moral and ethical conclusions. I know many similar cases involving people close to me. In fact I had to act as the legal representative for one. The woman in the office that handled the case told me that such divorce cases ( involving one party that has gone abroad ) are very common. So long as no questions of property or care of children are involved, divorces are granted without any questions asked.

II . Read

Read the following passages. Underline the important viewpoints while reading.

1. On Splitting

One affternoon recently, two unrelated friends called to tell me that, well, their marriages hadn't made it. One was leaving his wife for another woman. The other was leaving her husband because " we thought it best."

As always after such increasingly common calls, I felt helpless and angry. What had happened to those solemn vows that one of the couples had stammered on a steamy August afternoon three years earlier? And what had happened to the joy my wife and I had sensed when we visited the other couple and their two children last year, the feeling they gave us that here, in this increasingly fractionated world, was a constructive union?

I did not feel anger at my friends personally: Given the era and their feelings, their decisions probably made sense. What angered me was the loss of years and energy. It was an anger similar to that I feel when I see abandoned faundations of building projects - piled bricks and girders and a gash in the ground left to depress the passerby.

When our grandparents married, nobody except scandalous eccentrics

divorced. "As long as we both shall live?was no joke. Neither was the trepidation brides felt on the eves of their wedding days. After their vows, couples learned to live with each other-- not necessarily because they loved each other, but because they were stuck, and it was better to be stuck comfortably than otherwise.

Most of the external pressures that helped to enforce our grandparents' vows have dissolved. Women can earn money and may enjoy sex, even, bear children, without marrying. As divorce becomes more common, the shame attendant on it dissipates. Some divorcees even argue that divorce is beneficial, educational, that the second' on third or fifth marriage is "the best". The only reasons left to marry are love, tax advantages, and, for those old-fashioned enough to care abour such things, to silence parental kvetching.

In some respects, this freedom can be seen as social progress. Modern couples can flee the corrosive bitterness that made Strindberg's marriages

night-mares. Dreiser's Clyde Griffiths might have abandbned his Roberta instead of drowning her.

In other respects, our rapidly-rising divorce rate and the declining. marriage rate (as more and more couples opt to forgo legalities and simply Iive together) represent a loss. One advantage of spending a lifetime with a person is seeing each other grow and change. For most of us, it is possible to see history in the bathroom mirro--gray Hairs, crow's feet, yes, but not a change of mind or temperament. Yet, living with another person, it is impossible not to notice how patterns and attitudes

change and not to learn - about yourself and about time --from those perceptions.

Perhaps the most poignant victim of the twentieth centatry is our sense of continuity. People used to grow up with trees, watch them evolve from saplings to fruit bearers to gnarled' and unproductive grandfathers. Now unless one is a farmer or a forester there is almost no point to planting trees because one is not likely to be there to enjoy their maturity. We change addresses and occupations and hobbies and lifestyles and spouses rapidly and readily, much as we change TV channels.

In our grandparents' day one committed oneself to certain skills and disciplines and developed them. Caipenters spent lifetimes learning their craft; critics spent lifetimes learning literature. Today, the question often is not "What do you do?" but "What are you into?" Macrame one week, astrology the next, health food, philosophy, history, jogging, movies, EST - we fly from "commitment" to "commitment" like bees among flowers because it is easier to test something than to master it, easier to buy a new toy than to repair an old one.

I feel sorry for what my divorced friends have lost. No matter how earnestly the former spouses try to "keep in touch," no matter how generous the visiting privileges for the parent who does not win custody of the children, the continuity of their lives has been broken. The years they spent together have been cut off from the rest of their lives; they are an isolated memory, no more integral to their past than a snapshot. Intelligent people, they will compare their next marriages -- if they have them - to their first. They may even, despite not having a long shared past, notice growth. What I pray, though, is that they

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