TIME ESSAY & A short report on SSS reading

おはようございます。
希望されていた方がいましたので、全文を下に打ち込みます。一応、チェックしましたので、入力ミスはないと思います。

DysonのInfinite in All Directionsを読み方を色々変えながら少し目を通しました。状況をお話しすると、この手の本でのSSS式は際どい感じです。専門用語に抵抗がなく、比較的すらすらと読めますが、語彙も文章も理解度が９割は超えていないと、１文ずつ論理的な流れがある作品だけに途端に後が続かず（前に挙げた例文は事実の羅列だった）、許容範囲がとても狭いです。無理に進めると著者の言いたいことがわからず時間の無駄に終ります。専門用語には日本語でも知らないのもあり、この分野のものを多く読んでいけば解決するという感じもしません（説明文に遭遇する可能性低し）。よほど体系的に語彙と内容がうまく仕組まれていないと語彙の増加と理解の深度というわけにはいかない感じです。辞書なしはつらい。しかも、この手のものなので、普通の携帯版英英では対応できず、でかい英英か語数の多い英和が必要です。
　一方、小説や雑誌やネットの英文ではもう少し許容度はあって、８割を切っても大勢に影響なく読めることが多いように思います。ただ、図に乗ってあまり理解度を落とすと多読効果は出ない感じがし、このあたりの匙加減が難しいようです。速度が稼げるうえ、相乗的に英文の感覚を増やせる方法としては強力とは思いますが、効果を維持しようとすると、そうそう許容範囲は広げられない感じです。

What Oscar Wilde Knew About Japan
※ ‘ ’ means italic.

　　“The whole of Japan is a pure invention,” said Oscar Wilde, who should have known, since he was a pure invention himself. What he meant, of course, was that Japan, as much as anywhere, is a product of our imagination, and the country that we in America see is only the one we have been trained to see. Life imitates art. Yet, in a deeper sense, anyone who would understand that land of cultured surfaces can do no better than to turn to Wilde, who kept up appearances as if they were the only reality he knew. His championing of masks, his preference for style before sincerity, his unfailing conviction that there was nothing wrong with reality that a little artifice couldn’t fix, might all be prototypes of a certain kind of Japanese aesthetics (the Japanese ‘Book of Tea’ reads almost like a pure invention of Wilde’s, with its “cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence”). Yet Wilde also saw that silver generalities conceal basic copper truths: “The actual people who live in Japan,” he wrote, “are not unlike the general run of English people.”
　　That issue is, of course, an increasingly urgent one: Are the Japanese really different from you and me (and not just as the rich are)? Wilde certainly brings many Japanese cultural positions into the living room. But culture, you will say, is not the point. It is Japan’s one-party democracy, its corporate monopolies, its patriotism that amounts to protectionism that exasperate; it is Japan’s trade practices, in fact, and economic strategies. But trade practices are in some respects the product of cultural values, and no country pursues policies in which self-interest plays no part. The Japanese system ‘is’ different from the American; so too are the French, the Chinese and the South African. And when it comes to competition, all of those powers go with their strengths. Yes, you will add, but the Japanese keep telling us they’re different. Indeed they do, and try to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. But Americans, who start many of their sentences with the words “Americans …,” may not find this so alien.
　　Inevitably, it is never hard for Americans to find differences across the sea, and to say that we cannot possibly make our peace with people who put their verbs at the end of their sentences, say yes where we would say no, read their books back to front and take their baths at night. Just as easily, we could say that there is nothing much that need separate us from a race that likes to eat at McDonald’s, listens to the Walkman on the train home, watches baseball on TV and takes its honeymoons in Hawaii (some Japanese children, indeed, are surprised to find that there are McDonald’s outlets in America too, and that foreigners play ‘besuboru’). Recently Japan’s most prominent gangsters reportedly complained---in a p.c. fashion---that laws to curtail their activities were “a violation of their human rights.”
　　It may be too that every nation acquires certain habits at certain moments of its growth. One of the best descriptions of Japanese “conformity,” as stereotype conceives of it, was given by William Manchester in ‘The Glory and the Dream’. Believing, he wrote, that “leadership came from the group, that progress lay in something called problem-solving meetings, [they] had no use for drive and imagination. Above all, they distrusted individualism. The individual sought prestige and achievement at the expense of others. He was abrasive; he rocked the boat; he threatened the corporate One, and they wanted no part of him. ” The only trouble is, Manchester was describing Americans there, in the “silent generation” ‘50s.
　　Yet an even closer kinship links Japan, ironically, with the country that many Americans feel closest of all to, and regard as their second---or cultural---home, the country with which we enjoy our “special relationship.” The affinities between England and Japan go far beyond the fact that both are tea-loving nations with a devotion to gardens, far beyond the fact that both drive on the left and are rainy islands studded with green villages. They go even beyond face that both have an astringent sense of hierarchy, subscribe to a code of stoical reticence and are, in some respects, proud, isolated monarchies with more than a touch of xenophobia. The very qualities that seem so foreign to many Americans---the fact that people do not invariably mean what they say, that uncertain distances separate politeness from true feelings, and that everything couched in a kind of code in which nuances are everything---will hardly seem strange to a certain kind of Englishman.
　　Perhaps the best illustration of this can be found in the best-selling novel about six days in the life of an English butler, ‘The Remains of the Day’. The book reads almost like a handbook of traditional Japanese values: a samurai-like loyalty to a master, a quiet and impenitent nationalism, a sense that self is best realized through self-surrender. Many of the scenes--- in which the butler speaks to his father in the third person, talks of “military-style pep talks” to his staff and resolves to practice “bantering”---might almost be translated from the Japanese. Yet here are all these values, in the midst of an instantly recognizable England, in 1956! The book’s author, Kazuo Ishiguro, who moved to England from Nagasaki at the age of five, grew up simultaneously as a Japanese and a English schoolboy, and so can see that the two are scarcely different. “I think there are a lot of things about the Japanese way of communicating that I don’t know about,” he says, “simply because I don’t know my way around the code. But the actual Japanese method, the actual approach, I think I’m quite at home with---because I’ve been brought up in middle-class England.” Japan, as Wilde might have said, is only as alien as ourselves.