"Eddings, David - Regina's Song V2.0" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eddings David)

and I didn't really feel like chewing old soup for my
paper in the course. Dr. Conrad was our instructor,
naturally, and I was fairly certain that he'd take a rehash
of previous examinations of the book as a personal
insult.
Then I came across an interesting bit of information. It
seems that when Melville was writing Billy Budd, he kept
borrowing Milton's Paradise Regained from the New
York Public Library, and I began to see certain parallels.
Dr. Conrad found that kind of interesting. "I wouldn't
hang your doctoral dissertation on it, Mr. Austin," he
advised, "but you might squeeze an MA thesis out of it."
"Am I going for an MA, boss?" I asked him.
"You bet your hippie you are," he told me bluntly.
"Bippie?"
"Isn't it time for you to get back to Everett and make
more doors?" he asked irritably.
I considered the notion of graduate school while I was
trimming door stock that evening. It was more or less
inevitable-an English major without an advanced degree
was still only about two steps away from the green
chain. With an MA, I could probably get a teaching job
at a community college-a distinct advantage, since the
idea of teaching high school didn't wind my watch very
tight.
I had a sometime girlfriend back then, and she went
ballistic when I told her about my decision to stay in
school. I guess she'd been listening to the ghostly
sound of wedding bells in her mind, which proves that
she didn't understand certain ugly truths. Her father was
a businessman in Seattle, and mine was a working stiff
in Everett. I don't want to sound Marxist here, but old
Karl was right about one thing. There are real
differences between the classes. A rich kid doesn't have
to take his education too seriously, because there are
all kinds of other options open for him. A working-class
kid usually only has one shot at education, and he
doesn't dare let anything get in his way, and that
includes girlfriends and marriage. The birth of the first
child almost always means that he'll spend the rest of
his life pulling chain. Reality can be very ugly,
sometimes.
This is very painful for me, so I'll keep it short. In the
spring of 1995, the twins attended one of those "kegger
parties" on a beach near Mukilteo, just south of Everett.
I'm not sure who bought the kegs of beer for them, but
that's not really important. The kids built the customary
bonfire on the beach and proceeded to get red-eyed
and rowdy. There were probably forty or fifty of them,
and they were celebrating their upcoming graduation for