瓦尔登湖

Walden瓦尔登湖（有删节）

By Henry D. Thoreau

徐迟译

文字难度3.5

对于无数文人雅士来说，梭罗笔下的《瓦尔登湖》是令人神往的仙境，是心灵渴望归依的天堂。它是城市森林中一片飘逸的云，匆忙脚步边一缕停驻的风，是诗人海子追随的“面朝大海，春暖花开”的理想哲学。此书的译者、著名散文家徐迟曾评价它为“一本宁静、恬淡、充满智慧的书。”让我们在这个冬季的下午，泡一杯清茶，在暖暖的阳光透进的窗前，翻开这本《瓦尔登湖》，静静地走入梭罗的世界。

Excerpt from Chapter 6: Visitors 节选自第六章《访客》

He interested me because he was so quiet and 1)solitary and so happy 2)withal; a well of good humor and 3)contentment which 4)overflowed at his eyes. His

5)mirth was without 6)alloy. Sometimes I saw him at his work in the woods, felling trees, and he would greet me with a laugh of inexpressible satisfaction, and a 7)salutation in Canadian French, though he spoke English as well. When I approached him he would 8)suspend his work, and with half-9)suppressed mirth lie along the trunk of a pine which he had felled, and, 10)peeling off the inner 11)bark, roll it up into a ball and chew it while he laughed and talked. Such an exuberance of animal spirits had he that he sometimes 13)tumbled down and rolled on the ground with laughter at anything which made him think and tickled him. Looking round upon the trees he would exclaim—“14)By George! I can enjoy myself well enough here chopping; I want no better sport.” Sometimes, when at leisure, he amused himself all day in the woods with a pocket 15)pistol, firing salutes to himself at regular intervals as he walked. In the winter he had a fire by which at noon he warmed his coffee in a kettle; and as he sat on a log to eat his dinner the 16)chickadees would sometimes come round and alight on his arm and peck at the potato in his fingers; and he said that he “liked to have the little17)fellers about him.”

In him the 18)animal man chiefly was developed. In physical 19)endurance and contentment he was cousin to the pine and the rock. I asked him once if he was not sometimes tired at night, after working all day; and he answered, with a sincere and serious look, “20)Gorrappit, I never was tired in my life.” But the intellectual and what is called spiritual man in him were 21)slumbering as in an infant. He had been instructed only in that innocent and ineffectual way in which the Catholic priests teach the 22)aborigines, by which the pupil is never educated to the degree of consciousness, but only to the degree of trust and 23)reverence, and a child is not made a man, but kept

a child. When Nature made him, she gave him a strong body and contentment for his

24)portion, and propped him on every side with reverence and 25)reliance, that he might live out his threescore years and ten a child. He was so 26)genuine and