1 . Looking at the photos of public celebrations for International Pillow Fight Day in the news and social media from the 50 cities around the world, one question occurred to me: What are pillows really stuffed with? Not physically, but symbolically? Armed with nothing more than bring-our-own sacrificial cushions, strangers struck heavily each other in playful feather from Amsterdam to Atlanta, Warsaw to Washington DC. But why? Is there anything more to this delightful celebration?
As a cultural sign, the pillow is falsely soft. Since at least the 16th century, the humble pillow has been given unexpected meanings. The Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu tells a famous story about a wise man who meets a depressed young scholar at an inn and offers him a magic pillow filled with the most vivid dreams of a seemingly more fulfilling life. When the young man awakens to discover that his happy 50-year dream has in fact come and gone in the short space of an after-noon’s nap, our impression of the pillow’s power shifts from wonder to terror.
Succeeding writers have likewise seized upon the pillow. When the 19th-century English novelist Charlotte Bronte poetically observed “a ruffled (不平的,起皱的) mind makes a restless pillow”, she didn’t just change the expected order of the adjectives and nouns, but instead she made unclear the boundaries between mind and matter — the thing resting and the thing rested upon.
That can be considered as a trick which perhaps Bronte learned from the Renaissance philosopher Montaigne, who once insisted that “ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head”. On Montaigne’s thinking, intelligence and happiness confront each other forever in a pillow fight that only one can win.
Based on the words of Tang, Bronte, and Montaigne, we can perhaps more easily measure the attraction of the global pillow fight. Like a ritual of release, the annual international pillow fight amounts to a kind of cleansing, a brushing off of daily worries, an emptying of the world’s collective mind. Rather than a launch-pad for weightless rest, the pillow is a symbol of heavy thought: an anchor that drags the world’s soul down- one that must be lightened.
1. The writer uses the example of Tang Xianzu, wanting to illustrate that ________.
| A．dreams are always wonderful while the real world is cruel |
| B．pillows sometimes bless people with satisfactory dreams |
| C．people’s impression of pillows changes from wonder to terror |
| D．pillows symbolically convey the meaning in contrast to their soft appearance |
2. From the passage, we can learn that Charlotte Bronte ________.
| A．learned a trick from the Renaissance philosopher Montaigne |
| B．was likely to have been influenced by the thoughts of the Renaissance |
| C．regarded pillows as reflections of our minds |
| D．wrote poems about pillows |
3. The underlined sentence in Paragraph 4 “ignorance is the softest pillow on which a man can rest his head” most probably means ________.
| A．pillows give us comfort |
| B．pillows make people more intelligent |
| C．people with plenty of thoughts have no inner peace |
| D．people can easily fall asleep when they know little |
4. According to the author why is Pillow Fight Day so popular around the world?
| A．Because it is a ritual of release. | B．Because it makes life delightful. |
| C．Because it comforts restless minds. | D．Because it contains a profound meaning of life. |
