Reading Compreh...

This passage comes from the autobiography of a Black woman who grew up in Florida at the end of the nineteenth century.
Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof of it. It is
so troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeonhole way of life. It is upsetting because until the elders are pushed for an answer, they have never looked to see if it was so, nor how they came by what passes for proof to their acceptances of certain things as true. So, if telling their questioning young to run off and play does not suffice for an answer, a good swat on the child's bottom is held to be proof positive for anything from spelling "Constantinople" to why the sea is salt. It was told to the old folks and that had been enough for them, or to put it in Black idiom, nobody didn't tell 'em, but they heard. So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the gods of the pigeonhole. I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings,
and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. I was full of curiosity like many other children, and like them I was as unconscious of the sanctity of statuary as a flock of pigeons around a palace. I got few answers from other people, but I kept on asking, because I couldn't do anything else with my feelings. Naturally, I felt like other children in that death, destruction, and other agonies were never meant to touch me. Things like that happened to other people, and no wonder. They were not like me and mine. Naturally, the world and the firmaments careened to one side a little so as not to inconvenience me. In fact, the universe went further than that - it was happy to break a few rules just to show me preferences.
For instance, for a long time I gloated over the happy secret that when I played outdoors in the moonlight the moon followed me, whichever way I ran. The moon was so happy when I came out to play that it ran shining and shouting after me like a pretty puppy dog. The other children didn't count.
But, I was rudely shaken out of this when I confided my happy secret to Carrie Roberts, my chum. It was cruel. She not only scorned my claim, she said that the moon was paying me no mind at all. The moon, my own happy private playing moon, was out in its play yard to race and play with her. We disputed the matter with hot jealousy, and nothing would do but we must run a race to prove which one the moon was loving. First, we both ran a race side by side, but that proved nothing because we both contended that the moon was going that way on account of us. I just knew that the moon was there to be with me, but Carrie kept on saying that it was herself that the moon preferred. So then it came to me that we ought to run in opposite directions so that Carrie could come to her senses and realize the moon was mine. So we both stood with our backs to our gate, counted three, and tore out in opposite directions. "Look! Look, Carrie!" I cried exultantly. "You see the moon is following me!" "Ah, youse a tale-teller! You know it's chasing me." So Carrie and I parted company, mad as we could be with each other. When the other children found out what the quarrel was about, they laughed it off. They told me the moon always followed them. The unfaithfulness of the moon hurt me deeply. My moon followed Carrie Roberts. My moon followed Matilda Clark and Julia Mosley, and Oscar and Teedy Miller. But after a while, I ceased to ache over the moon's many loves. I found comfort in the fact that though I was not the moon's exclusive friend, I was still among those who showed the moon which way to go. That was my earliest conscious hint that the world didn't tilt under my footfalls, nor careen over one-sided just to make me glad. But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on probing to know.

This passage comes from the autobiography of a Black woman who grew up in Florida at the end of the nineteenth century.
Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof of it. It is
so troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeonhole way of life. It is upsetting because until the elders are pushed for an answer, they have never looked to see if it was so, nor how they came by what passes for proof to their acceptances of certain things as true. So, if telling their questioning young to run off and play does not suffice for an answer, a good swat on the child's bottom is held to be proof positive for anything from spelling "Constantinople" to why the sea is salt. It was told to the old folks and that had been enough for them, or to put it in Black idiom, nobody didn't tell 'em, but they heard. So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the gods of the pigeonhole. I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings,
and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. I was full of curiosity like many other children, and like them I was as unconscious of the sanctity of statuary as a flock of pigeons around a palace. I got few answers from other people, but I kept on asking, because I couldn't do anything else with my feelings. Naturally, I felt like other children in that death, destruction, and other agonies were never meant to touch me. Things like that happened to other people, and no wonder. They were not like me and mine. Naturally, the world and the firmaments careened to one side a little so as not to inconvenience me. In fact, the universe went further than that - it was happy to break a few rules just to show me preferences.
For instance, for a long time I gloated over the happy secret that when I played outdoors in the moonlight the moon followed me, whichever way I ran. The moon was so happy when I came out to play that it ran shining and shouting after me like a pretty puppy dog. The other children didn't count.
But, I was rudely shaken out of this when I confided my happy secret to Carrie Roberts, my chum. It was cruel. She not only scorned my claim, she said that the moon was paying me no mind at all. The moon, my own happy private playing moon, was out in its play yard to race and play with her. We disputed the matter with hot jealousy, and nothing would do but we must run a race to prove which one the moon was loving. First, we both ran a race side by side, but that proved nothing because we both contended that the moon was going that way on account of us. I just knew that the moon was there to be with me, but Carrie kept on saying that it was herself that the moon preferred. So then it came to me that we ought to run in opposite directions so that Carrie could come to her senses and realize the moon was mine. So we both stood with our backs to our gate, counted three, and tore out in opposite directions. "Look! Look, Carrie!" I cried exultantly. "You see the moon is following me!" "Ah, youse a tale-teller! You know it's chasing me." So Carrie and I parted company, mad as we could be with each other. When the other children found out what the quarrel was about, they laughed it off. They told me the moon always followed them. The unfaithfulness of the moon hurt me deeply. My moon followed Carrie Roberts. My moon followed Matilda Clark and Julia Mosley, and Oscar and Teedy Miller. But after a while, I ceased to ache over the moon's many loves. I found comfort in the fact that though I was not the moon's exclusive friend, I was still among those who showed the moon which way to go. That was my earliest conscious hint that the world didn't tilt under my footfalls, nor careen over one-sided just to make me glad. But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on probing to know.

This passage comes from the autobiography of a Black woman who grew up in Florida at the end of the nineteenth century.
Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof of it. It is
so troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeonhole way of life. It is upsetting because until the elders are pushed for an answer, they have never looked to see if it was so, nor how they came by what passes for proof to their acceptances of certain things as true. So, if telling their questioning young to run off and play does not suffice for an answer, a good swat on the child's bottom is held to be proof positive for anything from spelling "Constantinople" to why the sea is salt. It was told to the old folks and that had been enough for them, or to put it in Black idiom, nobody didn't tell 'em, but they heard. So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the gods of the pigeonhole. I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings,
and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. I was full of curiosity like many other children, and like them I was as unconscious of the sanctity of statuary as a flock of pigeons around a palace. I got few answers from other people, but I kept on asking, because I couldn't do anything else with my feelings. Naturally, I felt like other children in that death, destruction, and other agonies were never meant to touch me. Things like that happened to other people, and no wonder. They were not like me and mine. Naturally, the world and the firmaments careened to one side a little so as not to inconvenience me. In fact, the universe went further than that - it was happy to break a few rules just to show me preferences.
For instance, for a long time I gloated over the happy secret that when I played outdoors in the moonlight the moon followed me, whichever way I ran. The moon was so happy when I came out to play that it ran shining and shouting after me like a pretty puppy dog. The other children didn't count.
But, I was rudely shaken out of this when I confided my happy secret to Carrie Roberts, my chum. It was cruel. She not only scorned my claim, she said that the moon was paying me no mind at all. The moon, my own happy private playing moon, was out in its play yard to race and play with her. We disputed the matter with hot jealousy, and nothing would do but we must run a race to prove which one the moon was loving. First, we both ran a race side by side, but that proved nothing because we both contended that the moon was going that way on account of us. I just knew that the moon was there to be with me, but Carrie kept on saying that it was herself that the moon preferred. So then it came to me that we ought to run in opposite directions so that Carrie could come to her senses and realize the moon was mine. So we both stood with our backs to our gate, counted three, and tore out in opposite directions. "Look! Look, Carrie!" I cried exultantly. "You see the moon is following me!" "Ah, youse a tale-teller! You know it's chasing me." So Carrie and I parted company, mad as we could be with each other. When the other children found out what the quarrel was about, they laughed it off. They told me the moon always followed them. The unfaithfulness of the moon hurt me deeply. My moon followed Carrie Roberts. My moon followed Matilda Clark and Julia Mosley, and Oscar and Teedy Miller. But after a while, I ceased to ache over the moon's many loves. I found comfort in the fact that though I was not the moon's exclusive friend, I was still among those who showed the moon which way to go. That was my earliest conscious hint that the world didn't tilt under my footfalls, nor careen over one-sided just to make me glad. But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on probing to know.

In this excerpt from a 1994 article, a biologist discusses his
research expedition to Indonesia.
Over the course of millions of years, humans throughout
the world have built up a knowledge of their local natural
environment so extensive that not even professional biol-
ogists can hope to capture more than a small fraction of it,
and other members of urban and industrialized societies can
scarcely imagine it. At the end of the twenty-four days that
I spent with the Ketengban people of New Guinea, I felt like
a narrow-minded boor because I had so often nudged the
subject back to birds when they began to talk of anything
else. Even for very rare bird species, such as New Guinea's
leaden honey-eater and garnet robin, the Ketengbans rattled
off the altitudes at which the birds lived, the other species
with which they associated, the height above the ground at
which they foraged, their diet, adult call, juvenile call, sea-
sonal movements, and so on. Only by cutting short the
Ketengbans' attempts to share with me their equally
detailed knowledge of local plant, rat, and frog species
could I record even fragments of their knowledge of birds
in twenty-four days.
Traditionally, the Ketengbans acquired this knowledge
by spending much of their time in the forest, from child-
hood on. When I asked my guide, Robert Uropka, how,
lacking binoculars and the sight of one eye, he had come
to know so much about a tiny, dull-plumed warbler species
that lives in the treetops, he told me that as children he and
his playmates used to climb trees, build blinds in the can-
opy,and observe and hunt up there. But all that is changing,
he explained, as he pointed to his eight-year-old son. Child-
ren go to school now, and only at vacation times can they
live in the forest. The results, as I have seen elsewhere in
New Guinea, are adult New Guineans who know scarcely
more about birds than do most American city dwellers.
Compounding this problem, education throughout
Indonesian New Guinea is in the Indonesian national
language, not in Ketengban and the 300 other indigenous
languages. Radio, TV, newspapers, commerce, and govern-
ment also use the Indonesian national language. While the
reasoning behind such decisions is, of course, understand-
able, the outcome is that all but 200 of the modern world's
6,000 languages are likely to be extinct or moribund by the
end of the next century. As humanity's linguistic heritage
disintegrates, much of our traditional, mostly unrecorded
knowledge base vanishes with it.
The analogy that occurs to me is the final destruction,
in 391 A.D., of the largest library of the ancient world, at
Alexandria. The library housed all the literature of Greece,
plus much literature of other cultures, most of which, as a
result of that library's burning, was lost to later generations.
The ongoing loss today that draws most public attention
is the loss of biodiversity; that is, the loss of variety in nature.
In that loss, nature is viewed as the victim, humans as the
villains. But there is also a parallel loss in which humans
are both victims and unwitting villains. Not only are species
going extinct, but so is much of our information about
those species that survive. In the future, no children will
grow up in the forest, where they could receive or redis-
cover that knowledge. Certainly, professional biologists
don't have the necessary time - I count myself lucky if I
can spend one month every year or two in New Guinea. It
is as if we are burning most of our books, while the lan-
guages of those books that remain become as lost to us as
the texts written 3,000 years ago in ancient Crete in what
is the still-undecipherable ancient Greek script.

The two passages below discuss the detective story.
Passage 1 was written by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957),
a British literary critic and writer of detective stories.
Passage 2 was written by Raymond Chandler (1888-1959),
an American writer of detective stories.

Passage 1
As the detective ceases to be impenetrable and infallible
and becomes a person touched with feeling for our infirmi-
ties,so the rigid technique of the art necessarily expands a
little. In its severest form, the detective story is a pure and
analytical exercise and, as such, may be a highly finished
work of art, within its highly artificial limits. There is one
respect, at least, in which the detective story has an advan-
tage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristo-
telian perfection of beginning, middle, and end. A definite
and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its
conclusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or
death. It has the rounded (though limited) perfection of a
triolet. The farther it escapes from pure analysis, the more
difficulty it has in achieving artistic unity.
It does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loft-
iest level of literary achievement. Though it deals with the
most desperate effects of rage, jealousy, and revenge, it
rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion.
It presents us only with a fait accompli, and looks upon
death with a dispassionate eye. It does not show us the
inner workings of the murderer's mind - it must not, for
the identity of the criminal is hidden until the end of the
book. The victim is shown as a subject for analysis rather
than as a husband and father. A too-violent emotion flung
into the glittering mechanism of the detective story jars the
movement by disturbing its delicate balance. The most
successful writers are those who contrive to keep the story
running from beginning to end upon the same emotional
level, and it is better to err in the direction of too little
feeling than too much.

Passage 2
In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime,
Dorothy Sayers wrote that the detective story "does not,
and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of
literary achievement." And she suggested somewhere else
that this is because it is a "literature of escape" and not "a
literature of expression." I do not know what the loftiest
level of literary achievement is; neither did Aeschylus or
Shakespeare; neither did Miss Sayers. Other things being
equal, which they never are, books with a more powerful
theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet
some very dull books have been written about God, and
some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay
fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff,
and what the individual has to write it with. As for litera-
ture of expression and literature of escape, this is critics'
jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute
meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that
vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All
people who read escape from something else into what lies
behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be
argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.
All people must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of
their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among
thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them
from the three-toed sloth. I hold no particular brief for the
detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all
reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek or The
Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an
intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
I think that what was really gnawing at Dorothy Sayers'
mind was the realization that her kind of detective story
was an arid formula that could not even satisfy its own
implications. It was second-rate literature because it was
not about the things that could make first-rate literature.
If it started out to be about real people (and she could
write about them - her minor characters show that), they
must very soon do unreal things in order to conform to
the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did
unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. They
became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier-mache
villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.
The only kind of writer who could be happy with these
properties was the one who did not know what reality was.
Dorothy Sayers' own stories show that she was annoyed by
this triteness: the weakest element in them is the part that
makes them detective stories, the strongest the part that
could be removed without touching the "problem of logic
and deduction." Yet she could not or would not give her
characters their heads and let them make their own mystery.

This passage comes from the autobiography of a Black woman who grew up in Florida at the end of the nineteenth century.
Grown people know that they do not always know the why of things, and even if they think they know, they do not know where and how they got the proof. Hence the irritation they show when children keep on demanding to know if a thing is so and how the grown folks got the proof of it. It is
so troublesome because it is disturbing to the pigeonhole way of life. It is upsetting because until the elders are pushed for an answer, they have never looked to see if it was so, nor how they came by what passes for proof to their acceptances of certain things as true. So, if telling their questioning young to run off and play does not suffice for an answer, a good swat on the child's bottom is held to be proof positive for anything from spelling "Constantinople" to why the sea is salt. It was told to the old folks and that had been enough for them, or to put it in Black idiom, nobody didn't tell 'em, but they heard. So there must be something wrong with a child that questions the gods of the pigeonhole. I was always asking and making myself a crow in a pigeon's nest. It was hard on my family and surroundings,
and they in turn were hard on me. I did not know then, as I know now, that people are prone to build a statue of the kind of person that it pleases them to be. And few people want to be forced to ask themselves, "What if there is no me like my statue?" The thing to do is to grab the broom of anger and drive off the beast of fear. I was full of curiosity like many other children, and like them I was as unconscious of the sanctity of statuary as a flock of pigeons around a palace. I got few answers from other people, but I kept on asking, because I couldn't do anything else with my feelings. Naturally, I felt like other children in that death, destruction, and other agonies were never meant to touch me. Things like that happened to other people, and no wonder. They were not like me and mine. Naturally, the world and the firmaments careened to one side a little so as not to inconvenience me. In fact, the universe went further than that - it was happy to break a few rules just to show me preferences.
For instance, for a long time I gloated over the happy secret that when I played outdoors in the moonlight the moon followed me, whichever way I ran. The moon was so happy when I came out to play that it ran shining and shouting after me like a pretty puppy dog. The other children didn't count.
But, I was rudely shaken out of this when I confided my happy secret to Carrie Roberts, my chum. It was cruel. She not only scorned my claim, she said that the moon was paying me no mind at all. The moon, my own happy private playing moon, was out in its play yard to race and play with her. We disputed the matter with hot jealousy, and nothing would do but we must run a race to prove which one the moon was loving. First, we both ran a race side by side, but that proved nothing because we both contended that the moon was going that way on account of us. I just knew that the moon was there to be with me, but Carrie kept on saying that it was herself that the moon preferred. So then it came to me that we ought to run in opposite directions so that Carrie could come to her senses and realize the moon was mine. So we both stood with our backs to our gate, counted three, and tore out in opposite directions. "Look! Look, Carrie!" I cried exultantly. "You see the moon is following me!" "Ah, youse a tale-teller! You know it's chasing me." So Carrie and I parted company, mad as we could be with each other. When the other children found out what the quarrel was about, they laughed it off. They told me the moon always followed them. The unfaithfulness of the moon hurt me deeply. My moon followed Carrie Roberts. My moon followed Matilda Clark and Julia Mosley, and Oscar and Teedy Miller. But after a while, I ceased to ache over the moon's many loves. I found comfort in the fact that though I was not the moon's exclusive friend, I was still among those who showed the moon which way to go. That was my earliest conscious hint that the world didn't tilt under my footfalls, nor careen over one-sided just to make me glad. But no matter whether my probings made me happier or sadder, I kept on probing to know.

The two passages below discuss the detective story.
Passage 1 was written by Dorothy Sayers (1893-1957),
a British literary critic and writer of detective stories.
Passage 2 was written by Raymond Chandler (1888-1959),
an American writer of detective stories.

Passage 1
As the detective ceases to be impenetrable and infallible
and becomes a person touched with feeling for our infirmi-
ties,so the rigid technique of the art necessarily expands a
little. In its severest form, the detective story is a pure and
analytical exercise and, as such, may be a highly finished
work of art, within its highly artificial limits. There is one
respect, at least, in which the detective story has an advan-
tage over every other kind of novel. It possesses an Aristo-
telian perfection of beginning, middle, and end. A definite
and single problem is set, worked out, and solved; its
conclusion is not arbitrarily conditioned by marriage or
death. It has the rounded (though limited) perfection of a
triolet. The farther it escapes from pure analysis, the more
difficulty it has in achieving artistic unity.
It does not, and by hypothesis never can, attain the loft-
iest level of literary achievement. Though it deals with the
most desperate effects of rage, jealousy, and revenge, it
rarely touches the heights and depths of human passion.
It presents us only with a fait accompli, and looks upon
death with a dispassionate eye. It does not show us the
inner workings of the murderer's mind - it must not, for
the identity of the criminal is hidden until the end of the
book. The victim is shown as a subject for analysis rather
than as a husband and father. A too-violent emotion flung
into the glittering mechanism of the detective story jars the
movement by disturbing its delicate balance. The most
successful writers are those who contrive to keep the story
running from beginning to end upon the same emotional
level, and it is better to err in the direction of too little
feeling than too much.

Passage 2
In her introduction to the first Omnibus of Crime,
Dorothy Sayers wrote that the detective story "does not,
and by hypothesis never can, attain the loftiest level of
literary achievement." And she suggested somewhere else
that this is because it is a "literature of escape" and not "a
literature of expression." I do not know what the loftiest
level of literary achievement is; neither did Aeschylus or
Shakespeare; neither did Miss Sayers. Other things being
equal, which they never are, books with a more powerful
theme will provoke a more powerful performance. Yet
some very dull books have been written about God, and
some very fine ones about how to make a living and stay
fairly honest. It is always a matter of who writes the stuff,
and what the individual has to write it with. As for litera-
ture of expression and literature of escape, this is critics'
jargon, a use of abstract words as if they had absolute
meanings. Everything written with vitality expresses that
vitality; there are no dull subjects, only dull minds. All
people who read escape from something else into what lies
behind the printed page; the quality of the dream may be
argued, but its release has become a functional necessity.
All people must escape at times from the deadly rhythm of
their private thoughts. It is part of the process of life among
thinking beings. It is one of the things that distinguish them
from the three-toed sloth. I hold no particular brief for the
detective story as the ideal escape. I merely say that all
reading for pleasure is escape, whether it be Greek or The
Diary of the Forgotten Man. To say otherwise is to be an
intellectual snob, and a juvenile at the art of living.
I think that what was really gnawing at Dorothy Sayers'
mind was the realization that her kind of detective story
was an arid formula that could not even satisfy its own
implications. It was second-rate literature because it was
not about the things that could make first-rate literature.
If it started out to be about real people (and she could
write about them - her minor characters show that), they
must very soon do unreal things in order to conform to
the artificial pattern required by the plot. When they did
unreal things, they ceased to be real themselves. They
became puppets and cardboard lovers and papier-mache
villains and detectives of exquisite and impossible gentility.
The only kind of writer who could be happy with these
properties was the one who did not know what reality was.
Dorothy Sayers' own stories show that she was annoyed by
this triteness: the weakest element in them is the part that
makes them detective stories, the strongest the part that
could be removed without touching the "problem of logic
and deduction." Yet she could not or would not give her
characters their heads and let them make their own mystery.

In this excerpt from a 1994 article, a biologist discusses his
research expedition to Indonesia.
Over the course of millions of years, humans throughout
the world have built up a knowledge of their local natural
environment so extensive that not even professional biol-
ogists can hope to capture more than a small fraction of it,
and other members of urban and industrialized societies can
scarcely imagine it. At the end of the twenty-four days that
I spent with the Ketengban people of New Guinea, I felt like
a narrow-minded boor because I had so often nudged the
subject back to birds when they began to talk of anything
else. Even for very rare bird species, such as New Guinea's
leaden honey-eater and garnet robin, the Ketengbans rattled
off the altitudes at which the birds lived, the other species
with which they associated, the height above the ground at
which they foraged, their diet, adult call, juvenile call, sea-
sonal movements, and so on. Only by cutting short the
Ketengbans' attempts to share with me their equally
detailed knowledge of local plant, rat, and frog species
could I record even fragments of their knowledge of birds
in twenty-four days.
Traditionally, the Ketengbans acquired this knowledge
by spending much of their time in the forest, from child-
hood on. When I asked my guide, Robert Uropka, how,
lacking binoculars and the sight of one eye, he had come
to know so much about a tiny, dull-plumed warbler species
that lives in the treetops, he told me that as children he and
his playmates used to climb trees, build blinds in the can-
opy,and observe and hunt up there. But all that is changing,
he explained, as he pointed to his eight-year-old son. Child-
ren go to school now, and only at vacation times can they
live in the forest. The results, as I have seen elsewhere in
New Guinea, are adult New Guineans who know scarcely
more about birds than do most American city dwellers.
Compounding this problem, education throughout
Indonesian New Guinea is in the Indonesian national
language, not in Ketengban and the 300 other indigenous
languages. Radio, TV, newspapers, commerce, and govern-
ment also use the Indonesian national language. While the
reasoning behind such decisions is, of course, understand-
able, the outcome is that all but 200 of the modern world's
6,000 languages are likely to be extinct or moribund by the
end of the next century. As humanity's linguistic heritage
disintegrates, much of our traditional, mostly unrecorded
knowledge base vanishes with it.
The analogy that occurs to me is the final destruction,
in 391 A.D., of the largest library of the ancient world, at
Alexandria. The library housed all the literature of Greece,
plus much literature of other cultures, most of which, as a
result of that library's burning, was lost to later generations.
The ongoing loss today that draws most public attention
is the loss of biodiversity; that is, the loss of variety in nature.
In that loss, nature is viewed as the victim, humans as the
villains. But there is also a parallel loss in which humans
are both victims and unwitting villains. Not only are species
going extinct, but so is much of our information about
those species that survive. In the future, no children will
grow up in the forest, where they could receive or redis-
cover that knowledge. Certainly, professional biologists
don't have the necessary time - I count myself lucky if I
can spend one month every year or two in New Guinea. It
is as if we are burning most of our books, while the lan-
guages of those books that remain become as lost to us as
the texts written 3,000 years ago in ancient Crete in what
is the still-undecipherable ancient Greek script.

In this excerpt from a 1994 article, a biologist discusses his
research expedition to Indonesia.
Over the course of millions of years, humans throughout
the world have built up a knowledge of their local natural
environment so extensive that not even professional biol-
ogists can hope to capture more than a small fraction of it,
and other members of urban and industrialized societies can
scarcely imagine it. At the end of the twenty-four days that
I spent with the Ketengban people of New Guinea, I felt like
a narrow-minded boor because I had so often nudged the
subject back to birds when they began to talk of anything
else. Even for very rare bird species, such as New Guinea's
leaden honey-eater and garnet robin, the Ketengbans rattled
off the altitudes at which the birds lived, the other species
with which they associated, the height above the ground at
which they foraged, their diet, adult call, juvenile call, sea-
sonal movements, and so on. Only by cutting short the
Ketengbans' attempts to share with me their equally
detailed knowledge of local plant, rat, and frog species
could I record even fragments of their knowledge of birds
in twenty-four days.
Traditionally, the Ketengbans acquired this knowledge
by spending much of their time in the forest, from child-
hood on. When I asked my guide, Robert Uropka, how,
lacking binoculars and the sight of one eye, he had come
to know so much about a tiny, dull-plumed warbler species
that lives in the treetops, he told me that as children he and
his playmates used to climb trees, build blinds in the can-
opy,and observe and hunt up there. But all that is changing,
he explained, as he pointed to his eight-year-old son. Child-
ren go to school now, and only at vacation times can they
live in the forest. The results, as I have seen elsewhere in
New Guinea, are adult New Guineans who know scarcely
more about birds than do most American city dwellers.
Compounding this problem, education throughout
Indonesian New Guinea is in the Indonesian national
language, not in Ketengban and the 300 other indigenous
languages. Radio, TV, newspapers, commerce, and govern-
ment also use the Indonesian national language. While the
reasoning behind such decisions is, of course, understand-
able, the outcome is that all but 200 of the modern world's
6,000 languages are likely to be extinct or moribund by the
end of the next century. As humanity's linguistic heritage
disintegrates, much of our traditional, mostly unrecorded
knowledge base vanishes with it.
The analogy that occurs to me is the final destruction,
in 391 A.D., of the largest library of the ancient world, at
Alexandria. The library housed all the literature of Greece,
plus much literature of other cultures, most of which, as a
result of that library's burning, was lost to later generations.
The ongoing loss today that draws most public attention
is the loss of biodiversity; that is, the loss of variety in nature.
In that loss, nature is viewed as the victim, humans as the
villains. But there is also a parallel loss in which humans
are both victims and unwitting villains. Not only are species
going extinct, but so is much of our information about
those species that survive. In the future, no children will
grow up in the forest, where they could receive or redis-
cover that knowledge. Certainly, professional biologists
don't have the necessary time - I count myself lucky if I
can spend one month every year or two in New Guinea. It
is as if we are burning most of our books, while the lan-
guages of those books that remain become as lost to us as
the texts written 3,000 years ago in ancient Crete in what
is the still-undecipherable ancient Greek script.

In this excerpt from a 1994 article, a biologist discusses his
research expedition to Indonesia.
Over the course of millions of years, humans throughout
the world have built up a knowledge of their local natural
environment so extensive that not even professional biol-
ogists can hope to capture more than a small fraction of it,
and other members of urban and industrialized societies can
scarcely imagine it. At the end of the twenty-four days that
I spent with the Ketengban people of New Guinea, I felt like
a narrow-minded boor because I had so often nudged the
subject back to birds when they began to talk of anything
else. Even for very rare bird species, such as New Guinea's
leaden honey-eater and garnet robin, the Ketengbans rattled
off the altitudes at which the birds lived, the other species
with which they associated, the height above the ground at
which they foraged, their diet, adult call, juvenile call, sea-
sonal movements, and so on. Only by cutting short the
Ketengbans' attempts to share with me their equally
detailed knowledge of local plant, rat, and frog species
could I record even fragments of their knowledge of birds
in twenty-four days.
Traditionally, the Ketengbans acquired this knowledge
by spending much of their time in the forest, from child-
hood on. When I asked my guide, Robert Uropka, how,
lacking binoculars and the sight of one eye, he had come
to know so much about a tiny, dull-plumed warbler species
that lives in the treetops, he told me that as children he and
his playmates used to climb trees, build blinds in the can-
opy,and observe and hunt up there. But all that is changing,
he explained, as he pointed to his eight-year-old son. Child-
ren go to school now, and only at vacation times can they
live in the forest. The results, as I have seen elsewhere in
New Guinea, are adult New Guineans who know scarcely
more about birds than do most American city dwellers.
Compounding this problem, education throughout
Indonesian New Guinea is in the Indonesian national
language, not in Ketengban and the 300 other indigenous
languages. Radio, TV, newspapers, commerce, and govern-
ment also use the Indonesian national language. While the
reasoning behind such decisions is, of course, understand-
able, the outcome is that all but 200 of the modern world's
6,000 languages are likely to be extinct or moribund by the
end of the next century. As humanity's linguistic heritage
disintegrates, much of our traditional, mostly unrecorded
knowledge base vanishes with it.
The analogy that occurs to me is the final destruction,
in 391 A.D., of the largest library of the ancient world, at
Alexandria. The library housed all the literature of Greece,
plus much literature of other cultures, most of which, as a
result of that library's burning, was lost to later generations.
The ongoing loss today that draws most public attention
is the loss of biodiversity; that is, the loss of variety in nature.
In that loss, nature is viewed as the victim, humans as the
villains. But there is also a parallel loss in which humans
are both victims and unwitting villains. Not only are species
going extinct, but so is much of our information about
those species that survive. In the future, no children will
grow up in the forest, where they could receive or redis-
cover that knowledge. Certainly, professional biologists
don't have the necessary time - I count myself lucky if I
can spend one month every year or two in New Guinea. It
is as if we are burning most of our books, while the lan-
guages of those books that remain become as lost to us as
the texts written 3,000 years ago in ancient Crete in what
is the still-undecipherable ancient Greek script.