【正文】 t the work he is supposed to be doing at that moment. 5. Let us see how this works out in practice. Let us say that I have five things which have to be done before the end of the week: (1) a basketful of letters to be answered, some of them dating from October, 1928 (2) some bookshelves to be put up and arranged with books (3) a haircut to get (4) a pile of scientific magazines to go through and clip (I am collecting all references to tropical fish that I can find, with the 。e, twentytwo, was murdered and thrown from a moving car. On November 30 the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour. On the first day of December four people died violently, and on the third the wind began to break. 6 It is hard for people who have not lived in Los Angeles to realize how radically the Santa Ana figures in the local imagination. The city burning is Los Angeles39。 about twenty scattered days a year of the Santa Ana, which, with its incendiary dryness, invariably means fire. At the first prediction of a Santa Ana, the Forest Service flies men and equipment from northern California into the southern forests, and the Los Angeles Fire Department cancels its ordinary nonfirefighting routines. The Santa Ana caused Malibu to burn as it did in 1956, and Bel Air in 1961, and Santa Barbara in 1964. In the winter of 196667 eleven men were killed fighting a Santa Ana fire that spread through the San Gabriel Mountains. 5 Just to watch the frontpage news out of Los Angeles during a Santa Ana is to get very close to what it is about the place. The longest single Santa Ana period in recent years was in 1957, and it lasted not the usual three or four days but fourteen days, from November 21 until December 4. On the first day 25,000 acres of the San Gabriel Mountains were burning, with gusts reaching 100 miles an hour. In town, the wind reached Force 12, or hurricane force, on the Beaufort Scale。 necks. Anything can happen. That was the kind of wind it was. I did not know then that there was any basis for the effect it had on all of us, but it turns out to be another of those cases in which science bears out folk wisdom. The Santa Ana, which is named for one of the canyons it rushers through, is foehn wind, like the foehn of Austria and Switzerland and the hamsin of Israel. There are a number of persistent malevolent winds, perhaps the best know of which are the mistral of France and the Mediterranean sirocco, but a foehn wind has distinct characteristics: it occurs on the leeward slope of a mountain range and, although the air begins as a cold mass, it is warmed as it es down the mountain and appears finally as a hot dry wind. Whenever and wherever foehn blows, doctors hear about headaches and nausea and allergies, about nervousness, about depression. In Los Angeles some teachers do not attempt to conduct formal classes during a Santa Ana, because the children bee unmanageable. In Switzerland the suicide rate goes up during the foehn, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigating circumstance for crime. Surgeons are said to watch the wind, because blood does not clot normally during a foehn. A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. No one seems to know exactly why that should be。 ?he paints the very body and soul of English industrial life‘。s in essaywriting is often acpanied by a woolliness of expression which confirms the impression that no hard thinking has been taking place: ?his verse is packed with special meaning‘。 essential appeal。 essential atmosphere。 heights of tragedy。 consummate art。 inimitable narrative technique。, might sound rather highflown and technical: everything depends on what is expected at particular points in the stylistic range. But if ?incredible insight‘ is acceptable when used in criticism that is spoken on an informal occasion, it does not mean that these words are equally acceptable in written criticism of a formal kind. 7 All too frequently we tend to pick up the collocations of the most monly heard criticism and then to use them indiscriminately, without realising how empty they seem in a setting where precision is expected. In a set of essays written by an undergraduate class recently, it appeared that the following are among the monest collocations which must be branded as clich233。. If we are strolling during an interval at the theatre and our panion says, ?I admired Pinter‘s incredible insight in that act‘, we may not feel any of that distaste that constitutes reaction to a clich233。s status petition is renewed ,there in the muchdespised the Seventh Avenue IRT line the petition is maniacal .Some evenings the beggars ricochet off one another between stops,calling one anothers and s and telling each other to go find their own car. A mere blind man with a cane and a cup is mediocre is demanded is boys,one of them with a bongo drum,get on and the big boy,with the drum,starts beating on it as soon as the train starts up,and the little boy goes into what passes for a native dance. Then ,if there is room,he goes into a tumbling runs from one end of the car ,first in the direction the train is going,and does a plete somersault in the air,landing on his ,he runs back the other way and dose a somersault in the air ,only this time against the motion of the does this several times both ways ,doing some native dancing in act takes so long that it can be done properly only over a long stretch,such as the run between 42nd Street and 72nd the act is over,the boys pass along the car with Dixie cups,asking for contributions. 4. The Dixie cup is the conventional is one young Negro on the Seventh Av