My friend's grandfather came to America from a farm in Thailand. After arriving in New York, he went into a cafeteria(自助餐厅) in Manhattan to get something to eat. He sat down at an empty table and waited for someone to take his order. Of course nobody did. Finally, a woman with a big plate full of food came up to him. She sat down opposite him and told him how a cafeteria worked.

    “Start out at that end,” she said, “Just go along the line and choose what you want. At the other end they'll tell you how much you have to pay.”

    “I soon learned that's how everything works in America,” the grandfather told my friend later, “Life's a cafeteria here. You can get anything you want as long as you want to pay the price. You can even get success, but you'll never get it if you wait for someone to bring it to you. You have to get up and get it yourself.”

    I will absolutely be the first person to romanticize libraries. I come from a home with thirty-two bookcases, a count that does not include the several dozen boxes of books in the attic labeled "work" and "extra." All these books are courtesy of my parents, both of whom were English majors in their day and in whose footsteps I never hesitated to follow. My childhood dream was of a house with a claw-foot bathtub, stained glass, and (most importantly) an enormous library made of built-in shelves, a sliding ladder, and window seats in every window. As a high school girl, I began working at the county library near my house, following up on two summers of volunteering with their summer reading program. I was all starry eyes and romantic visions of alphabetizing the classics and discovering gems among the new arrivals. What I found instead was that the life of a library was nothing like my daydreams, but far more important than I could have imagined.

    There is no library that is only a library anymore. Modern libraries can't afford and don't try to be only a receptacle for free books. They offer classes, book groups, Internet access, resume and tax help, tutoring, and multimedia resources for anyone who might wander in. Librarians are equipped to help with research and give recommendations. Most libraries have access to interlibrary loans, making the acquisition of nearly any piece of material merely a matter of time. What makes libraries so unique and important, however, is none of the diversity of resources and opportunities for community that they most certainly provide.

    ____________________________________. Every building one enters today comes with some expectation of spending money. Restaurants require paying for service. Shops require the intention of purchasing something. Houses require rent. Anyone who has lived near the poverty line, whether or not they have actually been homeless, has felt the threatening pressure toward expenditure that permeates the public spaces of modern Western culture. Even a free restroom is becoming difficult to find, especially as growing cities experience ever-increasing space restrictions.

    In a library, no one is asked to pay anything simply to sit. For those with few resources besides time, this is a godsend. Libraries are unofficial playgrounds for low-income families on rainy days, homeless shelters in cold months, reprieves from broken homes for grade-school-age children. They are the last bastions of quiet and calm where nothing is asked of one but to exist. Many arguments have been made about how the library is an outdated institution offering outdated services—that in the twenty-first-century how-to books on building sheds and daily newspaper copies are obsolete and the funding used for libraries ought to be reallocated to other programs. I can only assume that those who make such arguments are people who have always been comfortable with the expenditures it takes to move through the world. For those people, libraries can be about books. But not everyone has the luxury of seeing past the space.

    Libraries, as they exist in the twenty-first century, are the only remaining public domain. In a library, anyone of any walk of life can come and go as they choose, and so long as they remain respectful of the space they can remain as long as they wish. Libraries welcome everyone, offering a place to be and easily accessible resources to the most vulnerable populations, whether in downtown Chicago or small-town Oklahoma. My childhood romantic vision of the library is still close to my heart, but the very real work that public libraries do today is so much more critical than a leather-bound edition of Homer or a graphic novel fresh off the press. Those are the things the library gives me, but libraries are for everyone.

    The days of the hunter are almost over in India. This is partly because there is practically nothing left to kill, and partly because some steps have been taken, mainly by banning tiger-shooting, to protect those animals which still survive.

    Some people say that Man is naturally a hunter. I disagree with this view. Surely our earliest forefathers, who at first possessed no weapons, spent their time digging for roots, and were no doubt themselves often hunted by meat-eating animals.

    I believe the main reason why the modern hunter kills is that he thinks people will admire his courage in overpowering dangerous animals. Of course, there are some who truly believe that the killing is not really the important thing, and that the chief pleasure lies in the joy of the hunt and the beauties of the wild countryside. There are also those for whom hunting in fact offers a chance to prove themselves and risk death by design; these men go out after dangerous animals like tigers, even if they say they only do it to rid the countryside of a threat. I can respect reasons like these, but they are clearly different from the need to strengthen your high opinion of yourself.

    The greatest big-game hunters expressed in their writings something of these finer motives. One of them wrote.

    “You must properly respect what you are after and shoot it cleanly and on the animal's own territory(领地). You must fix forever in your mind all the wonders of that particular day. This is better than letting him grow a few years older to be attacked and wounded by his own son and eventually eaten, half alive, by other animals, Hunting is not a cruel and senseless killing - not if you respect the thing you kill, not if you kill to enrich your memories, not if you kill to feed your people.”

    I can understand such beliefs, and can compare these hunters with those who hunted lions with spears(矛) and bravely caught them by the tail. But this is very different from many tiger-shoots I have seen, in which modern weapons were used. The so-called hunters fired from tall trees or from the backs of trained elephants. Such methods made tigers seem no more dangerous than rabbits.

    Thanks to exchange programmes an increasing number of young students are following educational courses in foreign countries. The Erasmus Programme, which started in 1987, is a European Union student exchange programme. It provides opportunities for young people from Europe to study in a foreign country for shot An intercontinental version of the programme, known as Erasmus Mundus, has existed since 2003, providing non-Europeans the opportunity to study in Europe.

    Devon Gallagher, a college graduate from Philadelphia, wants the world to know exactly here she's been during her worldwide vacation in a special way.

    The traveler, who was born with a bone disease, had her right leg amputated(k)at the age of four. Although the amputation caused setbacks for Gallagher early on, she now sees it as nothing short of inspiration for living her best life.

    To spread that message, Gallagher has taken to social media, where she shares photos of her travels across the globe, but instead of simply using a geo-tag, she writes her location across her artificial leg before taking a picture.

    Now she has been taking pictures across the Continent, which show her cycling over the canal in Amsterdam relaxing on a wall overlooking the city of Barcelona, posing with a waffle in Brussels, taking in the spectacular Parthenon temple in Athens and enjoying a river cruise in Budapest, all with the well-known locations written on her artificial leg “I get a new leg every two years and I can choose the design on it. One day I had a sudden thought to get a chalk-board, "Gallagher said. "My mum and grand-mother weren't too keen on the idea, but my friends thought it was great and told me to go for it, so I did.”

    Gallagher said people often stare when she's writing on her leg, but once she shares the photos she receives only positive feedback. "My leg hasn't stopped me from doing anything I've wanted to do," she said. "I don't know if it's my determination to prove to myself that I can do it, but regardless, I've been able to keep up with my peers and lead a pretty great life, Gallagher shows us that you should never let anything stand in the way of your dreams. And if life gives you an artificial leg, make art

    One day, when I was working as a psychologist in England, an adolescent boy showed up in my office. It was David. He kept walking up and down restlessly, his face pale, and his hands shaking slightly. His head teacher had referred him to me. "This boy has lost his family," he wrote, "He is understandably very sad and refuses to talk to others, and I'm very worried about him. Can you help?"

    I looked at David and showed him to a chair. How could I help him? There are problems psychology doesn't have the answer to, and which no words can describe. Sometimes the best thing one can do is to listen openly and sympathetically.

    The first two times we met, David didn't say a word. He sat there, only looking up to look at the children's drawing on the wall behind me. I suggested we play a game of chess. He nodded. After that he played chess with me every Wednesday afternoon-in complete silence and without looking at me. It's not easy to cheat in chess, but I admit I made sure David won once or twice.

    Usually, he arrived earlier than agreed, took the chess board and pieces from the shelf and began setting them up before I even got a chance to sit down. It seemed as if he enjoyed my company (陪伴). But why did he never look at me?

    "Perhaps he simply needs someone to share his pain with," I thought, "Perhaps he senses that I respect his suffering." Some months later, when we were playing chess, he looked up at me suddenly.

    "It's your turn," he said.

    After that day, David started talking. He got friends in school and joined a bicycle club. He wrote to me a few times about his biking with some friends, and about his plan to get into university. Now he had really started to live his own life.

Maybe I gave David something. But I also learned that one, without any words, can reach out to another person. All it takes is a hug, a shoulder to cry on, a friendly touch, and an ear that listens.