Music and Texts of Articles and Commentary | The Table and the Chair medium voice and piano the Table to the Chair, "You can hardly be aware, "How I suffer from the heat, "And from chilblains on my feet! "If we took a little walk, "We might have a little talk! "Pray let us take the air!" Said the Table to the Chair. Said the Chair to the table, "Now you know we are not able! "How foolishly you talk, "When you know we cannot walk!" Said the Table with a sigh, "It can do no harm to try, "I've as many legs as you, 'Why can't we walk on two?" So they both went slowly down, And walked about the town With a cheerful bumpy sound, As they toddled round and round. As they hastened to the side,the Table and the Chair "Have come out to take the air!" But in going down an alley, To a castle in a valley, They completely lost their way, And wandered all the day,
Till, to see them safely back, They paid a Ducky-quack, And a Beetle, and a Mouse, Who took them to their house. Then they whispered to each other, "O delightful little brother! "What a lovely walk we've taken! "Let us dine on Beans and Bacon!" So the Ducky and the leetle Browny-Mousy and the Beetle Dined and danced upon their heads Till they toddled to their beds. pages, circa 3' 40" ] Edward Lear in his own caricature George Orwell instructs us that, "Humour is the debunking of humanity, and nothing is funny except in relation to human beings. are only funny because they are caricatures of ourselves. A lump of stone could not of itself be funny; but it can become funny if it hits a human being in the eye, or if it is carved into human likeness. subtler methods of debunking than throwing custard pies. There is also the humour of pure fantasy, which assaults man's notion of himself as not only a
dignified but a rational being. Lewis Carroll's humour consists essentially in making fun of logic, and Edward Lear's in a sort of poltergeist interference with common sense." Leader, 28 July 1945. illustrations which Lear provided for this poem see inanimate objects and animals acting as people, the grammar correct per the observation of Orwell but the reality pleasantly wrong. The instances of impossibilities being presented in the world of men is no more nonsense than this nonsense, and of verses begin in C major, slip to D flat, then D and eventually to E to ease the return to the tonic. Yet the periodicity of the verses and their settings alter each time, for this is no standard verse setting. the moment the table and chair become lost, the accompaniment awkwardly tries to find its way with quick quotes from other tonalities alongside EThey are of course found in E major and assisted in their return to the tonic major.
The Table and the Chair is available as a free PDF download, though any major commercial performance or recording of the work is prohibited without prior arrangement with the composer. Click on the graphic below for this The Table and the ChairMr. Flood's Party Summary “Mr. Flood’s Party,” which first appeared in The Nation and later in Avon’s Harvest (1921), is a sad portrait of a friendless man who has witnessed “many a change” and has now outlived his time. Eben feels that he has lived too long. The harvest moon he sees underscores his situation. Harvested crops have a use at the end of their cycle, whereas Eben has outlived the late-autumn stage of his life and is of no use to anyone, not even to himself. The townspeople do not welcome him, probably because they think he is a mere drunk. He is so lonely that, tipsy with drink on the way to his empty hilltop house, he talks to himself as if he were two people celebrating together. There is, however, more to Eben Flood than meets the townspeople’s eye.
Despite his name’s close sound to “ebb and flow,” they do not think about what ups and downs he may have experienced in his life. Unlike the townsfolk, readers overhear Eben and learn that he believes everyone leads “uncertain lives” in a hard world where precious “things break” all too easily. When he says this, he is remembering the loss of his family and his many long-gone friends. In his younger years, Eben apparently possessed an appreciation of the arts, especially poetry. He still quotes from folk poet Robert Burns (“For auld lang syne”) and Edward FitzGerald’s famous translation of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (“the bird is on the wing”). Now his birdlike inner spirit lifts up with drink instead of verse. However, it is a sorry substitute, “like Roland’s ghost winding a silent horn.” In the epic poem The Song of Roland, young Roland blew his ivory horn to summon help from his king; in contrast, old Eben’s raised jug in the night far from town is a hopeless gesture silently summoning only cheerless memories.
Up to now we have not described in detail the rotational path of cyclohexane and what is the end result. We understand that the best path (the lowest energy path) available proceeds via the half chair and requires an energy input of 10 kcal/mol. This transition state proceeds to a twist boat energy minimum, but this is not highly popupulated and generally plays little or no role in cyclohexane's structure or chemistry. However, the twist boat can interconvert with another equivalent twist boat (via the true boat conformation as a transition state) to give another chair structure, in which the sense of the ring puckering isThis is significant in cyclohexane itself, because in this process the axial and equatorial hydrogens are interconverted. this interconversion or ring flip occrus rapidly at room temperature, all hydrogens spend 50% of their time as axial hydrogens and 50% of their time as equatorial hydrogens, so that on the time average all
C-H bonds of cyclohexane are equivalent. However, at any given instant, there are always two types of hydrogen. Since axial and equatorial bonds are non-equivalent, there are two non-equivalent positions in which to place any substituent. We use the simple methyl group as an example, but the same concept applies Equatorial methyl cyclohexane is the more stableWhen the ring flip occurs, however, it converts to axialThese two conformations are in rapid equilibrium at room temperature, but can be frozen out as distinct compounds at The equatorial conofrmation is favored in the equilibrium by a modest amount because the axial isomer has about 1.8 kcal/mol ofThis strain arises from the interaction of one of the hydrogens of the axial methyl group with each of the two other axial hydrogens on the same side of the ring, as illustrated above. Each of these steric interacgions is approximately equivalent to one gauche butane interaction of 0.9 kcal/mole, so the total is 1.8 kcal/mol.
The point of the gauche butane comparison is that the H/H distance of the sterically hindered hydrogens is almost exactly the same in gauche butane as with axial methyl cyclohexane, except that there are two such H/H interactions in the latter case. The steric interactions in axial methylcyclohexane are referred to as "1,3-diaxial interactions", because the interactions involve two axial atoms or groups (one H and one CH3 and the carbons bearing these atoms or groups are 1,3 related. THE "EQUATORIALITY PRINCIPLE" PROVIDES THAT ANY SUBSTITUENT PREFERS TO OCCUPY THE LESS STERICALLY HINDERED EQUATORIAL POSITION, IF AT ALL POSSIBLE.IN THE CASE OF DI- OR POLY-SUBSTITUTED CYCLOHEXANES NOT ALL SUBSTITUENTS CAN OCCUPY ALL EQUATORIAL POSITIONS IN EVERY ISOMER, BUT THAT ISOMER WILL BE THE MOST STABLE IN WHICH ALL OF THE SUBSTITUENTS OCCUPY EQUATORIAL POSITIONS(see examples below). Note that with the 1,4-disubstitution pattern, the
diequatorial (mosts stable) arrangement is what we call the "trans"in it, one substituent is "slant up" and one "slantRing flipping gives a conformation in which the methyl substituents are anti (dihedral angle of 180) to each other, but this is still trans, and thisconformation is less stable because it has two axial substituents. There is another isomer of 1,4-dimethylcyclohexane,Recall that cis and trans isomers are diastereoisomers, they are not different conformations of the same isomer and cannot be readily interconverted by a simple rotational process (a bond would have to be broken).In the cis isomer, here, one methyl group is equatorial and one axial, and ring flipping simply givesSince one methyl is axial, this costs 1.8 kcal of steric strain. Consequently, the cis isomer is less thermodynamically stable than the trans, which has no steric strain in the more stable conformation. The energy difference is again, 1.8
In the cis isomer, one substituent is vertically up (or down) and the other slant up (or down). So they both point, in a general sense, in the same direction, i.e., both up or both down. In the 1,3-disubstitution pattern (whether it is dimethyl or any other 1,3-dibsubstitution), both groups can only be equatorial when they are both cis. So the cis isomer is the more stable isomer in this case. Ring flipping gives a conformation of the cis isomer which has both methyls axial. Worse than that, they are both on the same side of the ring, so it is not an axial methyl/axial hydrogen interaction any longer, it is an axial methy/axial methyl interaction, which isConsequently this ring flip is too energetically difficult, and this conformer can be neglected in he conformational The trans-1,3-dimethylcyclohexane isomer , on the other hand, has one methyl axial in both ring-flip conformers, so that it is less stable than the cis isomer by 1.8 kcal/mol.
Both trans-1,4-dimethylcyclohexane and cis-1,3-dimethylcyclohexane have essentially the same energy, since neither one of them has any The 1,2-disubstitution pattern is very much like the 1,4 pattern, in that the two groups can only be equatorial if they are trans, so the trans isomer is more stable thanThe diaxial trans conformer has 3.6 kcal of steric strain, of course and is much less favored than the diequatorial conformer. The cis isomer is less stable than the trans because in it, one methyl must be axial. is therefore less stable than the trans by 1.8 kcal. The key difference between the 1,2 and 1,4 patterns, is that in the diequatorial 1,2 conformation, the methyl groups are gauche as in gauche butane (remember that gauche essentially implies a 60 degree dihedral angle ). diequatorial conformation no longer is strain free, as was the 1,4-trans diequatorial conformation, where the methyls are very far apart.