評(píng)論
打印
Why tell the whole? The blows of the basement hammer every day grew more and more between; and each blow every day grew fainter than the last; the wife sat frozen at the window, with tearless eyes, glitteringly gazing into the weeping faces of her children; the bellows fell; the forge choked up with cinders; the house was sold; the mother dived down into the long church-yard grass; her children twice followed her thither; and the houseless, familyless old man staggered off a vagabond in crape; his every woe unreverenced; his grey head a scorn to flaxen curls!
還用再說(shuō)下去嗎？總之，地下室里的錘子一天緊似一天地敲下去，可是每一記都一天比一天輕；妻子凍僵了似地坐在窗邊，無(wú)淚的眼睛，光閃閃地直瞪著幾個(gè)小孩的哭泣的臉；風(fēng)箱不動(dòng)了，熔爐里塞滿了爐灰，房子賣掉了，母親鉆進(jìn)了教堂墓地里的長(zhǎng)長(zhǎng)的青草下面，兩個(gè)孩子也都相繼跟著她去了；于是這個(gè)無(wú)家無(wú)室的老頭帶著黑紗搖搖晃晃地離開了，做流浪漢去了；他的各種悲哀都是不值得同情的，他的白發(fā)成為少婦們的詛咒對(duì)象！
Death seems the only desirable sequel for a career like this; but Death is only a launching into the region of the strange Untried; it is but the first salutation to the possibilities of the immense Remote, the Wild, the Watery, the Unshored; therefore, to the death-longing eyes of such men, who still have left in them some interior compunctions against suicide, does the all-contributed and all-receptive ocean alluringly spread forth his whole plain of unimaginable, taking terrors, and wonderful, new-life adventures; and from the hearts of infinite Pacifics, the thousand mermaids sing to them — "Come hither, broken-hearted; here is another life without the guilt of intermediate death; here are wonders supernatural, without dying for them.
這樣一種生涯，唯一值得想望的結(jié)果就是死；可是死只是走向那個(gè)"未經(jīng)證實(shí)"的異域；它不過(guò)招呼你到那遼闊的"遠(yuǎn)方"，"蠻荒"，"水鄉(xiāng)"，"無(wú)涘無(wú)際的"一切可能的地方的第一聲。因此，那種求死而內(nèi)心里還是不肯自殺的人，眼睛看到的是，那個(gè)慷慨豪爽與虛懷若谷的海洋已在誘人地展開它整個(gè)不可想象的景致，加上從那無(wú)垠的太平洋的中間，無(wú)數(shù)的人魚都在對(duì)他們叫喊——"到這里來(lái)，傷心的人們呀；這里是不會(huì)有犯死罪的另一種生活；這里是超自然的奇跡，是永生的。
