“Parting is such a sweet sorrow………”

 

There can hardly be anything sweet in the sorrow of saying farewell to life itself. A shadow of pathos always lurks behind the good-natured banter at farewell parties. Farewells remind us that, after all, everything and everyone must come to an end. Therefore, they are always heart wrenching and odd how much it hurts when a friend or loving one moves away and leaves behind silence.

 

In the novel “Goodbye Mr. Chips” Chips deserves credit for not letting his farewell degenerate into sentimental squalor (unpleasantness). As a teacher he always avoided to burden his students with dejected thoughts. In fact his speech was replete with crispy jokes underlying moral ideals. Despite the frequent roars of laughter, he managed to reach out and delicately touch the hearts of all the students and teachers.

 

The captain of the school, in he speech, had paid glowing tributes to the services rendered by Chips. In all modesty, the old teacher attributed it to the Captain’s habit of exaggeration. He remarked that it ran in the family because he had punished the Captain’s father for the same failing. The ensuing laughter covered up Chip’s embarrassment at receiving such praise.

 

Farewell speeches are usually composed of sweet and everlasting memories of past; and that evening Mr. Chips also looked back over the forty two years he had been with Brookfield. But, he chose not to dwell on the burdensome aspect of the past. he mentioned only the sweet memories associated with the school e.g. He remembered the first bicycle to be used there. He told the boys about the time when there was no gas or electricity at Brookfield. It was interesting g to learn that the staff had nominated a lamp-boy, whose job was to clean, trim and light lamps. Once, there had been a long frost and the whole school had learnt to skate on the fens.

 

During his speech, he also narrated the time when two-third of the school went down with German measles and Big Hall was turned into hospital. The situation became more humorous when Chips related the incident, which occurred on the Mafeking night. Inadvertently, a bonfire was lit too near the pavilion and the fire -brigade had to be called. The Firemen were having their own celebrations and arrived in drunken condition.

 

Towards the end of his speech, Chips stuck a tender note. He said that he would never forget the face of his students. If, later in life, he ever failed to recognize anyone, it would only because of the changed features of that boy. He also owed that he would always remember them as they were. He turned the track of his farewell speech from sadness to fun by mentioning the Chairman, who had unruly hair and poor grammar when he was a little boy. In this way, he felt his pupils as he had always kept them; happy and light hearted. By the skillful use of humour he avoided exploiting the emotions of the innocent students. Actually he did not need any display of sympathy from them because his calm and poise won by devotion and service to Brookfield transcended such pretty consideration. Even his parting words carried only a hint of the wistfulness in his heart:

 

“Think of me sometime, as I shall certainly think of you”.

1st order test (modified Turing personality test). It is close to the Turing test and implies determining the quality of the created copy of a person’s personality by checking it, for example, by someone from my acquaintances. Test of the 2nd order (objective comparison of answers according to Bolgarchuk).More complex and involves a direct comparison of the responses of a living person with his virtual copy of the personality. Those. he is more objective