"Ричард Фейнман. Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!/Вы, конечно, шутите, мистер Фейнман! (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

A TUZZO LANTO
-Poici di Pare

TANto SAca TULna TI, na PUta TUchi PUti TI la.
RUNto CAta CHANto CHANta MANto CHI la TI da.
YALta CAra SULda MI la CHAta PIcha PIno TIto BRALda
pe te CHIna nana CHUNda lala CHINda lala CHUNda!
RONto piti CA le, a TANto CHINto quinta LALda
O la TINta dalla LALta, YENta PUcha lalla TALta!

I do this for three or four stanzas, going through all the emotions
that I heard on Italian radio, and the kids are unraveled, rolling in the
aisles, laughing with happiness.
After the banquet was over, the scoutmaster and a schoolteacher came
over and told me they had been discussing my poem. One of them thought it
was Italian, and the other thought it was Latin. The schoolteacher asks,
"Which one of us is right?"
I said, "You'll have to go ask the girls - they understood what
language it was right away."


----
Always Trying to Escape


When I was a student at MIT I was interested only in science; I was no
good at anything else. But at MIT there was a rule: You have to take some
humanities courses to get more "culture." Besides the English classes
required were two electives, so I looked through the list, and right away I
found astronomy - as a humanities course! So that year I escaped with
astronomy. Then next year I looked further down the list, past French
literature and courses like that, and found philosophy. It was the closest
thing to science I could find.
Before I tell you what happened in philosophy, let me tell you about
the English class. We had to write a number of themes. For instance, Mill
had written something on liberty, and we had to criticize it. But instead of
addressing myself to political liberty, as Mill did, I wrote about liberty
in social occasions - the problem of having to fake and lie in order to be
polite, and does this perpetual game of faking in social situations lead to
the "destruction of the moral fiber of society." An interesting question,
but not the one we were supposed to discuss.
Another essay we had to criticize was by Huxley, "On a Piece of Chalk,"
in which he describes how an ordinary piece of chalk he is holding is the
remains from animal bones, and the forces inside the earth lifted it up so
that it became part of the White Cliffs, and then it was quarried and is now
used to convey ideas through writing on the blackboard.
But again, instead of criticizing the essay assigned to us, I wrote a
parody called, "On a Piece of Dust," about how dust makes the colors of the
sunset and precipitates the rain, and so on. I was always a faker, always
trying to escape.