星期三清晨的小聚

　　THIS IS A STORY ABOUT A MAN named Eddie and it begins at the end, with Eddie dying in the sun. It might seem strange to start a story with an ending. But all ending are also beginnings. We just don't know it at the time.

　　THE LAST HOUR of Eddie's life was spent, like most of the others, at Ruby Pier, an amusement park by a great gray ocean. The park had the usual attractions, a boardwalk, a Ferris Wheel, roller coasters, bumper cars, a taffy stand, and an arcade where you could shoot streams of water into a clown's mouth. It also had a big new ride called Freddy's Free Fall, and this would be where Eddie would be killed, in an accident that would make newspapers around the state.

　　AT THE TIME of his death, Eddie was a spuat, white-haired old man, with a short neck, a barrel chest, thick forearms, and a fades army tattoo on his right shoulder. His legs were thin and veined now, and his left knee, wounded in the war, was ruined by arthritis. He used a cane to get around. His face was broad and craggy from the sun, with salty whiskers and a lower jaw that protruded slightly, making him look prouder than he felt. He kept a cigarette behind his left ear and a ring of keys hooked to his belt. He wore rubber-soled shoes. He wore an old linen cap. His pale brown uniform suggested a workingman, and a workingman he was. ...繼續閱讀

The Delights of books
by Sir John Lubbock

　　Books are to mankind what memory is to the individual. They contain the history of our race, the discoveries we have made, the accumulated knowledge and experience of ages; they picture for us the marvels and beauties of nature; help us in our difficulties, comfort us in sorrow and in suffering, change hours of weariness into moments of delight, store our minds with ideas, fill them with good and happy thoughts, and lift us out of and above ourselves.

　　When we read we may not only be kings and live in palaces, but, what is far better, we may transport ourselves to the mountains or the seashore, and visit the most beautiful parts of the earth, without fatigue, inconvenience, expense. Precious and priceless are the blessings, which the books scatter around our daily paths. We walk, in imagination, with the noblest spirits, through the most sublime and enchanting regions.

　　Macaulay had wealth and fame, rank and power, and yet he tells us in his biography that he owed the happiest hours of his life to books. In a charming letter to a little girl, he say: "If any one would make me the greatest king that ever lived, with palaces and gardens and fine dinners, and wines and coaches, and beautiful clothes, and hundreds of servants, on condition that I should not read books, I would not be a king. I would rather be a poor man in garret with plenty of books than a king who did not love reading."

In a New Light
By Dominique Browning

　　In the midst of redoing my garden, I decided to throw a big party for a friend who was getting married. I invited 60 of her friends and went back to work with even greater determination. I decided I should give her a garden party; it had to be, since my house wouldn't hold 60 people, no matter how close they were. And I liked the sound of it—a garden party.

　　On the afternoon of the party, the sky began clouding up. After my friends and I had set up the tables outside, and the caterer had arrived and the fire was blazing in a rented barbecue the size of a Ping-Pong table, the rains came. We stood at the kitchen window, all of us watching in despair as the torrential downpour turned into hail, and large ice cubes began to bounce off the tables. I went up to my bedroom, and there my friend Lora found me an hour later. ...繼續閱讀

The Second Tuesday: We Talk About Feeling Sorry for Yourself
by Mitch Albom

　　I came back the next Tuesday. And for many Tuesday that followed. I looked forward to these visits more than one would think, considering I was flying seven hundred miles to sit alongside a dying man. But I seemed to slip into a time warp when I visited Morrie, and I liked myself better when I was there. I no longer rented a cellular phone for the rides from the airport. Let them wait, I told myself, mimicking Morrie.

　　The newspaper situation in Detroit had not improved. In fact, it had grown increasingly insane, with nasty confrontations between picketers and replacement workers, people arrested, beaten, lying in the street in front of delivery trucks.

　　In light of this, my visits with Morrie felt like a cleansing rinse of human kindness. We talked about life and we talked about love. We talked about one of Morrie's favorite subjects, compassion, and why our society had such a shortage of it. Before my third visit, I stopped at a market called Bread and Circus—I had seen their bags in Morrie's house and figured he must like the food there—and I loaded up with plastic containers from their fresh food take-away, things like vermicelli with vegetables and carrot soup and baklava. ...繼續閱讀

In Home Décor, Clutter Rules And Minimalists Are in Retreat
By Rick Marin

　　Some people spend a lifetime accumulating; others spend it throwing out.

　　Ever since the Bauhaus, it was much cooler to be minimal than maximal. But as the machine age gives way to the Google age, more is more. Minimalists are being forced to submit to fashionable new levels of clutter. The transition isn't going to be easy.

　　I had always excised excess furniture as ruthlessly as excess verbiage. Any amateur can be a minimalist: emptiness is easy. Clutter is hard. There's a fine line between an "artful jumble" and "my life is a mess." Like many existential problems, this one called for professional help. ...繼續閱讀

八月三日討論文章

The Little Prince序章


　Once when I was six years old I saw a Magnificent picture in a book, called True Stories from Nature, about he peimeval forest. It was a picture of a boa constrictor in the act of swallowing an animal. Here is a copy of the drawing.



　In the book it said: “Boa contrictors swallow their prey whole, without chewing it. After that they are not able to move, and they sleep through the six months that need for digestion.”

　I pondered deeply, then, over the adventures of the jungle. And after some work with a colored pencil I succeeded in making my first drawing. My Drawing Number One. It looked like this:

...繼續閱讀

Ezra Pound
The River-Merchant’s Wife: A Letter
(長干行／李白)

While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I prayed about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
For ever and for ever and for ever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!

The leaves Fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
　As far as Cho-fu-Sa. ...繼續閱讀

Impression: Sunrise at Uluru
by Don George

The first time you approach Uluru, the world is still dark. You are rolling through the pre-dawn desert in a minivan when the big black monolith looms suddenly through the side window. It is difficult to judge how far away it is, or how close you are, because the whole world is monotone and flat. Yet you feel the power.

You have been wary of your preconceptions about the place - the accumulation of iconography and cliches, photographs seen and descriptions read. You don't want to feel exactly what you know you are supposed to feel. You want a raw connection with the thing. You want to wipe your brain clean, approach the rock like the first human ever to take it in, stumbling incredulous toward it like some red sun-trick on the horizon that doesn't disappear, but only grows larger and larger until finally all you can do is fall on your knees before it.

And then you see it, and suddenly your wariness falls away. You are drawn to the dark immensity purely, simply, irresistibly, and with a power that comes from the thing itself and not, as far as you can tell, from your own desire to feel the power. Because it catches you by surprise and because it is such a strong, pit-of-the-stomach pull, you trust it.

As you get closer, you creak and crane your neck to see as much of it as you can, until you notice - because you'd been so obsessed with seeing the rock, you'd missed this - that you are passing other mini-vans and buses and dozens upon dozens of people. They wear jeans and warm jackets and hold steaming cups of coffee in their hands; some stamp their feet, others set up their cameras. They have come to see exactly what you have come to see, and you realize there is no point in trying to feel better than them or different from them. You have to share Uluru with them.

Your minivan parks and you emerge, brushing off the cobwebs of some conversation about kangaroos and dingos. All you want to do is concentrate on the rock itself: Uluru.

You position yourself at one of the barriers beyond which visitors are not allowed to step, less than a kilometer from the rock, and you look. The rock is a smooth, sloping burnt-orange rise against a deep gray-blue sky. Before it are dark waves of vegetation, which surprise you; somehow you imagined the rock standing solitary in a vast flatland extending red and cracked-dry to the horizon.

For the next half hour, as the earth slowly tilts toward the sun at your back, you watch.

The rock gradually grows more orange, more bright, and you begin to see the fissures and pocks in its side, shadowy sluices where rainfall must flow, deep gouges sculpted by wind and water and time.

The sky lightens from dark blue to a pastel peach-pink, the bushes and trees in the foreground take a silver-green shape, the rock's orange brightens, and pocks darken like caves in its side.

The sky grows lighter and lighter, the rock face brighter and brighter; more veins and pits emerge in relief.

And then, in what seems one miraculous moment, birdsong bursts from the bushes and trees and the sun fires up the face of Uluru and it is as if the rock is glowing from within, pulsing, breathing, one huge burning ember. And then it is like nothing you've seen before and you simply don't have the words to describe it. It is alive with some kind of earth energy of its own. It pulses. It gathers everything into itself. It beats with a luminous orange energy that courses through the world around it. It is the heart of the soil and the rocks and the roots beneath the soil, coming to life.

You think of the elaborate sun temples that ancient civilizations had constructed, of Stonehenge, Teotihuacan, Machu Picchu, Sounion. And for a moment you think that this could be nature's sun temple, a construct manifesting a connection so far beyond comprehension that the only possible response is awe.

And then the moment ends. The people pack up their cameras and pile into their buses. Within minutes, they are gone.

But you remain, listening to the birdsong, looking at the rock.

You've had enough mysticism for one morning, so you drop to your knees and pick up a handful of soil. You want to ground yourself.

But as you let the soil sift through your hands, slowly, softly, you feel it: some kind of electrical connection. The particles passing through your fingers are the same as the particles that molded to form the rock. And you consider: Are those particles really so different from the particles that molded into the big blue and green rock on which you now kneel?

Sift, sift. The grains tilt through your dusty hands, bursting into sun-lit life.

（文摘自Lonely Planet網站Don George's column "Traveller at Large", 2001.5.29 ）
（Photo: Geografi Australia）

第一篇主題文章（2005.7.6）

World of E.B. White
By M. J. ARLEN
The Points of My Compass By E.B. White

The essay writer occupies one of the more exposed of all literary positions. Most other writers, novelists and historians for example, can go about their business and keep their own personalities safely out of sight. The modern journalist is nearly always concealed behind some cover. And even lyric poets are able to work their trade and give away no more about their character, or lack of it, than they wish to.

Not so the essayist. Year in, year out, the essayist is right there with us, bravely talking along, telling us what he thinks of things, what he sees. And although it is possibly easier in some ways to talk directly to your reader thus, rather than having to work up some fabulation of plot and character to engage his attention, essay writing is nonetheless a kind of writing which places extraordinary emphasis on the kind of man who is doing it, on the stamp of his mind and his character--which is probably as good a reason as any one can think of why so few people have ever done it well.

E. B. White does do it well. He does it extremely well. And here is a new book of his called "The Points of My Compass," a collection of eighteen essays, reports and reminiscences (all but one of which have previously appeared in The New Yorker as a "Letter from the East" or some other compass point) in which he is as good as ever. It is a first-rate collection of pieces: wise and funny and perceptive and altogether interesting, and written with that special magic which only people trying to write truthfully now and then attain.

It's true, of course, that E. B. White is one of the great prose writers of our language, and amid the present miseries of English prose one reads him not only with immense pleasure, but with a faint uneasiness that here is someone who, if he did not actually invent the language, is one of the few people left around who knows how the thing works. Mr. White writes sentences the way writers ought to write sentences, but almost never do, which is to say with pain and care, and a sense of the warmth and precision and jauntiness of English words. One of the results is that he is invariably labeled a "prose stylist," which, for a writer of depth and intelligence, is just a little better than saying he can spell.

His new books covers a lot of ground, for Mr. White is a true democrat of letters. Nothing is too big for him, and nothing too small. He writes of coons, and how a swallow builds a nest, and the way a Maine fire department attends a fire, and also of fallout, disarmament and the United Nations. "Disarmament, I think, is a mirage," he writes in an essay called "Unity." "I don't mean it is indistinct or delusive. I mean it isn't there. Every ship, every plane could be scrapped, every stockpile destroyed, every soldier mustered out, and if the original reasons for holding arms were still present, the world would not have been disarmed. Arms would simply be in a momentary state of suspension, preparatory to new and greater arms."

The essay on Prof. Will Strunk is here, Mr. White's late teacher at Cornell, (which resulted, after its magazine publication, in a best-selling reissue of Strunk's "Elements of Style"), as well as two splendid dissertations on "The Motorcar" and "The Railroad." There is a fine appreciation, too, of Thoreau and "Walden," called "A Slight Sound at Evening," full of love and humor and intelligence, and at the end of the book a long reminiscence of a sea voyage to Alaska, surely one of the funniest memoirs ever written. One forgets at times that E. B. White is among the four or five best humorists this country has produced, and one forgets too, for that matter, how unstrained and natural first-class humorous writing can be.

At one point he says, "As a writing man, or secretary, I have always felt charged with the safekeeping of all unexpected items of worldly or unworldly enchantment, as though I might be held personally responsible if even a small one were to be lost." It is E. B. White's special virtue that he can tell us what he thinks of the United Nations, or of the way a coon comes down a tree, and with what seems an instinctive natural concern for each. One feels that no item of enchantment he safekeeps for us, nor any of the other items he has cared to write about is really likely to be lost.

Mr. Arlen is a freelance writer and essayist.

（轉貼自The New York Times, 1962.10.28）

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