現(xiàn)代大學(xué)英語精讀4__thinking_as_a_hobby_原文、課文對(duì)比版-資料下載頁
2025-08-09 13:54本頁面
【正文】 y my bearing all the affection and respect that the English felt for him. It is possible and I have to make the admission that I felt here were two gradeone thinkers standing side by side。 yet I doubt if my face conveyed more than a formless awe. I would have given my Greek and Latin and French and a good slice of my English for enough German to municate. But we were divided。 he was as inscrutable as my headmaster. For perhaps five minutes we stood together on the bridge, undeniable gradeone thinker and breathless aspirant. With true greatness, Professor Einstein realized that any contact was better than none. He pointed to a trout wavering in midstream.He spoke: Fisch.My brain reeled. Here I was, mingling with the great, and yet helpless as the veriest gradethree thinker. Desperately I sought for some sign by which I might convey that I, too, revered pure reason. I nodded vehemently. In a brilliant flash I used up half of my German vocabulary. Fisch. Ja. Ja.For perhaps another five minutes we stood side by side. Then Professor Einstein, his whole figure still conveying good will and amiability, drifted away out of sight. I, too, would be a gradeone thinker. I was irrelevant at the best of times. Political and religious systems, social customs, loyalties and traditions, they all came tumbling down like so many rotten apples off a tree. This was a fine hobby and a sensible substitute for cricket, since you could play it all the year round. I came up in the end with what must always remain the justification for gradeone thinking, its sign, seal, and charter. I devised a coherent system for living. It was a moral system, which was wholly logical. Of course, as I readily admitted, conversion of the world to my way of thinking might be difficult, since my system did away with a number of trifles, such as big business, centralized government, armies, marriage... It was Ruth all over again. I had some very good friends who stood by me, and still do. But my acquaintances vanished, taking the girls with them. Young peoplewomen seemed oddly contented with the world as it was. They valued the meaningless ceremony with a ring. Young men, while willing to concede the chaining sordidness of marriage, were hesitant about abandoning the organizations which they hoped would give them a career. A young navy officerman on the first rung of the Royal Navy, while perfectly agreeable to doing away with big business and marriage, got as rednecked as Mr. Houghton when I proposed a world without any battleships in it. Had the game gone too far? Was it a game any longer? In those prewar days, I stood to lose a great deal, for the sake of a hobby. Now you are expecting me to describe how I saw the folly of my ways and came back to the warm nest, where prejudices are so often called loyalties, where pointless actions are turnedhallowed into customs by repetition, where we are content to say we think when all we do is feel. But you would be wrong. I dropped my hobby and turned professional. If I were to go back to the headmaster39。s study and find the dusty statuettes still there, I would arrange them differently. I would dust Venus and put her aside, for I have e to love her and know her for the fair thing she is. But I would put the Thinker, sunk in his desperate thought, where there were shadows before him and at his back, I would put the leopard, crouched and ready to spring.
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