When Ian informed Will that it was his turn for shark-bait position, he was told, You know, Lyssa came in second in chess club, but she lost to Seth Birnbaum in the final. By unspoken agreement, Luke, Ian, and Charla stopped asking Will to take his turn dangling in the ocean.
This might all seem grist to Berkeley’s mill. Berkeley himself knew that we interpret our experience in spatio-temporal, objective terms. But he thought we had to ‘speak with the vulgar but think with the learned’: in other words, learn to regard that interpretation as a kind of façon de parler, rather than the description of a real, independent, objective world.
[I]f you're honest enough you might end up in the drunk-tank 15 or 20 times and lose a few jobs and a wife or 2 or maybe slug somebody in the streets and sleep on a park bench now and then […].
The PLA had landed several battalions on the beaches and suffered immediate counterattacks by the Nationalist “Kinmen Bears” riding in American M5 A1 tanks for which the Communists had no counter. Fifteen thousand men had died in less than three days. The victory left Kinmen itself a hallowed ground in the minds of the Taiwanese.
