Para. 7

There is no comment about the fact that, three years earlier, Oppenheimer had been “tried” for disloyalty to this country and that his clearance had been taken away. One of the charges brought against him was that his wife, Katherine Puening Oppenheimer, was the former wife of Joseph Dallet, who had been a member of the Communist Party and who had been killed in 1937 fighting for the Spanish Republican Army. In 1937, Spender was also a member of the Communist Party in Britain and had also spent time in Spain. Did Oppenheimer know this? He usually knew most things about the people who interested him. Did “Kitty” Oppenheimer know it? Did this have anything to do with the fact that, during Spender’s visit, she was upstairs “ill”? Spender offers no comment. What was he thinking? There was so many things the two of them might have said to each other, but didn’t. They talked about the invasion of the Suez Canal.

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Q: Did this have anything to do.. she was upstairs "ill"?

A:

(1) What is the implication of this question?

(2) The implication is the author believes that Kitty Oppenheimer deliberately tried to avoid meeting Spender.

(3) Does the author think she was really ill?

No, he thinks it is only an excuse so "ill" is put in quotes.

Para. 8

In the fall of my second year at the institute, Dirac came for a visit. We all knew that he was coming, but no one had actually encountered him, despite rumored sightings. By this time, Dirac, who was in his mid-fifties, had a somewhat curious role in physics. Unlike Einstein, he had kept up with many of the developments and indeed from time to time commented on them. But, like Einstein, he had no school for following and had produced very few students. He had essentially to collaborators. Once, when asked about this, he remarked that “the really good ideas in physics are had by only one person. ” That seems to apply to poetry as well. He taught his classes in the quantum theory at Cambridge University, where he held Newton’s Lucasian chair, by, literally, reading in his precise, clipped way from his great text on the subject. When this was remarked on, he replied that he had given the subject a good deal of thought and that was no better way to present it.

Q: According to “but no one had actually encountered him, despite rumored sightings.”, does it mean there was no news about him?

A: No,there were unconfirmed reports about people having seen him from a distance.

Para. 9

At the institute we had a weekly physics seminar over which Oppenheimer presided, often interrupting the speaker. Early in the fall we were in the midst of one of these— there were about forty people in attendance in a rather small room—when the door opened. In walked Dirac. I had never seen him before, but I had often seen pictures of him. The real thing was much better. He wore much of a blue suit—trousers, shirt, tie, and, as i recall, a sweater—but what made an indelible impression were the thigh—length muddy rubber boots. It turned out that he was spending a good deal of time in the woods near the institute with an ax, chopping a path in the general direction of Trenton. Some years later, when I had begun writing for The New Yorker and attempted a profile of Dirac, he suggested that we might conduct some of the sessions while clearing this path. He was apparently still work on it.

Q: Why did the author say “much of a blue suit”?

A: Because he did not wear a blue coat. Instead he had on a sweater. So it cannot be called a blue suit.

Para. 10

Now it is some twenty-five years later. The sun has not yet come up, and I am driving across the state of New Jersey with my companion. We have left New York at about 5 A. M. so that I will arrive in time for a midmorning lecture. I have cobbled something together about physics and writing. Neither of us has had a proper breakfast. As we go through the Lincoln Tunnel I recall an anecdote my Nobelist Colleague T. D. Lee once told me about Dirac. He was driving him from New York to Princeton through this same tunnel. Sometime after they had passed it, Dirac interrupted his silence to remark that, on the average, about as much money would be collected in tolls if they doubled the toll and had tollbooths only at one end. A few years later the Port Authority seems to have made the same analysis and halved the number of tollbooths. We pass the turnoff that would have taken us to Princeton. It is tempting to pay a visit. But Oppenheimer is by then dead and Dirac living in Florida with his wife, this sister of fellow physicist Eugene Winger. Dirac used to introduce her to people as Winger’s sister, as in “I would like yo to meet Winger’s sister.” Dirac died in Florida in 1984.

Q: What is the role of the first sentence in Paragraph 10?

It brings the story back to the year 1981 so as to carry on the story.

Para. 11

We arrived at the conference center a few minutes before my lecture was scheduled to begin. There was no one, or almost no one, in the lecture room. However, in midroom, there was Spender. I recognized him at once form his pictures. Christopher Isherwood once described Spender’s eyes as having the “violent color of blue-bells”. Spender was wearing a dark blue suit an done of those striped British shirts—Turnbull and Asser?—the mere wearing of which makes one feel instantly better. He had on a club tie of some sort. He said nothing during my lecture and left soon as it was over, along with the minuscule audience that I had traveled five hours by car to address. My companion and I then had a mediocre lunch in one of the local coffee shops. There seemed to be no official lunch. I was now thoroughly out of sorts and was ready to return to New York, but she wanted very much to stay for a least part of Spender’s poetry workshop, and so we did.

Q: What is a club tie?

A:A club tie is a tie with the insignia or symbol of the club on it. Many American universities also have university ties. A club usually is an exclusive institution, rendering service only to its members. Membership fee may be expensive but the environment is very nice and service very good. Being a club member is usually a status symbol.

Para. 12

I had never been to poetry workshop and I couldn’t imagine what one consist of. I had been to plenty of physics workshops and knew only too well what they consisted of: six physicists in a room with a blackboards shouting at one another. The room where Spender was to conduct this workshop was full, containing perhaps thirty people. One probably should not read too much into appearances, but these people—mostly women—looked to me as if they were clinging to poetry as if it were some sort of life raft. If I had had access to Spender’s journals (they came out a few years later), I would have realized that he was very used to all of this. In fact, he had been earning his living since his retirement from University College in London a decade earlier by doing lectures and classes for groups like this. I would also have realized that by 1981 he was pretty tired of it, and pretty tired of being an avatar for his now dead friends—Auden, C. Day Lewis, and the rest. He had outlived them all, but was still under their shadow, especially that of Auden, whom he had first met at Oxford at about the same age and same time that Oppenheimer had met Dirac.

Q: What was he tired of?

A:He was tired of being a person in whom people would find traces or influences of his more famous friends: Auden, C. D. Lewis and others. In other words, he no longer wanted to be seen as one always under the influence of others. He wanted to be recognized in his own right.

Para. 13

Spender walked in with a stack of poems written by the workshop members. He gave no opening statement, but began reading student poems. I was surprised by now awful they were. Most seemed to be lists: “sky, sex, sea, earth, red, green, blue”, and so forth. Spender gave no clue about what he thought of them. Every once in a while he would interrupt his reading and seek out the author and ask such a question as, “Why did you choose red there rather than green? What does red mean to you?” He seemed to be on autopilot.

Q: How do you think of “He seemed to be on autopilot.”?

A: The questions Spender asked came out automatically, unthinkingly. He was rather mechanical, without giving the writings much thought.