Capítulo 11 de 27 · 5'00"
On a date with Alice, Tony admits her family has something almost nobody finds, and he cannot match their courage. He tells a story about a college dream he gave up and calls the family business "my excuse," while Alice teases him about the back of his head.
Tony Talks About Courage
❝ Monólogo · 9 frases The Engine in Green Grass
It starts as a silly college idea and swells into a dream of powering the world from sunlight.
The Research Tony Gave Up
Tony and Alice sit together and talk about her family, whom Tony finds astonishing. He laments that people build castles in the air their whole lives and end up with nothing, then tells how he and a college friend once studied why grass is green, and gave it up. He admits his own excuse is the Kirby banking line.
The scene is Tony's confession, dressed up as a talk about philosophy. He admires the Sycamores because "in their own way, they've found what everybody's looking for," and immediately turns the lesson on himself: most people are too afraid to live, and so is he. His college story — a real idea about capturing the sun's energy — ends with his friend selling cars and himself in banking, and the line he uses to name the failure is almost a title: "that's his excuse for lack of courage." When Alice supplies his own excuse, the Kirby family tradition, he does not argue. The flirting at the end, about the back of his head, is really the answer to all of it.
A1–C2 es la escala MCER. Las tarjetas por encima del nivel elegido se atenúan y la reproducción no se pausa en ellas.
“People spend their whole lives building castles in the air and then nothing ever comes of them.”
It lines up a whole life of dreaming with the empty result, all in one breath.
literary
“It just seems like, in their own way, they've found what everybody's looking for.”
It credits each person's own path to the thing everyone wants.
Informal
“Anyway, that's his excuse for lack of courage.”
It names the polite reason for what it really is: a cover for fear.
Neutral
“Everybody's afraid to live. You know?”
Names the real fear in one short line.
Informal
Well, this guy and I had this idea. We wanted to find out what made the grass grow green. Now, that sounds silly and everything, but that's the biggest research problem in the world today. And I'll tell you why. Because there's a tiny little engine in the green of this grass and in the green of the trees that has the mysterious gift of being able to take energy from the rays of the sun and store it up. You see, that's how the heat, and power in coal, and oil, and wood, is stored up. Well, we thought if we could find the secret of all those millions of little engines in this green stuff, we can make big ones, and then we could take all the power we could ever need right from the sun's rays.
Siguiente · 12went out with the buffaloLa escena: Tony Introduces Alice to His ParentsThey live the way they want without fear, which he sees as what everyone is really looking for; he contrasts it with people who spend their lives building castles in the air.
The Kirby family tradition of banking, which has been pounded into his head for so long that he treats it as an unbreakable line he cannot step out of.
Tony's college friend and research partner. They studied why grass is green, gave it up, and he ended up selling cars while Tony went into banking.
Not entirely. She calls it silly, says he is too young to talk that way, and jokes that she likes his brain and first noticed the back of his head.
Banking. He calls the Kirbys bankers for thousands of years and says the line just cannot be broken.
