张汉熙高级英语第二册第六课

As a logical conclusion of this idea, the writer, in the final paragraph of this key chapter we are studying, states, "As surely as nature is being swallowed up by the mind, the banks, you might say, are disappearing through their own skylights.
The author focuses on changes in nature, history, language, art, and human evolution that have taken place since the beginning of the twentieth century: "Because the changes have been fundamental, the concepts - and even the vocabularies and images in which the concepts tend to be framed - no longer seem to objectify a real world. It is as though progress were making the real world invisible."
as the title suggests, the writer puts forward his central theme of " disappearance " —nature disappears, history disappears and even the solid banks disappear. Besides expressing the central theme of the book, the metaphorical phrase, "Disappearing Through the Skylight", is used also specifically in this chapter to describe the changed appearance of modern banks which seem to be disappearing.
The third concept is, " If man creates machines, machines in turn shape their creators". The modern man is no longer a unique individual, the product of a special environment and culture. The homogeneous world he now lives in universalizes him. He becomes a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world.

1. Disappearing Through the Skylight is not only the title of this chapter but also the title of the book. This shows the importance the writer attaches to this chapter. The book, however, also has a sub-title, "Culture and Technology in the Twentieth Century".
Lesson6 Disappearing Through the Skylight
Osborne Bennet Hardison Jr.
O.B. Hardison, Jr. (1928 -1990)
Background information
1) The author O.B. Hardison, Jr. (1928 -1990) was born in San Diego, California in 1928. He was educated at the University of North Carolina and the Universtiy of Wisconsin. English professor, Shakespearean scholar, and amateur physicist, is always entertaining and often thought-provoking. A scholarly writer Mr.hardison wrote numerous books and articles, as well as poetry and book reviews. His scholarly concerns ranged from Renaissance literature to technology and change in modern society.
It has become a set of geometric and mathematical relations that lie under the surface of the visible. It is still, however, indubitably there. Today, nature has slipped, perhaps finally, beyond our field of vision. We can imitate it in mathematics—we can even produce convincing images of it—but we can never know it. We can only know our own creations. "
As for the central theme of this book, the writer says: " This book is about the ways culture has changed in the past century, changing the identities of all those born into it. Its metaphor for the effect of change on culture is "disappearance".
The effect of change has been the disappearance of regional and parochial （地方范围的） identities and the emergence of a global consciousness. The universalizing process of technology has touched every facet of culture. As this has happened, the sense of individuality has inevi the author of Lyrics and Elegies (1958), The Enduring Monument (1962), English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance (1964), Toward Freedom and Dignity: The Humanities and the Idea of Humanity (1973), Entering the Maze: Identity and Change in Modern Culture (1981) and Disappearing Through the Skylight (1980).
As for "disappearance", he says, "In the nineteenth century, science presented nature as a group of objects set comfortably and solidly in the middle distance before the eyes of the beholder.
Architecture, in alliance with technology, is dissolving age-old cultural differences around the world. Skyscrapers, suspension bridges, Holiday Inns, McDonalds, or condominiums（《国际法》共管） look the same in SingaPore, St. Louis, New Delhi and New England. The emergence of a global architectural style hastened the disappearance of regional differences.
Hardison skillfully relates twentieth-century poetry, architecture, and physics, weaves together Dadaism and postmodernism, literature and television, computer art and artificial intelligence, the Bauhaus and robot musicians, medieval clockmaking and the frontiers of chaos theory, Greek cosmology and theory of language, Plato and Christo, Tristan Tzara and George Lucas.