Lion and Tigers abd Bear课文中的独立
原文
1. So I thought I'd spend the night in Central Park,and, having stuffed my small rucksack with a sleeping bag, a big bottle of mineral water,a map,and a toothbrush, I arrived one heavy, muggy Friday evening in July to do just that:to walk around until I got so tired that I'd curl up under a tree and drop off to a peaceful,outdoorsy sleep. Of cour,anybody who knows anything about New York knows the city's esntial platitude—that you don't wander around Central Park at night—and in that, needless to say,was the appeal: it was the thing you don't do. And, from what I can tell, it has always been the thing you don't do, ever since the Park's founding commissioners, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago,decided that the place should be clod at night. Ogden Nash obrved in 1961:
If you should happen after dark.
To find yourlf in Central Park.
Ignore the paths that beckon you.
And hurry, hurry to the zoo.
And creep into the tiger's lair.
Frankly, you'll be safer there.
2. Even now,when every Park official,city administrator, and police officer tells us that the Park is safe during the day,they all agree in this: only a fool goes there at night.Or a pur snatcher, loon,prostitute, drug dealer, murderer—not to mention bully, garrotter, highway robber.
3. I arrived at nine-fifteen and made for the only nocturnal spot I knew: the Delacorte Theatre.Tonight's show was The Taming of the Shrew.Lights out, applau,and the audience began exiting.So far, so normal, and this could have been an outdoor summer-stock Shakespeare production anywhere in America,except in one respect: a police car was now parked conspicuously in view, its roof light slowly rotating.The police were there
to reassure the audience that it was being protected;the rotating red light was like a campfire in the wild,warning what's out there to stay away.
4. During my first hour or so, I wandered around the delacorting, reassured by the lights, the laughter,the lines of Shakespeare that drifted out into the summer night.I was feeling a certain exhilaration, climbing the steps of Belvedere Castle all alone,peeking through the windows of the Henry Luce Nature Obrvatory, identifying the herbs in the Shakespeare Garden,when, after tuming this way and that, I was on a winding trail in impenetrable foliage, and, within minutes, I was lost.
5. There was a light ahead, and as I rounded the coner I came upon five men, all wearing white T-shirts, huddled around a bench.I walked past, avoiding eye contact, and turned down a path, a narrow one, black dark, going down a hill,getting darker, very dark.Then I heard a great shaking of the bushes beside me and froze.Animal? Mugger? Whatever I was hearing would surely stop making that noi, I thought.But it didn't. How can this be?I'm in the Park less than an hour and already I'm lost, on an unlighted path,facing an unk
nown thing shaking threateningly in the bushes, and I thought, Shit! What am I doing here?And I bolted, not running, exactly,but no longer strolling—and certainly not looking back—turning left, turning right, all n of direction obliterated,the crashing continuing behind me, louder even, left, another man in a T-shirt, right, another man,when finally I realized where I was—in the Ramble.As I turned left again, I saw the lake, and the skyline of Central Park South.I stopped. I breathed. Relax, I told mylf. It's only darkness.
6. About fifteen feet into the lake,there was a large boulder, with a heap of branches leading to it.I tiptoed across and sat, enjoying the picture of the city again, the very reassuring city.I looked around. There was a warm breeze, and heavy clouds overhead, but it was still hot, and I was sweating.Far out in the lake, there was a light—someone rowing a boat, a lantern suspended above the stem.I got my bearings. I was on the West Side, around Seventy-venth.The far side of the lake must be near Strawberry Fields, around Seventy-cond.It was where, I realized, two years ago, the police had found the body of Michael Mc Morrow, a forty-four-year-old man (my age),who was stabbed thirty-fo
ur times by a fifteen-year-old.After he was killed, he was dimboweled, and his intestines ripped out so that his body would sink when rolled into the lake—a detail that I've compulsively reviewed in my mind since I first heard it.And then his killers, with time on their hands and no witness, just went home.
7. One of the first events in the park took place 140 years ago almost to the day:a band concert.The concert, pointedly,was held on a Saturday, still a working day, becau the concert, like much of the Park then, was designed to keep the city's rougher elements out.The Park at night must have emed luxurious and cluded—a giant evening garden party.The Park was to be strolled through, enjoyed as an aesthetic experience, like a walk inside a painting.George Templeton Strong, the indefatigable diarist, recognized, on his first visit on June 11,1859, that the architects were building two different parks at once.One was the Romantic park,which included the Ramble, the carefully "designed" wilderness, wild nature re-created in the middle of the city.The other, the southern end of the Park,was more French: ordered, and characterized by straight lines.
