苏州培训
Unit 14国籍英语
Homeless
邮寄英文Anna Quindlen
1 Her name was Ann, and we met in the Port Authority Bus Terminal veral Januarys ago. I was doing a story on homeless people. She said I was wasting my time talking to her; she was just passing through, although she’d been passing through for more than two weeks. To prove to me that this was true, she rummaged through a tote bag and a manila envelope and finally unfolded a sheet of typing paper and brought out her photographs.
2 They were not pictures of family, or friends, or even a dog or cat, its eyes brown-red in the flashbulb’s light. They were pictures of a hou. It was like a thousand hous in a hundred towns, not suburb, not city, but somewhere in between, with aluminum siding and a chain-link fence, a narrow driveway running up to a one-car garage and a patch of
backyard. The hou was yellow. I looked on the back for a date or a name, but neither was there. There was no need for discussion. I knew what she was trying to tell me, for it was something I had often felt. She was not adrift, alone, anonymous, although her bags and her raincoat with the grime shadowing its creas had made me believe she was. She had a hou, or at least once upon a time had had one. Inside were curtains, a couch, a stove, potholders. You are where you live. She was somebody.
英语四级满分3 I’ve never been very good at looking at the big picture, taking the global view, and I’ve always been a person with an overactive n of place, the legacy of an Irish grandfather. So it is natural that the thing that ems most wrong with the world to me right now is that there are so many people with no homes. I’m not simply talking about shelter from the elements, or three square meals a day or a mailing address to which the welfare people can nd the check — although I know that all the are important for survival. I’m talking about a home, about precily tho kinds of feelings that have wound up in cross-stitch and French knots on samplers over the years.
4 Home is where the heart is. There’s no place like it. I love my home with a ferocity totally out of proportion to its appearance or location. I love dumb things about: the hot-water heater, the plastic rack you drain dishes in, the roof over my head, which occasionally leaks. And yet it is precily tho dumb things that make it what it is — a place of certainty, stability, predictability, privacy, for me and for my family. It is where I live. What more can you say about a place than that? That is everything.
5 Yet it is something that we have been edging away from gradually during my lifetime and the lifetimes of my parents and grandparents. There was a time when where you lived often was where you worked and where you grew the food you ate and even where you were buried. When that era pasd, where you lived at least was where your parents had lived and where you would live with your children when you became enfeebled. Then, suddenly where you lived was where you lived for three years, until you could move on to something el and something el again.
6 And so we have come to something el again, to children who do not understand wh
at it means to go to their rooms becau they have never had a room, to men and women who fantasy is a wall they can paint a color of their own choosing, to old people reduced to sitting on molded plastic chairs, their skin blue-white in the lights of a bus station, who pull pictures of hous out of their bags. Homes have stopped being homes. Now they are real estate.
7 People find it curious that tho without homes would rather sleep sitting up on benches or huddled in doorways than go to shelters. Certainly some prefer to do so becau they are emotionally ill, becau they have been locked in before and they are damned if they will be locked in again. Others are afraid of the violence and trouble they may find there. But some em to want something that is not available in shelters, and they will not compromi, not for a cot, or oatmeal, or a shower with special soap that kills the bugs. “One room,” a woman with a baby who was sleeping on her sister’s floor, once told me, “painted blue.” That was the crux of it; not size or location, but pride of ownership. Painted blue.
8 This is a difficult problem, and some wi and compassionate people are working hard at it. But in the main I think we work around it, just as we walk around it when it is lying on the sidewalk or sitting in the bus terminal — the problem, that is. It has been customary to take people’s pain and lesn our own participation in it by turning it into an issue, not a collection of human beings. We turn an adjective into a noun: the poor, not poor people; the homeless, not Ann or the man who lives in the box or the woman who sleeps on the subway grate.
9 Sometimes I think we would be better off if we forgot about the broad strokes and concentrated on the details. Here is a woman without a bureau. There is a man with no mirror, no wall to hang it on. They are not the homeless. They are people who have no homes. No drawer that holds the spoons. No window to look out upon the world. My God. That is everything. affirmative
无家可归
安娜·昆德伦本能2 致命诱惑
breedmeraw
committee1. 她的名字叫安，几年前的一月份，我们在港务局汽车站邂逅。那时我正在做一个关于流浪者的专题。她说我采访她纯粹是浪费时间；因为她只是路过这个汽车终点站而已，虽然她已经在这里待了不止两周了。为了证明这是事实，她翻遍一个大购物袋，找出一个牛皮纸信封，最后展开了一张打印纸，取出了一些照片。化妆师培训
2. 这些照片上没有亲友，甚至没有在闪光灯下眼睛变成棕红色的狗或猫。照片上是一栋房子。这房子跟很多小镇上的千万栋房子没什么两样，既不在郊区，也不在城市，而是介于两者之间，墙板是铝制板的，四周围着铁丝网，狭窄的车道通向仅容一车的车库，还有一片后院。房子是黄色的。我翻看照片背面，想找到拍摄日期或姓名，但什么都没有。无需讨论，我已知道她想表达什么，因为这也是我经常感同身受的。她是想告诉我，她不是四处漂泊、孑然一身、无名无姓的人，虽然她的大包小包和她那件黑垢模糊了褶子的雨衣让我认为她是。她拥有过一栋房子，至少从前曾经拥有过。房子里面有窗帘，有沙发，有炉子，还有隔热垫。你住的地方代表着你。她是有名有姓有家的人。
