偶然看见一本三年前的书，《马克思为什么是对的》（Why Marx Was Right, by Terry Eagleton，耶鲁大学出版社；有中译本），题目很好玩儿，令我想起政治考试论述题的常见模式：论述“为什么说……”，可谁那么说了呀？

尽管Terry不可能用一本小书来为一个伟大的理论做辩护，他的文字还是可以学习的。读几行就会感觉他的句子很有味道，在其他书是闻不到的。他似乎特别喜欢Nor，统计了一下，大约平均每10页有一个Nor-句（这个比例很高了，另外还有很多带nor的句子）。Nor有什么好呢？牛津词典的解释是，Continuing the force of a negative (as not, never, etc.) attached to some word in the preceding clause, and extending it to the corresponding word which follows。这样看来，Nor是最辩证的字眼儿，看前面怎么说，它能跟着调整自己的说法，用来辩护是再恰当没有了。马克思为什么正确呢，就看你怎么说Nor——此书的科学意义自有理论家去发掘，我发现的是它为我们学英文的提供了一个有趣的Nor-句宝库：

1.      Nor is it unknown for decent, compassionate types to support wholecivilizations steeped in blood.

2.       Nor are all such monstrosities as old as the Victorians.

3.       Nor did any Marxist thinker until Stalin imagine that this was possible,including Lenin, Trotsky and t he rest of the Bolshevik leadership.

4.       Nor did Marxists ever imagine that it was possible to achieve socialismin one country alone.

5.       Nor is it the notion of communism, which is of ancient provenance.

6.       Nor did he think up the idea of the proletariat, which was familiar to anumber of nineteenth-century thinkers.

7.       Nor do pathbreaking changes in the productive forces necessarily resultin new social relations, as the Industrial Revolution might illustrate.

8.       Nor does socialism follow necessarily from it. It is not to suggest thatthe crimes of capitalism are justified by the advent of socialism.

9.       Nor is it to clam that capitalism was bound to emerge.

10.   Nor do stoats have politics, unless they are keeping them cunninglyconcealed.

11.   Nor would it necessarily be desirable.

12.   Nor does it mean that everyone will be granted exactly the same amountof wealth or resources.

13.   Nor do modes of production throw up only those ideas or institutionswhich serve their purposes.

14.   Nor was his interest in art purely theoretical.

15.   Nor is the superstructure secondary to the base in the sense of beingsomehow less real.

16.   Nor is it true to say that all the activities of schools, newspapers,churches and the state support the present social system.

17.   Nor does it assign such political importance to the working classbecause it is supposedly the most downtrodden of social groups.

18.   Nor should one forget the enormous slum population of the world, growingat an extraordinarily fast rate.

19.   Nor is it a total upheaval.

20.   Nor have they had at their disposal anything like the formidablemilitary resources of the capitalist state.

21.   Nor, as Lenin insisted, can it be carried abroad and imposed at thepoint of a bayonet, as Stalin did in eastern Europe.

22.   Nor do revolutionaries necessarily reject parliamentary democracy.

23.   Nor were the politically unwary wholly mistaken in this view.

24.   Nor did he teach that men and women were the helpless playthings ofhistory.

25.   Nor did he see society in terms of two starkly polarized classes.