take more responsibility for shaping the technology that shapes us We asked Keen to expand on those views for #maketechhuman What excites you about where we’re headed with technology? I’m excited by technology that can really solve profound problems like educating people who have had no chance historically and who might have a chance if they learn to read I was just reading The Economist, which has a story about $1-a-week schools Technology that solves core problems like global warming… While I’m dubious in some ways of self-driving cars, because of the big-data element and the idea that we can be tracked wherever we go, the idea and the principal notion of self-driving cars can solve a lot of our environmental problems and also be a tremendous lifesaver Most aspects of technology excite me—and that we have enough problems in the world for it to address What doesn’t excite me is the way in which some people, particularly in Silicon Valley, think all solutions are technological What worries you? The thing that most worries me is the way in which technology is on the verge of destroying jobs More and more technology is replacing labor whether it’s drivers or people who work in stores and I think that we’re on the brink of a profound crisis in labor I also think about privacy We’re not literally in public but I think it’s harder and harder to maintain a really private life in the big-data age where companies like Google and Facebook know everything about us and their business model is mining our data It doesn’t mean they’re evil They’re not Big Brother This isn’t 1984 It’s something different, but it’s still troubling Why are you such an outspoken critic of Internet culture? The idea of there being technology and culture, or technology and society, or technology and the individual, and technology shaping those things is very problematic Technology is part of a complex web of things that are determining our identity Technology itself wasn’t delivered by a stork It comes with cultural assumptions and biases of its own It comes out of a specific place, particularly in Northern California So rather than seeing technology as the cause of narcissism or isolation or loneliness or ignorance, it’s both a cause and a consequence of both the great strengths and weaknesses of our culture There’s no doubt that there’s a lot of remarkable creativity and energy, vitality, vibrancy on the Internet, but on the other hand, it’s also compounding the narcissism of our culture Narcissism wasn’t invented by the digital revolution Greeks were the ones who invented the idea of it We’ve always been a little bit in love with ourselves, but selfie culture certainly compounds that It’s creating a culture of what Nicholas Carr calls “the shallows,” where we can’t concentrate on anything Where we’re forever obsessed with the latest new thing Douglas Rushkoff calls it the “culture of now,” where we’ve lost both our ability to remember and to forget Many of the things which I think are troubling people are themselves problematic about the Web, and I think one has to be very careful not to fall into the trap of blaming everything on the Internet You’ve said the Internet needs a “Bill of Responsibilities.” What would you include? When I talk about a bill of responsibilities, I’m contrasting that with the idea of a bill of rights, which Tim Berners-Lee calls for The idea of a bill of responsibility is it’s part of a social contract When we go on there, we have certain obligations One thing would be to treat other people decently, not to steal other people’s content We have a bill of responsibilities towards ourselves not to be addicted to this thing, so we don’t spend 12 hours a day checking our Facebook updates, and our Twitter updates, and our email The idea of responsibility is something that’s lacking broadly in our culture and it’s certainly lacking on the Internet That’s what troubles me about, say, the network neutrality debates—the idea that they’re taking the Internet away from us As if the Internet is this thing that was delivered to everybody on Christmas because we behave well, which is nonsense We don’t deserve the Internet Most of us don’t deserve the Internet because we’re abusing it I like the idea of a bill of responsibilities as something that gets to the core of what’s going on That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have rights on the Internet, but I think that responsibilities are more important than rights, and if we were more responsible in our use I think [the Internet] would be a better place How you think about the Internet in your personal life? As a communications tool, as an information resource, it’s invaluable I couldn’t one percent of what I without the Internet We have to get beyond this idea that either one is against technology and living in a cave or one is super-networked The reality is that most of us are super-networked, but we’re also ambivalent about some of the technology and that’s the camp I would put myself in I’m anything but a Luddite One of the things that annoys some of my critics is that they cannot believe that I’m both an entrepreneur and a critic You can be—and actually the best ones are, like Jaron Lanier He invented virtual reality and now he’s very critical of technological culture How you imagine our digital society will evolve? One of the dangers of my kind of work and position is that we can fall into this generational trap We turn into a generational island and say there’s people like myself who appreciate books and movies, and then there’s young people who are ignorant and stupid and wasting their time on Twitter and Facebook The reality is that all of us, whether we’re 60 or 16, are wrapped up in a lot of this nonsense My belief is that we’re going to be led out of this by young people We’re still in the 1950s with all this technology We’re still in the Eisenhower years, where we never had it so good We’re on the brink of the ’60s—the rebellion The kids who are growing up now and have been given iPhones since they were two, who are being surrounded with all this technology, they’re the ones who are going to rebel People who’ve grown up in purely digital culture are going to rediscover the book; they’re going to rediscover physical newspapers; they’re going to rediscover the physical meeting Write out the ten passages underlined IN YOUR OWN WORDS Write a summary of the whole article in about 300 words (250-350 words) Do you agree with the argument in the concluding paragraph in italics? Write an answer in about 300 words (250-350 words) _ ENGLISH EXAM Read the article below and then the following THREE things Put the passages underlined into your own words (10 pts) Summarise the main points of the article (10 pts) Comment upon the article giving your own views of its arguments (10 pts) Do we really want to live forever – or even for an extremely long time? It might seem that this is something we would relish After all, we have a strong instinct of self-preservation Danger rarely raises a yawn, while to be saved from death brings gasps of relief and a new appreciation of life Suicide is rare, and frequently provoked by intolerable conditions of health or life Therefore it would appear that we love life and want as much of it as we can get This is the point at which Miguel de Unamuno seems to arrive in his Tragic Sense of Life: What we really long for after death is to go on living this life, this same mortal life, but without its ills, without its tedium and without death Seneca, the Spaniard, gave expression to this in his Consolatio ad Marciam (xxvi); what he desired was to live this life again: ista moliri And what Job asked for (xix 25-7) was to see God in the flesh, not in the spirit And what but that is the meaning of that comic conception of eternal recurrence, which issued from the tragic soul of poor Nietzsche, hungering for concrete and temporal immortality? Unamuno thinks that what we desire is this life with a few unpleasantnesses shaved away - illness, chores and death That is why, in his view, writers as different as Seneca, Job and Nietzsche all want to ground their views of the hereafter in what they are already experiencing here on earth 'How well the Spiritualists bait their hook', writes C.S.Lewis '"Things on this side are not so different after all." There are cigars in Heaven For that is what we should all like The happy past restored.' But is that true? In the sense that Lewis, grieving after the loss of his wife, wanted her back again, it might have been true But is a future that stretches this life out to eternity, while peeling away a few discomforts, really what we long for in any afterlife? Lewis may not be right in the view that we just want the happy past restored and then extended indefinitely One could tire of an endless supply of cigars, even if it no longer mattered that they were a health hazard Mortality as a Friend One of the most famous accounts of the supposed bitterness of immortality is provided by Jonathan Swift in 'Gulliver's Travels' Swift introduces us to the immortals of Luggnagg, called Struldbrugs, who are born with a red spot on their foreheads over their left eyebrows, a characteristic that marks them out to live forever Gulliver is asked what he thinks of the Struldbrugs His initial reaction is that theirs is an enviable state They are 'born exempt from that universal calamity of human nature without the weight and depression of spirits caused by the continual apprehension of death.' Gulliver's hosts are interested in this remark, and ask him what he would if he were himself a Struldbrug Gulliver replies that he would amass wealth and learning, acquiring an encyclopaedic knowledge so as to become a 'living treasury of knowledge and wisdom' He would observe with unceasing interest and wonder the path of history, seeing 'ancient cities in ruins and obscure villages become the seats of kings' He would be able to record the advance of science and, if not moral advance (Swift does not seem to allow for this - he talks of 'barbarity overrunning the politest nations, and the most barbarous becoming civilised'), at least the changing fortunes of different countries He would cease to marry after 60 (by which time he would presumably be a widower) and would concentrate upon educating the young with the wisdom born of his ever-lengthening experience of life We may conclude that Gulliver sees himself as an eternally happy boulevardier of human existence, marking it, recording it and from his greater knowledge of it instructing others Gulliver's reaction causes great amusement among the Luggnaggians They point out to him that countries without any Struldbrugs of their own always fear death and see it as the greatest of evils In such lands 'whoever had one foot in the grave was sure to hold back the other as strongly as he could' In Luggnagg, however, it was generally recognised that immortality was a fate worse than death Gulliver had forgotten the effects of age He was imagining himself forever in the prime of youth, with the mental vigour and physical health that attend it He should bear in mind that the perpetual life the Struldbrugs lead comes with 'all the usual disadvantages which old age brings along with it' By the age of eighty they have 'all the follies and infirmities of other old men', made worse by the knowledge that there would be no escape from them to death, the 'harbour of rest to which they themselves can never hope to arrive' Envy and impotent desires are their prevailing passions Their failing memories mean that they can hardly be the repositories of knowledge and wisdom that Gulliver imagines them to be Over the centuries senility steadily sets in, until they are robbed of the power of reading - since by the time they reached the end of a sentence they have forgotten how it began - and even of talking, since language has by then changed out of recognition, making them foreigners in their own country As for their fellow human beings, they tend to despise these immortals At the age of eighty they lose their property to their heirs, have no employment and are left to eke out a miserable existence on a pittance Their immortal lives are a misery to every one of them, except perhaps the lucky minority who have relapsed into complete dotage If in Gulliver's own country there still exists a fear of death, his hosts tell him, he might like to take one or two Struldbrugs with him in order to educate his fellow citizens Gulliver meets a few Struldbrugs and is persuaded that theirs is indeed a miserable existence He concludes that 'no tyrant could invent a death into which I would not run with pleasure from such a life' Despite Swift's comments, there are plenty of people who seem determined to live on, even as a Struldbrug The last chapter mentioned the interest in cryonics, a technique for keeping bodies at sub-zero temperatures until a way can be found of reviving them But even were it to succeed, it would still raise all the problems of Swift's Struldbrugs Certainly it might be exciting to come back in a hundred years' time and see how the world had changed - it would carry some of the excitement of being whisked off in a time machine But the seventy-year-old cancer victim who is 'frozen' in, say, 2010, and spends two hundred years in suspended animation, effectively comes back in 2210 as a seventy-yearold who has recovered from a two-hundred-year-long operation and now has to find a way of continuing his or her life in an entirely unfamiliar environment He or she would continue to age, might well fall victim to other diseases requiring further periods of suspended animation, and would eventually lose so many faculties that at the age of a hundred and ten or a hundred and twenty the option of coming back might not seem so compelling However, we might feel that Swift's account is less about the horrors of immortality than the horrors of old age Part of his satire concerned the treatment of the elderly, and might well resonate in the twenty-first century where the old are constantly portrayed in negative terms as a drain upon the exchequer Immortality, we might feel, would indeed be terrible if it was attended by the ever-increasing infirmity of old age We would be left, in the famous words of Jaques as he concludes his soliloquy on the seven stages of human life in Shakespeare's As You Like It, 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything' - and in the Struldbrugs case sans an end to it all as well But there are other ways in which we might conceive of immortality We might, for instance, live forever at a particular age The elixir of life, after all, is one of eternal youth If we were forever young, wouldn't immortality then be the sort of unending delight that Gulliver at first imagined it to be? Don't those people who keep hoping that somewhere in our genetic makeup there lies the instructions for ageing and death have a justifiable aim? They want to cut out the undesired instructions for ageing from the corresponding strand of DNA and enable us to remain young indefinitely The argument therefore becomes that mortality is only a friend to those who have to endure the terminal illness which we call ageing If we could be forever thirty years old, (the age often chosen by Christian writers speculating about the afterlife, and taking the age when Jesus began his ministry as the moment when a person is at the height of their powers) what sort of a friend would mortality be to us then? The Makropoulos Case Interestingly, even the prospect of eternal youth has not led all writers to embrace the prospect of living forever with relish In 'The Makropoulos Case: Reflections on the Tedium of Immortality' Professor Bernard Williams concentrates not on the question of whether we are immortal but, in his words, 'what a good thing it is that we are not' Though he regards death as an evil, he also believes that 'from facts about human desire and happiness and what a life is, it follows that immortality would be, where conceivable at all, intolerable.' 'The Makropoulos Case' is the title of a play by the Czech writer Karel Čapek The play is less well known than the opera based upon it by Czech composer Janaček Its central character is a woman on whom the court physician to a sixteenth century emperor has tried out the elixir of life At the time of the action she is 342 years old and her unending life has resolved itself into boredom and coldness She refuses to have anything more to with the elixir and dies; meanwhile a young woman destroys the formula Elina Makropoulos was 342 because she had been 42 for 300 years, so her problem was not that like the Struldbrugs she had grown old and decrepit Through the repeated patterns of social contact that make up her life, she increasingly finds that experiences happen to her without affecting her, making her increasingly detached and withdrawn Everything is joyless to her Of course we may say that such a reaction depends on the character of the person making it We may also note, as Williams points out, that an environment where everyone was immortal might have a different effect to one in which, as in the Makropoulos case, only one person is But he does not think that these qualifications affect his main argument ' to suppose more generally that boredom and inner death would be eliminated if everyone were similarly becalmed, is an empty hope: it would be a world of Bourbons, learning nothing and forgetting nothing ' Elina Makropoulos descends into 'boredom and distance from life'; these 'both kill desire and consist in the death of it.' They show that the prospect of immortality can be of no comfort to those 'who want to live longer because they want to live more' Swift referred to the ageing Struldbrugs as becoming 'incapable of friendship' and 'dead to all natural affection' The suggestion of Čapek, picked up by Williams, is that this might come from mere longevity, and not through the ever-increasing mental and physical incapacity that attends growing old We would not lose our physical and mental virility, but we would be drained of feeling and love Life would be the endless pleasure that ultimately cloys Wordsworth provides a slightly different variant of the idea that life loses its vitality as we grow older: There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream It is not now as it hath been of yore;Turn whereso'er I may, By night and day, The things which I have seen I now can see no more Wordsworth, unlike Williams, has a strong sense that we have come from God ('trailing clouds of glory we come/From God who is our home'), and therefore that the magnificence we have lost is something which we once had, as if life simply took us further and further away from the glorious past we had in the direct presence of our Maker The poem is not, perhaps, entirely settled in its view On the one hand Wordsworth feels increasingly detached from nature and his childhood vision, a sentiment that suggests Elina Makropoulos and her increasing distance from life On the other hand the poet strikes an optimistic chord too He is still linked to that childhood vision through memory and thought - 'O joy! that in our embers/Is something that doth live' - and age does not obliterate it - 'Though inland far we be,/ Our souls have sight of that immortal sea/Which brought us hither' Such a power of reawakening past glory through the exercise of reflection can be compared to Wordsworth's famous account of poetry as 'emotion recollected in tranquillity' Nevertheless, some of the most powerful passages of Wordsworth’s poem present an inescapable sense of loss, of something that is either irrecoverable or only recoverable second-hand, as if the person who fell out of love had now to be content with reading about the passions of others When the child grows up and 'fits his tongue' to 'dialogues of business, life or strife', he is already parted from this early glory He has become 'the little Actor' who 'cons another part'; Filling from time to time his 'humorous stage' With all the Persons, down to palsied Age, That life brings with her in her equipage; As if his whole vocation Were endless imitation Endless life in the popular imagination On a lighter but still significant note, the supposed boredom of endless life has been a regular theme in science fiction The only two of Terry Pratchett's novels to centre upon science fiction themes, Strata and Dark Side of the Sun, both suggest the tedium of immortality In Strata rich people don't die of old age; they pay for a regular operation But 200-yearold Kin Arad, beneficiary of a surgical company that pays in 'days' rather than cash (days added to life by surgical improvements), is the Struldbrug tiring of life in this novel Indeed as death becomes more avoidable, so the willingness of people to go on dangerous, 'death-defying' expeditions increases All that happens through the great strides taken by medical science to prevent people dying is an increasing take-up of backpacking expeditions on the wrong side of Saturn In Dark Side of the Sun death is avoided through a technologically guaranteed capacity to predict the future and thereby avoid all risks, with similarly unrewarding results Douglas Adams' Life, the Universe and Everything has a similar theme with the 'infinitely prolonged Wowbagger', who is made immortal by accident and can't cope with his 'good luck' Though Adams' book implies that there are immortals who know how to cope with endless life, we don't discover anything about how they so It is Wowbagger's feelings, dreading yet another turgid Sunday afternoon, that are given full rein It is not difficult to think of characters from literature with no end to their lives in sight who are presented in a state of suffering, like the endlessly wandering Flying Dutchman, captain of a ghostly ship doomed to sail the seven seas forever, and for whom the 'land' he yearns for might as well be the end of his life Why else is the literary creation of the 'undead' seen as a punishment rather than a reward? Dracula knows better than any the endless wandering, the sadness of never-ending life Such literary creations appear to echo Mark Benecke’s view that ‘if death does not curb life, life loses its value' He seems to think that continuous living here on earth would make us feel like the pusillanimous souls in Dante’s Inferno who are rejected by Heaven and Hell alike: They are without even the hope of death; Their blind existence is of such abjection That they are envious of every other fate Given the treatment it is given in much popular literature, we might be inclined to feel some sympathy with the position of Professor Williams, who died himself at the age of 70, keeping strictly to the requirements of a biblical threescore years and ten If suicide is, as this chapter began by arguing, a rare event and most people relish the living of life, it is because they are aware that it is relatively short Were endless centuries of living suddenly to stretch out before human beings, suicide might rapidly become the most common cause of death Mortality as an enemy Williams makes a powerful case for the potential staleness and ennui of living forever, which will be taken up and developed further in the chapter on Heaven However, some have questioned the creative impulse brought by mortality as much as others have undermined that brought by immortality It should not be assumed, they suggest, that the coming of death 'concentrates our minds wonderfully', as Dr Johnson famously remarked concerning the prospect of a hanging, or that somehow knowing that the symphony will end enables us to enjoy the music even more The prospect of an inevitable end to our lives might instead drain us of energy or immobilise us Death might be the shocking reality round the corner that saps us of our will to live or react In other words, it might be romanticising death to see it as the spur to creativity or even intensity of feeling in this life An example of this view would be Philip Larkin's poem Aubade The first lines make it clear that the prospect of death has a negative rather than a positive effect on the subject of the poem Rather than being 'concentrated wonderfully' by the prospect of death, the mind of this individual is distracted and upset by it I work all day, and get half-drunk at night Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die There is no sense here of the prospect of death somehow being stimulating Far from it Death, which constantly 'stays just on the edge of vision' as an 'unfocused blur' is described as 'a standing chill that slows each impulse down to indecision' Death does not encourage creativity It freezes it out, mesmerising the person who is moving closer every day towards an unavoidable dissolution Like an animal frozen by headlights in the dark, the ageing individual can think of nothing else than impending death It could even be said that Larkin himself exemplified this, in that his output dried up in middle age Aubade, written in 1977 when he was 55, was one of very few that he managed in the decade before his death Perhaps death had become the one thing that he could still write about The horror of death, the poem insists, has nothing to with remorse for things done or not done ('time torn off unused'), but rather concerns the prospect of 'total emptiness forever', of 'the sure extinction that we travel to and shall be lost in always' Religion, the poem goes on, offers no solution in its pretence that we never die Nor is there solace to be had in the Lucretian observation that there is nothing to fear in death since we will not be there to regret the situation we are in For it is precisely the fact that we will not be there that so upsets us, so that 'realisation of it rages out in furnace-fear when we are caught without people or drink' The phrase 'furnace-fear' suggests imagery of hell, but a hell brought into this life precisely by the fear of death The only answer is to have recourse to distractions, like the monarch described in Pascal's Pensées, forever demanding endless entertainment from his court jester - in modern 'democratic' times everyone has their personal court jester in the form of a television set Even courage in the face of death serves no purpose, because 'being brave lets no one off the hook Death is no different whined at than withstood' Not only has it been claimed the prospect of death robs life of its creativity, but it has also been claimed that it robs it of meaning In Being and Nothingness, Sartre examines the idea that ‘death becomes the meaning of life as the resolved chord is the meaning of melody’ The metaphor recalls the idea of a finite life as the only tolerable one, much as even the most beautiful music can be heard once too often However, Sartre’s understanding is very different Finitude, for him, is a very different matter to death Finitude is bound up with the fact that human existence involves choices, and whatever we choose means inevitably rejecting a different pathway through life Sartre’s existentialism is strongly based upon the idea of human freedom; not simply the pathway we choose through life but our personality itself is a project made by our will (he quotes approvingly Alain’s idea that ‘character is a vow’) Death is not the basis or a condition of this freedom It is an absurd (Sartre’s own word to describe death) intrusion In almost all cases it does not appear ‘at the right time’ in order to round off a life, but (as the Bible itself tells us – see Matthew 25:1-13, the parable of the ‘foolish virgins’) like a thief in the night – ‘Keep awake then; for you never know the day or the hour’ Sartre compares us to a condemned prisoner (again there is the suggestion of Dr Johnson’s condemned man whose mind is being ‘concentrated wonderfully’) who prepares in his prison cell for the end to come the next morning, only to be suddenly carried off prematurely by ‘flu In another analogy Sartre offers, a good first book may show that someone can be a great writer; or it may show that this writer had only one good book in him or her But if the person dies, it is impossible to tell, and the sacrifices which this person made to art can never be properly assessed They might have been mediocre and destined never to write better books; or they might have been a Balzac who died before Les Chouans If the end were truly to be like the last chord of a symphony, then it should not arrive by chance but be part of the melody as such It is not, however There is what Sartre calls a ‘perpetual appearance of chance at the heart of my projects’, and this can never be apprehended as my possibility – in other words taken up by me as part of my own project for my life Death can be part of no one’s life plan Thus death is never that which gives life its meanings; it is, on the contrary, that which on principle removes all meaning from life If we must die, then our life has no meaning because its problems receive no solution and because the very meaning of the problems remains undetermined Sartre’s strong sense of human freedom highlights something important about the nature of death – something arguably closer to the parable of the ‘foolish virgins’ in Matthew 25 than to the naïve assumption that we are somehow entitled to our threescore years and ten (or more), that medicine or ‘civilisation’ has somehow provided us all with a lifetime guarantee Death remains the unwelcome visitor who chooses his moment rather than the welcome guest – as even Sartre puts it, ‘the Christian death comes from God He chooses our hour….’ Conclusion This chapter raised the issue of whether an indefinitely prolonged life would be experienced as increasingly unpleasant until we wished for an end to it Citing Swift, it suggested that were we to become increasingly older and more frail, life would clearly become intolerable, but what if, like Čapek's Elina Makropoulos, we stayed forever (at least so far as our physical constitution was concerned) at one age, as in the mediaeval dreams of an 'elixir'? Could life then be endlessly blissful as we met the challenge of new projects, or is there some kind of built-in spiritual entropy so that, like it or not, we become gradually more and more removed from and tired of life, more separated from the 'glory' it once had (whether or not we associate that 'glory' with childhood in quite the way Wordsworth did)? Such considerations prepare us for the attempt to describe Heaven, the traditionally 'dull partner' in attempts to visualise Heaven and Hell Does Heaven need to be more than life as it is, purged of a few inconveniences and ailments? Though some might be ‘satisfied’ with that, it seems that for others such a ‘heaven’ would very soon grow tiresome and might even turn into its opposite This is not to say that extinction is to be embraced as a welcome alternative to an indefinitely prolonged life We might be as unwilling to see life end as to see it continue indefinitely We may be caught between two highly undesirable options – the end of everything and the continuation forever of what we have For it could perfectly well be argued that Williams, Larkin and Sartre all have perfectly valid observations to make about death, which are compatible with one another Larkin is a lugubrious character who cultivates his own discontent, but it is not difficult to reconcile his outlook with Williams' view of the cloying implications of endless life We might be equally unable to cope with an end to life (Larkin) and with its being endless (Williams) We might say that since it is all we have, we prefer it to nothing at all; but that does not mean we can cope with too much of it However, there is a further argument to be made This chapter has focused exclusively upon the idea of whether endless life would be a continuous source of pleasure, or whether it would inevitably grow stale and wearisome It might well be argued that such an approach neglects the crucial moral dimension to human existence, the sense in which we are not here simply to ‘enjoy ourselves’ but in order to contribute to making the world a better place, even at the cost of suffering and hardship (as in the injunction of Christ to ‘take up thy cross and follow me’; the cross being one of the first century’s most effective instruments of physical torture, this was hardly a recipe for a life of endless fun) Some people will probably read the Bernard Williams article and feel uncomfortable with it They will suspect a self-indulgent listlessness, the sin of 'accidie' (traditionally one of the seven deadly ones) which is so much more than sloth because it includes a numbness, a lack of emotional concern (the Greek root of the word means lack of caring), a failure any longer to connect with the world around - perhaps 'torpor' is the single word which conveys the state of Elina Makropoulos best However, it might be argued that such torpor is avoidable at any age if one continues to care about others and has learned to develop the moral habit of compassionate love Whatever way one chooses in order to respond to this approach, it is surely reasonable to argue that there is a moral quality to life, though it easily becomes entangled in the discussion of life’s enjoyments In an address to a conference on 'Happiness and the Meaning of Life' at the University of Birmingham in May 2007, for instance, Tim Chappell of the University of Birmingham gave a talk entitled 'Infinity Goes up on Trial: Is Heaven Boring?' He takes issue with Williams by stressing the importance of the motivation and zest for life that comes from having projects, new ones starting as old ones finish and some always in the process of being realised He seems to imagine that one could be endlessly drawn along the road of existence by having new challenges ahead In the abstract to his talk he writes: Our lives are meaningful insofar as they contain worthwhile projects and commitments; insofar as we value these projects, and the possibility of taking further equally valuable projects, we have reason to value the prospect of immortality as a way of continuing to pursue them indefinitely On the one hand we might be a little unpersuaded by Tim Chappell relishing his ‘projects’ and doubtless parading endlessly round the academic conference circuit like a Flying Dutchman purged of his regret On the other hand, we might feel that the point about ‘worthwhile projects and commitments’ is well made, insofar as they refer to things which we feel passionately committed to managing (or to which we would at least like to contribute before we die) Should Williams' concerns about the intrinsic dullness of endless life, then, be rejected as the self-indulgent positioning of someone who refuses to 'get a life'? 10 Or is it a profound reflection upon the intrinsic limitations of finite life which become ever more apparent to us as we grow older but which not simply appear because we grow older? Should we decide that life is wonderful while it lasts, and only because it doesn't last forever, even though at the same time we couldn't bear to be without it, in which case we are trapped between two awful alternatives, each of which appears intolerable? Or is there a sense in which consideration of the moral quality of life can lift us out of this dilemma? ... italics? Write an answer in about 300 words (250-350 words) _ ENGLISH EXAM Read the article below and then the following THREE things Put the passages underlined... romanticising death to see it as the spur to creativity or even intensity of feeling in this life An example of this view would be Philip Larkin's poem Aubade The first lines make it clear that the... creativity, but it has also been claimed that it robs it of meaning In Being and Nothingness, Sartre examines the idea that ‘death becomes the meaning of life as the resolved chord is the meaning of