5 Exercise for Precis writing with Unsolved Examples for Class 9, 10, 11, 12 and Higher classes.

EXERCISE 1

The dangers which confront our civilization are not so much the external dangers – wild men wars and the bankruptcy that wars bring after them. The most alarming dangers are those which menace it from within, that threaten the mind rather than the body and estate of contemporary man.

Of all the various poisons which modern civilization, by a process of auto-intoxication, brews quietly up within its own bowels, few, it seems to me, are more deadly (while none appears more harmless) than that curious and appalling thing that is technically known as pleasure, ‘Pleasure’ (I place the word between inverted commas to show that I mean not real pleasure, but the organized activities officially known by the same name) – pleasure – what nightmare visions the word evokes! Like every man of sense and good feeling, I abominate work. But I would rather put in eight hours a day at a Government office than be condemned to lead a life of pleasure.. I would even, I believe, prefer to write a million words of journalism a year.

The horrors of modem ‘pleasure’ arise from the fact that every kind of organized distraction tends to become progressively more and more imbecile. There was a time when people indulged themselves with distractions requiring the expense of a certain intellectual effort. In the seventeenth century for example royal personages and their courtiers took a real delight in listening to erudite sermons (Dr.Donne’s for example) and academical disputes on the points of theology or metaphysics.

Royal personages were not the only people who enjoyed intelligent pleasures. In Elizabethan times every lady and gentleman of ordinary culture could be relied upon, at demand, to take his or her part in a madrigal or a motet. Those who know the enormous complexity and subtlety of 16′ century music will realize what this means. To indulge in their favourite pastime our ancestors had to exert their minds to an uncommon degree. Even the uneducated vulgar delighted in pleasures requiring the exercise of a .certain intelligent individuality and personal initiative. They listened for example to Othello, King Lear and Hamlet – apparently with enjoyment and comprehension. They sang and made much music. And far away, in the remote country, the peasants, year by year, went through the traditional rites -the dances of spring end summer, the winter mummings, the ceremonies of harvest home – appropriate to each successive season. Their pleasures were intelligent and alive, and it was they who, by their own efforts, entertained themselves.

We have changed all that. In place of the old pleasures demanding intelligence and personal initiative, we have vast organisation that provide us with ready—made distractions —distractions which demand from pleasure—seekers no personal participation and no intellectual effort of any sort. To the interminable democracies of the world a million cinemas bring the same stale balder—dash. They have always been fourth rate writer and dramatists; but their works in the past, quickly died without getting beyond the boundaries of the city or the country in which they appeared. Today the inventions of the scenario—writer go out from Los Angles across the whole world. Countless audience soak passively in the tepid bath of nonsense. No mental effort is demanded of them, no participation, they need only sit and keep their eyes open.

Do the democracies want music? In the old days they would have made it themselves. Now they merely turn on the gramophone. Or if they are a little more up to date they adjust their wireless telephone to the right wavelength and listen into the fruity contralto at Marconi House, singing, ‘The Gleaner’s Slumber song’. And if they want literature, there is the press. Nominally it is true, the Press exists to impart information. But its real function is to provide, like the cinema, a distraction which shall occupy the mind without demanding of it the slightest effort or the fatigue of a single thought. This function, must be admitted, it fulfils with an extra-ordinary success. It is possible to go on for years reading two papers every working day and one on Sunday without ever once being called upon to think or to make any other effort than to move the eyes, not very attentively down the printed column.

Certain sections of the community still practise athletic sports in which individual participation is demanded. Great number of the middle and upper classes play golf and tennis in person and if they are sufficiently rich, shoot birds and pursue the fox and go skiing in the Alps. But the vast mass of the community has now come even to sport vicariously, preferring the watching of football to the fatigues and dangers of the actual game. All classes it is true, still dance; but dance all the world over the some steps to the same tunes. The dance has been scrupulously sterilized of any local or personal individuality

These effortless pleasures, these ready made distractions that are the same for everyone over the face of the whole Western w3rld are surely a worse menace to our civilization than ever ‘he Germans were. The working hours of the day are already for the great majority of human beings occupied in the performer, s-e of purely mechanical tasks in which no mental effort, no initiative are required. Arid now in the hours of leisure, we turn t. distractions as Mechanically stereotyped and demanding as little intelligence and initiative as does our work. Add such leisure to such work and the sum is a perfect day which it is a blessed relief to come to the end of.

Self tioisoned in this fashion, civilization looks as though it might easily decline into a kind of premature senility. With a mind almost atrophied by lack of use, unable to entertain itself and grown so wearily uninterested in the ready-made distraction offered from without that nothing but the grossest stimulants of an ever increasing violence and crudity can move it, the democracy of the future will sicken of a chronic and mortal boredom. It will go perhaps the way the Romans went, the Romans who came at last to lose precisely as we are doing now, the capacity to distract themselves; the Romans who like it, lived on ready-made entertainments in which they had no participation. Their deadly ennui demanded ever more gladiators, more tightrope walking elephants, more rare and far fetched animals to be slaughtered. Ours would demand no less; but owing to the existence of a few idealists, doesn’t get all it asks for. The most violent forms of entertraintment can only be obtained illicitly; to satisfy a taste for slaughter and cruelty you must become a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Let us not despair, however, the force of a boredom clamouring to be alleviated may yet prove too much for the idealists.

EXERCISE 2

Different epochs need different virtues; or perhaps, it would be truer to say that the composition of the alloy, from which human life is forged, varies in each stage of civilization. it is reasonable to describe our age as the age of science taking that word not in the narrow connotation which it to day but in the Latin sense of knowledge an age which in all departments of life, social and political as well as physical, increasingly tries to base itself on knowledge. If so the virtue which it needs most is truth. Without that it can no more hope to endure than a bridge whose construction disobeys the laws of mechanics. And this platitude brings me to my subject.

Here you will demand that I should define truth. Not being a philosopher, I shall not attempt such a task. What puzzled Plato, baffles me, and anyhow I am not dealing with truth in the sense in which he used the word. I mean by it that veracity which does its best to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, where it is uncertain confesses to uncertainty, where it lacks knowledge does not pretend to it; which is candid and frank, takes no unfair advantage in argument, is careful not to misrepresent an opponent or to ignore the strength of his case and the weakness of its own.

Is truth in this sense the virtue as well as the need of our times? In the field of physical science the answer is yes. There we have conquered the temptation to let our passions or desires distort reality and ask only to see things as they are. But when we pass from microbes to men, things are very different. In scientific work mis-representation or suppression of facts is rare. No one could say as much of writing on political or social questions; here we find ourselves in a different world ruled apparently by different principles where the law of veracity may be admitted but is habitually broken. Indeed, of recent years it has not been admitted even in the two largest countries in Europe – Germany and Russia. In Russia we have a secular version of the mediaeval church. The citizen may criticize details but he must keep his mouth shut about the higher policy. The communist postpones liberty of thought to a scheme of human happiness. No doubt interference with free speech is not the same as falsification of facts. Liberty is not truth and its denial is not identical with falsehood. But in effect liberty is essential to truth and liberty is refused in order to set propaganda free.

I do not know enough of serious studies on political and social questions to say how far what I have called the principle of variety prevails in them. I imagine that in general it does so though I can think some academic writers on politics who could not honestly claim to comply with the oath administered to witnesses in the law court and I have heard respectable people say that history is uninteresting if it is impartial – as if truth were dull. But passing outside academic circles, we are apt to find ourselves in a waste land, where truth if recognized as a possible ideal is not a major pre-occupation. On controversial issues we do not expect to hear from all politicians or all journalists an impartial statement, which conceals nothing and does justice to opponents.

To say this is not to fall into a defect common and dangerous in democratic societies – that of denigrating their governors. Politicians and journalists are made of as good clay as other men but their occupation exposes them far more to a weakness to which all men are liable. Consider the class called intellectuals, whose name suggests that in them we find the intellect dominant and the virtue of the intellect fully developed.

Consider the New Statesman, organ and product of the class. Consider a typical representative of the class, Shaw, the fallen angel of the age, who could have told the truth and has not. Or consider Wells, who was thought, or at least thinks himself, a representative of the scientific spirit but who has no trace of the patience and objectivity which make it a, bundle of emotions and prejudices and admirable gadfly, a disastrous guide. All these are intellectuals in the sense that they have intellects and use them but they did not use them for the prime purpose for which intellect exists – to discover the truth. Yet these were held by the generation, and not only by the half educated in it, to represent progressive and enlightened thought.

I do not think any one will question the justice of these criticisms. In personal relations veracity is, if not the universal practice at any rate an accepted rule of conduct, we are shocked if others break it, ashamed if we do so ourselves. But in controversy on social and political problems our standards are very different. There are politicians and publicists who take a licence in this field which they would never allow themselves in personal relations; though if we must depart from the truth it is less disastrous to do so in private than in public life. For apart from any normal question – inveracity in political and social controversy is such an obstacle to progress, it prevents our ascertaining the facts; it hinders common action. A man does not help the country to find the right road by throwing dust in people’s eyes, and in the process some dust is apt to find its way into his own. It is hard enough to find the truth any how; it is not made easier if a large number of people are trying to conceal it. There are many obstacles to political and social progress but a chief one is what I have called inveracity. We hear a good deal today about the need of improving the physical health of the nation. Let us, to this admirable campaign add one for improving the health of its intelligence and see what we can do to extirpate a major disease of it and so acquire healthy minds.

Have we any special conditions or institutions which may breed or foster indifference to truth and which we could remove or alter? I think that we have such institutions, but I am not clear how we could alter them. Dibelius an acute critic stresses the element of falseness and unreality in our parliamentary system, the sham fighting in it, the tendency to dress a personal or party combat in the cloak of great principles; to make promises which can never be carried out; to attack a policy or measure nominally on its merits, in fact because the other party puts it forward and indeed the doctrine that the duty of His Majesty’s Opposition is to oppose, if practically useful, is intellectual dishonesty. We should allow some weight to this criticism.

The party system has double effect. It encourages and almost demands that each party should misrepresent the other. But the mere fact of debate is a check on misrepresentation. If it goes too far it exposes itself and discredits its authors. The dictator on the other hand can lie almost without limit; he lies to a silent people; no voice is raised in protest or criticism; he is free to delude his nation and in the end may delude himself. Politicians would not probably agree with Socrates that the uncriticised life is not worth living but Parliamentary government saves them from that life, and they and we are better for it.

EXERCISE 3

There are, I think, several factors that contribute to wisdom. Of these I should put first a sense of proportion: the capacity to take account of all the important factors in a problem and to attach to each its due weight. This has become more difficult than it used to be owing to the extent and complexity of the specialized knowledge required of various kinds of technicians. Suppose, for example, that you are engaged in research in scientific medicine. The work is difficult and is likely to absorb the whole of your intellectual energy. You have no time to consider the effect which your discoveries or inventions may have outside the field of medicine. You succeed (let us say), as modern medicine has succeeded, in enormously lowering the infant death rate, not only in Europe and America, but also in Asia and Africa. This has the entirely unintended result of making the food supply inadequate and lowering the standard of life in the most populous parts of the world. To take an even more spectacular example, which is in everybody’s mind at the present time: you study the composition of the atom from a disinterested desire for knowledge, and incidentally place in the hands of powerful lunatics the means of destroying the human race. In such way the pursuit of knowledge may become harmful unless it is combired with wisdom; and wisdom in the sense of comprehensive vision is not necessarily present in specialists in the pursuit of knowledge.

Comprehensiveness alone, however, is not enough to constitute wisdom. There must be, also, a certain awareness of the ends of human life. This may be illustrated by the study of history. Many eminent historians have done more harm than good because they viewed facts through the distorting medium of their own passions. Hegel had a philosophy of history which did not suffer from any lack of comprehensiveness, since it started from the earliest times and continued into an indefinite future. But the chief lesson of history which he sought to inculcate was that from the year 400 A.D. down to his own time Germany had been the most important nation and the standard bearer of progress in the world. Perhaps one could stretch the comprehensiveness that constitutes wisdom to include not only intellect but also feeling. It is by no means uncommon to find men whose knowledge is wide but whose feelings are narrow. Such men lack what I am calling wisdom

It is not only in public ways, but in private life equally, that wisdom is needed. It is needed in the choice of ends to be pursued and in emancipation from personal prejudice. Even an end, which it would be noble to pursue if it were attainable, may be pursued unwisely if it is inherently impossible of achievement. Many men in past ages devoted their lives to a search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life. No doubt, if they could have found them, they would have conferred great benefits upon mankind, but as it was their lives were wasted. To descend to less heroic matters, consider the case of two men, Mr. A and Mr. B, who hate each other and, through mutual hatred, bring each other to destruction. Suppose you go to Mr. A and say, “Why do you hate Mr. B ?” He will no doubt give you an appalling list of Mr. B’s vices, partly true, partiy false. And now suppose you go to Mr. B. He will give you an exactly similar list of Mr. A’s vices with an equal admixture of truth and falsehood. Suppose you now come back to Mr. A and say, “You will be surprised to learn that Mr. B says the same things about you as you say about him’, and you go to Mr. B and make a similar speech. The first effect, no doubt, will be to increase their mutual hatred, since each will be so horrified by the other’s injustice. But perhaps, if you have sufficient patience and sufficient persuasiveness, you may succeed in convincing each that the other has only the normal share of human wickedness, and that their enmity is harmful to both. If you can do this, you will have instilled some fragment of wisdom.

I think the essence of wisdom is emancipation, as far as possible, from the tyranny of the here and the now. We cannot help the egoism of our senses. Sight and sound and touch are bound up with our own bodies and cannot be made impersonal. Our emotions start similarly from ourselves. An infant feels hunger or discomfort, and is unaffected except by his own physical condition. Gradually with the years, his horizon widens, and in proportion as his thoughts and feelings become less personal and less concerned with his own physical state, he achieves growing wisdom. This is of course a matter of degree. No one can view the world with complete impartiality: and if anyone could, he would hardly be able to remain alive. But it is possible to wake a continual approach towards impartiality on the one hand, by knowing things somewhat remote in the time or space, and, on the other hand, by giving to such things there due weight in our feelings. It is this approach towards impartiality that constitutes growth in wisdom.

Can wisdom in this sense be taught? And, if it can, should the teaching of it be one of the aims of education? I should answer both these questions in the affirmative. We are told on Sundays that we should love our neighbour as ourselves. On the other six days of the week, we are exhorted to hate him. You may say that this is nonsense, since it is not our neighbour whom we are exhorted to hate. But you will remember that the precept was exemplified by saying that the Samaritan was our neighbour. Vie no longer have any wish to hate Samaritan and so we are apt. to miss the point of the parable. If you want to get its point, you should substitute Communist, or anti-Communist, as the case may be, for Samaritan. It might be objected that it is right to hate those who do harm. I do not think so. If you hate them, it is only too likely that you will become equally harmful; and it is very unlikely that you will induce them to abandon their evil ways. Hatred of evil is itself a kind of bondage to evil. The way out is through understanding, not through hatred. I am not advocating non-resistance. But I am saying that resistance, if it is to be effective in preventing the spread of evil, should be combined with the greatest degree of understanding and the smallest degree of force that is compatible with the survival of the good things that we wish to preserve.

EXERCISE 4

The period of history, which is commonly called “modern”, has a mental outlook which differs from that of the medieval period in many ways. Of these, two are the most important the diminishing authority of the Church and the increasing authority of science. With these two, others are connected. The culture of modem times is more lay than clerical. States increasingly replace the Church as the governmental authority that controls culture. The Government of nations is, at first, mainly in the hands of kings; then, as in ancient Greece, the kings are gradually replaced by democracies or tyrants. The power of the national State, and the functions that it performs, grow steadily throughout the whole period; but at most times the state has less influence on the opinions of philosophers than the Church had in the Middle Ages. The feudal aristocracy, which north of the Alps, had been able, till the fifteenth century, to hold its own against central governments, loses first its political and then its economic importance. It is replaced by the king in alliance with rich merchants; these two share power in different proportions in different countries. There is a tendency for the rich merchants to become absorbed into the aristocracy. From the time of the American and French Revolutions onwards, democracy, in the modern sense, becomes an important political force. Socialism, as opposed to democracy based on private property, first acquires government power in 1917. This form of government however, if it spread, must obviously bring with it a new form oftteure; the culture with which we shall be concerned is in the main ‘liberal’, that is to say, of the kind most naturally associated with commerce. To this there are important exceptions, especially in Germany. But such exceptions are not typical of their age.

The rejection of ecclesiastical author which is the negative characteristic of the modern age, beings earlier than the positive characteristic, which is the cc tance of scientific authority. In the Italian Renaissance, science played a very small part; the opposition to the Church, in men’s thoughts, was connected with antiquity, and looked still to the past. The first serious irruption of science was the publication of the Copernican theory in 1543; but this theory did not become influential until it was taken up and improved by Kepler and Galileo in the seventeenth century. Then began the long fight between science and dogma, in which traditionalists fought a losing battle against new knowledge.

The authority of science, which is recognized by moss philosophers of the modem epoch, is a very different thing from the authority of the Church, since it is intellectual, not governmental. No penalties fall upon those who reject it; no prudential arguments influence those who accept it. It prevails solely by its intrinsic appeal to reason. It is, moreover, a piecemeal and partial authority; it does not, like the body of Catholic dogma, lay down a complete system, covering human morality, human hopes, and the past and further history of the universe. It pronounces only on whatever, at the time, appears to have been scientifically ascertained, which is a small island in an ocean of nascence. There is yet another difference from ecclesiastical authority, which declares its pronouncements to be absolutely certain and externally unalterable: the pronouncements of science are made tentatively, on a basis of probability, and are regarded as liable to modification. This produces a temper of mind very different from that of the medieval dogmatist.

So far I have been speaking of theoretical science, which is an attempt to understand the world. Practical science, which is an attempt to change the world, has been important from the first, and has continually increased in importance, unit it has almost ousted theoretical science from men’s thoughts. The practical importance of science was first recognized in connection with war; Galileo and Leonardo obtained government employment by their claim to improve artillery and the art of fortification. From their time onwards, the part of men of science in war has steadily grown greater. Their part in developing machine production, and accustoming the population to the use, first of steam, then of electricity, came later and did not begin to have important political effects until near the end of the nineteenth century. The triumph of science has been mainly due to its practical utility, and there has been an attempt to divorce this aspect from that of theory, thus making science more and more a technique, and less and less a doctrine as to the nature of the world. The penetration of this point of view to the philosophers is very recent.

Emancipation from the authority of the church led to the growth of individualism, even to the point of anarchy. Discipline, intellectual moral and political, was associated in the minds of t-he men of the Renaissance with the scholastic philosophy and ecclesiastical government. The Aristotelian logic of the Schoolmen was narrow, but afforded: training in a certain kind of accuracy. When this school of logic became unfashionable, it was not, at first, succeeded by something better, but only an eclectic imitation of ancient models. The moral and political anarchy of fifteenth-century Italy was appalling, and gave rise to the doctrines of Machiavelli. At the same time the freedom from mental shackles led to an astonishing display of genius in art and literature. But such a society is unstable. The Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, combined with the subjection of Italy to Spain, put an end to both the good and the bad of the Italian Renaissance. Modern philosophy, however, has retained for the most part an individualistic and subjective tendency.

Meanwhile science as technique was building up in practical men a quite different outlook from any that was to be found among theoretical philosophers. Technique conferred a sense of power: man is now much less at the mercy of his environment than he was in former times. But the power conferred by technique is social, not individual and average individual wrecked on a desert island could have achieved more in the seventeenth century than he could now.

Scientific technique requires the co-operation of a large number of individuals organized under a single direction. Its tendency, therefore, is against anarchism and even individualism, since it demands a well-knit social structure. Unlike religion, it is ethically neutral: it assures men that they can perform wonders, but does not tell them what wonders to perform. In this way it is incomplete. In practice, the purposes to which scientific skill will be devoted depend largely on chance. The men at the head of the vast organisations which it necessitates can, within limits, turn it this way or that as they please. The power impulse thus has a scope which it never had before. The philosophies that have been inspired by scientific technique are power philosophies, and tend to regard everything non-human as mere raw material. Ends are no longer considered; Only the skilfulness of the process is valued. This is a form of madness. It is, in our day, the most dangerous form, and the one against which a sane philosophy should provide an antidote.

EXERCISE 5

A friend of mine wrote to me the other day that the sceptre has passed from literature to science. He is, of course, a man .of science himself. And it seemed rather strange that he should use such a very literary phrase to express his triumph. It would have been mare appropriate if he had sent me an equation I should not have known what equation meant. Perhaps that was the reason why he sent me a metaphor instead.

While I pandered his phrase it began to look to me like a barefaced contradiction in terms, and I wandered what kind .of an equation would adequately express his satisfaction that literature had at last to play second fiddle to science. Even if an equation could be discovered with the proper nuance of ‘I told you so’ what would be the pleasure far him if I did not appreciate it? No enemy is stranger than one who does not know he is beaten. And to compare large things with small would not the effect upon the literature of the victory of science be precisely the same as the effect upon me of my defeat by an equation I could not understand? Literature may be sham of its sceptreand purple, but if there is no little bay to call out that the Emperor is naked, who will be the wiser? If nobody knows who will care?

Nevertheless, since my friend is a brilliant man. I have done my utmost to extract a meaning from his phrase. I am sure that he means something mare to make than my flesh creep. My flesh refuses to creep but I want to know what he means. I suspect that his metaphor was badly chosen and that he would have done better with two scepters instead of one. Probably he meant that literature end science each had a sceptres but the scepter of science had .of late became heavier and mare imposing than the sceptre of literature. Literature now rules a little kingdom, while .science rules a big one. But the kingdom of literature has certainly not been incorporated into the kingdom of science, nor is it likely to be. You might as well try to marry Bayle’s law to a bookcase.

But even if we take my friend to mean that science has now became a mare important activity of the human mind than literature, is he saying mare than that Bayle’s law is mare valuable than a book-case? And is not that judgement without import as the logicians say? Is he not like a man who insists on comparing the values of logarithms and lave? And if we suppose he means only that at the present time abler minds are engaged in scientific discovery than in literary creation, a question exceedingly difficult to judge, the issue is not affected. Quite possible, our bridges are better built than our poems now-a-days. As Socrates would have said: our bridges have more of the goodness of bridges than our poems have the goodness of poems. But that does not mean that a bridge is more important than a poem, or a poem than a bridge.

I suspect that what my friend has in his head is that the Einstein theory is a discovery of supreme philosophical importance and; that this will have determining influence upon the future evolution of literature.

It is quite true that scientific theory does have an influence upon literary creation. But it has to be translated into emotional terms. In order to affect literature it has to affect our attitude of life. The Theory of Natural Selection, emotionally interpreted as handing man over to the play of blind and uncontrollable forces, certainly cave a pessimistic tinge to the literature of the nineteenth century—The Copernican Revolution, no doubt contributed to that emphatic isolation of the individual which is the beginning of modern romanticism. But we cannot say that the literature of the nineteenth century is either more to less important than Darwinism or the Copernican Revolution. This is no means of comparing them. What we can say is that the literature may wear better. When those two scientific theories have been exploded now, the great books created by minds coloured by them will remain as fresh and valuable as ever.

For the truth of matter surely is that there are very few emotional attitudes towards life which a man can truly and instinctively hold. He may believe—life is painful and pitiful he may believe it is glorious and splendid; he may confidently hope, he may continually despair, he may alternate between hope and despair. What is his attitude will be determined by many things: his heredity, his personal destiny and to some degree by the scientific theories that obtain in his life-time. A scientific theory which directly affects his hope of long life or immortality or better things to come, colour his-mind and gives a twist to his sensibility. He becomes, if he is 3 writer, differently interested in life. In so far as either the Einstein theory or modem biology opens up new vistas of the significance or duration of human life, they will determine a change of tone in literature. Possibly the pessimism which still hangs about us like e colour-with be dissipated for a season. But it will return simply because it is an eternal mode of the human spirit. And it may be dispelled without the cleansing’ wind of science because optimism also is a natural mode of the human spirit.

Literature changes tone in obedience to these modes. But its substance is unchanged, for that is based on a delighted interest in human life and destinies. Science has no power over that interest, which is a gift of the gods like the genius of communicating it. When the man of science has power to determine or to change the structure of our minds, then literature may begin to fear him. By that time ordinary men will fear him also and there will be a massacre of biologists. But till that day science can do no more to literature than to help to decide whether its vision of life shall be tinged with pity or happiness, resignation or confidence.

This may equally be decided by the indifference of the writer’s mistress or his happiness and love. Science is of the things which colour the glass through which the writer looks at life; at present it can either give not take away the gift of seeing clearly through the glass; neither can it increase nor diminish the pleasure of those who take delight in what the writer can show them. The scepter of science may be the more majestic. Beside, its massy steel rod of literature may appear slight and slender. We do not expect a magician’s wand to look otherwise.