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Years later I would come to discover, as Robinson Crusoe did when he found Man Friday, that I was not alone in that world or on that island. I would discover (through reading, naturally) that while I was sprawled, legs akimbo, in that chair with a book, Jamaica Kincaid was sitting in the glare of the Caribbean sun in Antigua reading in that same way that I did, as though she was starving and the book was bread.
多年以后我才發(fā)現(xiàn)自己在這個世界或小島上并不孤單，就像魯賓遜·克魯索發(fā)現(xiàn)星期五時那樣。我發(fā)現(xiàn)（當然，是通過讀書），當我叉開兩腿躺在椅子上看書的時候，牙買加·金凱德就坐在安提瓜島上刺眼的加勒比海陽光下，和我一樣讀著書，仿佛饑不可耐，而書就是面包。
Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. "Book love," Trollope called it. "It will make your hours pleasant to you as long as you live." Yet of all the many things in which we recognize some universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in that chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. I did not read from a sense of superiority, or advancement, or even learning. I read because I loved it more than any other activity on earth.
閱讀一直是我的家、我的食物、我那不可缺少的伴侶。特羅洛普把這稱為“書戀”。他說它能使你一生中每個小時都非常愉快。”然而，在所有我們普遍認為能給人安慰的事物中——上帝、性愛、食品、家庭、朋友——讀書似乎是最少被人提起的，起碼在公開的場合是如此。但對我來說，讀書就是我能想到、能感受到的一切：不論是在我貪婪地一本接著一本看書的時候；還是在我明明坐在椅子上，可是心卻早跑出了家門的時候；或是在我滿世界到處漫游，而實際上根本從來沒有離開房間的時候，我這么做不是出于一種優(yōu)越感，也不是為了升職，甚至和做學問都無關(guān)。我讀書就是因為我喜歡，喜歡它勝過喜歡世界上任何別的活動。
By the time I became an adult, I realized that while my satisfaction in the sheer act of reading had not abated in the least, the world was often as hostile, or as blind, to that joy as had been my girlfriends banging on our screen door, begging me to put down the book—"that stupid book," they usually called it, no matter what book it happened to be.
在我成年之時，我認識到，盡管我對讀書本身的興趣絲毫未減，可是這世界卻經(jīng)常對這份快樂抱著一種敵對或視而不見的態(tài)度，就和當年我那些小女伴們一樣——她們老是砰砰地敲我家的紗門，叫我把書放下，總說那是“無聊的書”，也不管那是什么書。
