1.delusion

a false belief or opinion about yourself or your situation: the

delusions

of the mentally ill 

Don't go getting delusions of grandeur (= a belief that you are more important than you actually are). 

 He was suffering from paranoid delusions and hallucinations.

 Love can be nothing but a delusion.

2.marvel

verb (-ll-, AmE -l-) ~ (at sth) to be very surprised or impressed by sth

Everyone marvelled at his courage. 

I marvel that she agreed to do something so dangerous.

3.tremor

a slight shaking movement in a part of your body caused, for example, by cold or fear

There was a slight tremor in his voice.

 She felt a tremor of fear run through her.

4.exempt

adjective [not before noun] ~ (from sth) if sb/sth is exempt from sth, they are not affected by it, do not have to do it, pay it, etc:

 The interest on the money is exempt from tax. 

Some students are exempt from certain exams.

5.hamper

verb [VN] [often passive] (written) to prevent sb from easily doing or achieving sth

Synonym: HINDER

Our efforts were severely hampered by a lack of money.

And that division will continue to hamper a clear U.N. resolution with enforcement power.

6.stature

the importance and respect that a person has because of their ability and achievements

an actress of considerable stature

 The orchestra has grown in stature.

7.platitude

(written, disapproving) a comment or statement that has been made very often before and is therefore not interesting

a political speech full of platitudes and empty promises

We shall have to listen to more platitudes about the dangers of overspending.

8.assignation

(formal or humorous) a meeting, especially a secret one, often with a lover

 rumours about his secret assignations with his friend's wife.

She had an assignation with her boyfriend.

9.sloth

[U] (formal) the bad habit of being lazy and unwilling to work

He admitted a lack of motivation and a feeling of sloth.

To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation

10.splice

to join the ends of two pieces of rope by weaving them together

to join the ends of two pieces of film, tape, etc. by sticking them together

He taught me to edit and splice film...

To investigate further, Dr Drayna is now attempting to splice human stutter-causing genes into the DNA of mice.

11.suicidal

people who are suicidal feel that they want to kill themselves

On bad days I even felt suicidal.

For many years before treatment, Clare had suicidal tendencies

12.reconciliation

~ (with sb) an end to a disagreement and the start of a good relationship again

Their change of policy brought about a reconciliation with Britain.

Her ex-husband had always hoped for a reconciliation.

13.conscience

the part of your mind that tells you whether your actions are right or wrong

to have a clear / guilty conscience (= to feel that you have done right / wrong) 

This is a matter of individual conscience (= everyone must make their own judgement about it).

He won't let it trouble his conscience.

14.liaison

[U, sing.] ~ (between A and B) a relationship between two organizations or different departments in an organization, involving the exchange of information or ideas

Our role is to ensure liaison between schools and parents.

We work in close liaison with the police.

15.antidote

anything that takes away the effects of sth unpleasan

A Mediterranean cruise was the perfect antidote to a long cold winter.

The holiday was a marvellous antidote to the pressures of office work.

16.swoon

~ (over sb) to feel very excited, emotional, etc. about sb that you think is sexually attractive, so that you almost lose consciousness

He's used to having women swooning over him.

But if the swoon is just caused by bad luck, what misfortunes could explain the latest dip?

17.carnal

(formal or law) connected with the body or with sex

carnal desires / appetites

His faith is carnal,the bodies in his masterpieces are trapped in flesh, even when that's the Son of God

18.consort

the husband or wife of a ruler

At tea-time, Victoria sang duets with her Consort, Prince Albert...

She was surely the most distinguished queen consort we have had.

19.despise

[VN] (not used in the progressive tenses) to dislike and have no respect for sb/sth

She despised gossip in any form.

 He despised himself for being so cowardly.

20.ludicrous

ridiculous and unreasonable; that you cannot take seriously

a ludicrous idea / suggestion / situation 

 It was ludicrous to think that the plan could succeed. 

 He is paid a ludicrous amount of money.

原文&典故出处

On Self-Respect

Joan Didion

Once, in a dry season, I wrote in large letters across two pages of a notebook that innocence ends when one is stripped of the delusion that one likes oneself. Although now, some years later, I marvel that a mind on the outs with itself should have nonetheless made painstaking record of its every tremor, I recall with embarrassing clarity the flavor of those particular ashes. It was a matter of misplaced self-respect.

I had not been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. This failure could scarcely have been more predictable or less ambiguous (I simply did not have the grades), but I was unnerved by it; I had somehow thought myself a kind of academic Raskolnikov, curiously exempt from the cause-effect relationships which hampered others. Although even the humorless nineteen-year-old that I was must have recognized that the situation lacked real tragic stature, the day that I did not make Phi Beta Kappa nonetheless marked the end of something, and innocence may well be the word for it. I lost the conviction that lights would always turn green for me, the pleasant certainty that those rather passive virtues which had won me approval as a child automatically guaranteed me not only Phi Beta Kappa keys but happiness, honor, and the love of a good man; lost a certain touching faith in the totem power of good manners, clean hair, and proved competence on the Stanford-Binet scale. To such doubtful amulets had my self-respect been pinned, and I faced myself that day with the nonplussed apprehension of someone who has come across a vampire and has no crucifix at hand.

Phi Beta Kappa

The Phi Beta Kappa Society (ΦΒΚ) is the oldest honor society for the liberal arts and sciences in the United States, with 286 active chapters. Widely considered to be the nation's most prestigious honor society,[1] Phi Beta Kappa aims to promote and advocate excellence in the liberal arts and sciences and to induct the most outstanding students of arts and sciences at American colleges and universities.

美国大学优等生之荣誉学会

Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikovis the fictional protagonist of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Raskolnikov is a young ex-law student living in extreme poverty in Saint Petersburg. He lives in a tiny garret which he rents, although due to a lack of funds has been avoiding payment for quite some time. He sleeps on a couch using old clothes as a pillow, and due to lack of money eats very rarely. He is handsome and intelligent, though generally disliked by fellow students.

拉斯柯尔尼科夫

陀思妥耶夫斯基

The Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scales (or more commonly the Stanford-Binet) is an individually administered intelligence test that was revised from the original Binet-Simon Scale by Lewis M. Terman, a psychologist at Stanford University. The Stanford–Binet Intelligence Scale is now in its fifth edition (SB5) and was released in 2003. It is a cognitive ability and intelligence test that is used to diagnose developmental or intellectual deficiencies in young children. The test measures five weighted factors and consists of both verbal and nonverbal subtests. The five factors being tested are knowledge, quantitative reasoning, visual-spatial processing, working memory, and fluid reasoning.

斯坦福-比奈

知识、数量推理、视觉空间处理、工作记忆和流体智力。

Although to be driven back upon oneself is an uneasy affair at best, rather like trying to cross a border with borrowed credentials, it seems to me now the one condition necessary to the beginnings of real self-respect. Most of our platitudes notwithstanding, self-deception remains the most difficult deception. The tricks that work on others count for nothing in that well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself; no winning smiles will do here, no prettily drawn lists of good intentions. One shuffles flashily but in vain through one’s marked cards – the kindness done for the wrong reason, the apparent triumph which involved no real effort, the seemingly heroic act into which one had been shamed. The dismal fact is that self-respect has nothing to do with the approval of others – who are, after all, deceived easily enough; has nothing to do with reputation, which, as Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, is something people with courage can do without.

To do without self-respect, on the other hand, is to be an unwilling audience of one to an interminable documentary that deals one’s failings, both real and imagined, with fresh footage spliced in for every screening. There’s the glass you broke in anger, there’s the hurt on X’s face; watch now, this next scene, the night Y came back from Houston, see how you muff this one. To live without self-respect is to lie awake some night, beyond the reach of warm milk, the Phenobarbital, and the sleeping hand on the coverlet, counting up the sins of commission and omission, the trusts betrayed, the promises subtly broken, the gifts irrevocably wasted through sloth or cowardice, or carelessness. However long we postpone it, we eventually lie down alone in that notoriously uncomfortable bed,the one we make ourselves. Whether or not we sleep in it depends, of course, on whether or not we respect ourselves.

Phenobarbital, also known as phenobarbitone or phenobarb, is a medication recommended by the World Health Organization for the treatment of certain types of epilepsy in developing countries. 鲁米那，镇定安眠剂

Epilepsy is a group of neurological disorders characterized by epileptic seizures. Epileptic seizures are episodes that can vary from brief and nearly undetectable to long periods of vigorous shaking.These episodes can result in physical injuries including occasionally broken bones.癫痫

To protest that some fairly improbable people, some people who could not possibly respect themselves, seem to sleep easily enough is to miss the point entirely, as surely as those people miss it who think that self-respect has necessarily to do with not having safety pins in one’s underwear. There is a common superstition that “self-respect” is a kind of charm against snakes, something that keeps those who have it locked in some unblighted Eden, out of strange beds, ambivalent conversations, and trouble in general. It does not at all. It has nothing to do with the face of things, but concerns instead a separate peace, a private reconciliation. Although the careless, suicidal Julian English in Appointment in Samara and the careless, incurably dishonest Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby seem equally improbably candidates for self-respect, Jordan Bakerhad it, Julian English did not. With that genius for accommodation more often seen in women than men, Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: “I hate careless people,” she told Nick Carraway. “It takes two to make an accident.”

Appointment In Samarra, published in 1934, is the first novel by American writer John O'Hara (1905 – 1970). It concerns the self-destruction and suicide of the fictional character Julian English, a wealthy car dealer who was once a member of the social elite of Gibbsville (O'Hara's fictionalized version of Pottsville, Pennsylvania). The book created controversy due to O'Hara's inclusion of sexual content.

相约萨马拉

Jordan Baker – Daisy Buchanan's long-time friend with "autumn-leaf yellow" hair, a firm athletic body, and an aloof attitude. She is Nick Carraway's girlfriend for most of the novel and an amateur golfer with a slightly shady reputation and a penchant for untruthfulness. Fitzgerald told Maxwell Perkins that Jordan was based on the golfer Edith Cummings, a friend of Ginevra King.[14] Her name is a play on the two popular automobile brands, the Jordan Motor Car Company and the Baker Motor Vehicle, alluding to Jordan's "fast" reputation and the freedom now presented to Americans, especially women, in the 1920s.

Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an excess of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named co-respondent. In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. The measure of its slipping prestige is that one tends to think of it only in connection with homely children and United States senators who have been defeated, preferably in the primary, for reelection. Nonetheless, character – the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life – is the source from which self-respect springs.

Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about. They had instilled in them, young, a certain discipline, the sense that one lives by doing things one does not particularly want to do, by putting fears and doubts to one side, by weighing immediate comforts against the possibility of larger, even intangible, comforts. It seemed to the nineteenth century admirable, but not remarkable, that Chinese Gordon put on a clean white suit and held Khartoum against the Mahdi; it did not seem unjust that the way to free land in California involved death and difficulty and dirt. In a diary kept during the winter of 1846, an emigrating twelve-year-old named Narcissa Cornwall noted coolly: “Father was busy reading and did not notice that the house was being filled with strange Indians until Mother spoke out about it.” Even lacking any clue as to what Mother said, one can scarcely fail to be impressed by the entire incident: the father reading, the Indians filing in, the mother choosing the words that would not alarm, the child duly recording the event and noting further that those particular Indians were not, “fortunately for us,” hostile. Indians were simply part of the donnee.

Major General Charles George Gordon CB (28 January 1833 – 26 January 1885), also known as Chinese Gordon, Gordon Pasha, and Gordon of Khartoum, was a British Army officer and administrator.

He saw action in the Crimean War as an officer in the British Army. But he made his military reputation in China, where he was placed in command of the "Ever Victorious Army," a force of Chinese soldiers led by European officers. In the early 1860s, Gordon and his men were instrumental in putting down the Taiping Rebellion, regularly defeating much larger forces. For these accomplishments, he was given the nickname "Chinese Gordon" and honours from both the Emperor of China and the British.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/gordon_general_charles.shtml

查理·乔治·戈登

Khartoum is the capital and second largest city of Sudan and the state of Khartoum.

In Islamic eschatology, the Mahdi is the prophesied redeemer of Islam who will rule for five, seven, nine, or nineteen years (according to differing interpretations)before the Day of Judgement (yawm al-qiyamah, literally, the Day of Resurrection)and will rid the world of evil.

In one guise or another, Indians always are. Again, it is a question of recognizing that anything worth having has its price. People who respect themselves are willing to accept the risk that the Indians will be hostile, that the venture will go bankrupt, that the liaison may not turn out to be one in which every day is a holiday because you’re married to me. They are willing to invest something of themselves; they may not play at all, but when they do play, they know the odds.

That kind of self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for doing exactly that, but the psychological effect alone is incalculable: it is difficult in the extreme to continue fancying oneself Cathy in Wuthering Heights with one’s head in a Food Fair bag. There is a similar case for all the small disciplines, unimportant in themselves; imagine maintaining any kind of swoon, commiserative or carnal, in a cold shower.

But those small disciplines are valuable only insofar as they represent larger ones. To say that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton is not to say that Napoleon might have been saved by a crash program in cricket; to give formal dinners in the rain forest would be pointless did not the candlelight flickering on the liana call forth deeper, stronger disciplines, values instilled long before. It is a kind of ritual, helping us to remember who and what we are. In order to remember it, one must have known it.

The Battle of Waterloo was fought on Sunday, 18 June 1815, near Waterloo in present-day Belgium, then part of the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. A French army under the command of Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated by two of the armies of the Seventh Coalition: an Anglo-led Allied army under the command of the Duke of Wellington, and a Prussian army under the command of Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher, Prince of Wahlstatt.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gift for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

https://cynthiaripleymiller.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/dantes-paolo-and-francesca-loves-passionate-storm/

On this day in 1887, Anne Sullivan begins teaching six-year-old Helen Keller, who lost her sight and hearing after a severe illness at the age of 19 months. Under Sullivan’s tutelage, including her pioneering “touch teaching” techniques, the previously uncontrollable Keller flourished, eventually graduating from college and becoming an international lecturer and activist. Sullivan, later dubbed “the miracle worker,” remained Keller’s interpreter and constant companion until the older woman’s death in 1936.

It is the phenomenon sometimes called “alienation from self.” In its advanced stages, we no longer answer the telephone, because someone might want something; that we could say no without drowning in self-reproach is an idea alien to this game. Every encounter demands too much, tears the nerves, drains the will, and the specter of something as small as an unanswered letter arouses such disproportionate guilt that answering it becomes out of the question. To assign unanswered letters their proper weight, to free us from the expectations of others, to give us back to ourselves – there lies the great, the singular power of self-respect. Without it, one eventually discovers the final turn of the screw: one runs away to find oneself, and finds no one at home.