选择知识点

In this age of Internet chat, videogames and reality television, there is no shortage of mindless activities to keep a child occupied. Yet, despite the competition, my 8-year-old daughter Rebecca wants to spend her leisure time writing short stories. She wants to enter one of her stories into a writing contest, a competition she won last year.

As a writer I know about winning contests, and about losing them. I know what it is like to work hard on a story only to receive a rejection slip from the publisher. I also know the pressure of trying to live up to a reputation created by previous victories. What if she doesn't win the contest again? That's the strange thing about being a parent. So many of our own past scars and dashed hopes can surface.

A revelation (启示) came last week when I asked her, "Don't you want to win again?" "No," she replied, "I just want to tell the story of an angel going to first grade."

I had just spent weeks correcting her stories as she spontaneously (自发地) told them. Telling myself that I was merely an experienced writer guiding the young writer across the hall, I offered suggestions for characters, conflicts and endings for her tales. The story about a fearful angel starting first grade was quickly "guided" by me into the tale of a little girl with a wild imagination taking her first music lesson. I had turned her contest into my contest without even realizing it.

Staying back and giving kids space to grow is not as easy as it looks. Because I know very little about farm animals who use tools or angels who go to first grade, I had to accept the fact that I was co-opting(借用) my daughter's experience.

While stepping back was difficult for me, it was certainly a good first step that I will quickly follow with more steps, putting myself far enough a way to give her room but close enough to help if asked. All the while I will be reminding myself that children need room to experiment, grow and find their own voices.

Whenever something looks interesting or beautiful, there’s a natural impulse(冲动) to want to own and preserve it — which means, in this day and age, that we’re likely to reach for our phones to take a picture.

Though this would seem to be an ideal solution, there are two big problems associated with taking pictures. Firstly, we’re likely to be so busy taking the pictures that we forget to look at the world whose beauty and interest prompted us to take a photograph in the first place. And secondly, because we feel the pictures are safely stored on our phones, we never get around to looking at them, so sure are we that we’ll get around to it one day.

These problems were noticed right at the beginning of the history of photography, when the average camera was the size of a grandfather clock. The first person to notice them was the English art critic, John Ruskin. He was a traveller who realised that most tourists make a boring job of noticing or remembering the beautiful things they see. He argued that humans have an innate tendency to respond to beauty and wish to have it, but that there are better and worse expressions of this desire. At worst, we get into buying souvenirs or taking photographs. But, in Ruskin’s eyes, there’s one thing we should do and that is attempt to draw the interesting things we see, no matter whether we have any talent for doing so.

Ruskin was very upset by how seldom people notice details. He strongly disapproved of the travellers who prided themselves on covering Europe in a week by train. “If he be truly a man, no harm to go slow; for his glory is not at all in going, but in being.”

Are you the kind of person who likes staying in unusual places? If the answer is "yes", then try the world's coldest hotel in Jukkasjarvi in the north of Sweden. But go in winter or all you'll find is a pool of water, because the hotel melts every spring!

The man who runs the Aortic Hall Hotel is Nils Yngve Bergqvist. He is also the man whose idea it was. He built his first hotel for an art show in 1991 and he designed the present hotel---over 200 square metres ---himself. It took workmen about two months to put 1,000 tons of snow onto a wooden board. As the weather got colder, the snow froze and then they removed the board. The whole building and everything in it is made of snow---except for the wooden front door. There's a theatre, a jazz club, a radio station and a large ice bar. As you can imagine, hot drinks are popular with the guests! The rooms have no doors, there is no furniture, no heating and everyone sleeps on ice beds. But the 800 people who have stayed at the hotel this winter seem to like it. If you want to stay in one of the ten ice rooms, it will cost you about ￡30 a night. You won't be very comfortable, but you will receive a survival certificate (生存能力证书) from the manager!

When the winter is over, Nils holds his competition every year to predict the day that the hotel will fall. The person that guessed the day correctly last year received a large painting from an Aortic Hall show. Bergqvist's ice hotels are becoming world-famous and he loves his work. He's already excited about his next project---an ice hotel that will be bigger and better, he says.