现代大学英语精读4--thinking-as-a-hobby-原文、课文对比版
Thinking as a Hobby
by William Golding
While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking; and since I was later to claim thinking as my hobby, I came to an even stranger conclusion - namely, that I mylf could not think at all.
I must have been an unsatisfactory child for grownups to deal with. I remember how incomprehensible they appeared to me at first, but not, of cour, how I appeared to them. It was the headmaster of my grammar school who first brought the subject of thinking before me - though neither in the way, nor with the result he intended. He had some statuettes in his study. They stood on a high cupboard behind his desk. One was a lady wearing nothing but a bath towel. She emed frozen in an eternal panic lest the bat
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h towel slip down any farther, and since she had no arms, she was in an unfortunate position to pull the towel up again. Next to her, crouched the statuette of a leopard, ready to spring down at the top drawer of a filing cabinet labeled A-AH. My innocence 粉色衣服interpreted this as the victim's last, despairing cry. Beyond the leopard was a naked, muscular gentleman, who sat, looking down, with his chin on his fist and his elbow on his knee. He emed utterly mirable. 丝巾英文
Some time later, I learned about the statuettes. The headmaster had placed them where they would face delinquent children, becau they symbolized to him to whole of life. The naked lady was the Venus of Milo. She was Love. She was not worried about the towel. She was just busy being beautiful. The leopard was Nature, and he was being natural. The naked, muscular gentleman was not mirable. He was Rodin's Thinker, an image of pure thought. It is easy to buy small plaster models of what you think life is like.
I had better explain that I was a frequent visitor to the headmaster's study, becau of the latest thing I had done or left undone. As we now say, I was not integrated. I was, if anythi
ng, disintegrated; and I was puzzled. Grownups never made n. Whenever I怎么熬鸡汤 found mylf in a penal position before the headmaster's desk, with the statuettes glimmering whitely above him, I would sink my head, clasp my hands behind my back, and writhe one shoe over the other.
The headmaster would look opaquely at me through flashing spectacles. "What are we going to do with you"
Well, what were they going to do with me I would writhe my shoe some more and stare down at the worn rug.
"Look up, boy! Can't you look up"
Then I would look at the cupboard, where the naked lady was frozen in her panic and the muscular gentleman contemplated the hindquarters of the leopard in endless gloom. I had nothing to say to the headmaster. His spectacles caught the light so that you could e 图书馆奇遇nothing human behind them. There was no possibility of communication.
"Don't you ever think at all"
No, I didn't think, wasn't thinking, couldn't think - I was simply waiting in anguish for the interview to stop.
古籍印刷"Then you'd better learn - hadn't you"
On one occasion the headmaster leaped to his feet, reached up and plonked Rodin's masterpiece on the desk before me.
"That's what a man looks like when he's really thinking."
I surveyed the gentleman without interest or comprehension.
"Go back to your class."
Clearly there was something missing in me. Nature had endowed the rest of the human race with a sixth n and left me out. This must be so, I mud, on my way back to the class, since whether I had broken a window, or failed to remember Boyle's Law, or been l
ate for school, my teachers produced me one, adult answer: "Why can't you think"
As I saw the ca, I had broken the window becau I had tried to hit Jack Arney with a cricket ball and misd him; I could not remember Boyle's Law becau I had never bothered to learn it; and I was late for school becau I preferred looking over the bridge毛毛虫菠萝 into the river. In fact, I was wicked. Were my teachers, perhaps, so good that they could not understand the depths of my depravity Were they clear, untormented people who could direct their every action by this mysterious business of thinking The whole thing was incomprehensible. In my earlier years, I found even the statuette of the Thinker confusing. I did not believe any of my teachers were naked, ever. Like someone born deaf, but bitterly determined to find out about sound, I watched my teachers to find out about thought.
