1 Glories of the StormNancy PetersonIt begins when a feeling of stillness creeps into my consciousness. Everything has suddenly gone quiet. Birds do not chirp. Leaves do not rustle. Insects do not sing.The air that has been hot all day becomes heavy. It hangs over the trees, presses the heads of the flowers to the ground, sits on my shoulders. With a vague felling of uneasiness I move to the window. There, in the west, lies the answer——cloud has piled on cloud to form a ridge of mammoth white towers, rearing against blue sky.Their piercing whiteness is of brief duration. Soon the marshmallow rims flatten to anvil tops, and the clouds reveal their darker nature. They impose themselves before the late-afternoon sun, and the day darkens early. Then a gust of wind whips the dust along the road, chill warning of what is to come.In the house a door shuts with a bang, curtains billow into the room. I rush to close the windows, empty the clothesline, secure the patio furnishings. Thunder begins to grumble in the distance.The first drops of rain are huge. They splat into the dust and imprint the windows with individual signatures. They plink on the vent pipe and plunk on the patio roof. Leaves shudder under their weight before rebounding, and the sidewalk wears a coat of shiny spots.The rhythm accelerates; plink follows plunk faster until the sound is a roll of drums and the individual drops become an army marching over fields and rooftops. Now the first bolt of lightning stabs the earth. It is heaven’s exclamation point. The storm is here!In spite of myself, I jump at the following crack of thunder. It rattles the windowpane and sends the dog scratching to get under the bed. The next bolt is even closer. It raises the hair on the back of my neck, and I take an involuntary step away from the window.The rain now becomes a torrent, flung capriciously by a rising wind. Together they batter the trees and level the grasses. Water streams off roofs and out of rain spouts. It pounds against the window in such a steady wash that I am sightless. There is only water. How can so much fall so fast? How could the clouds have supported this vast weight? How can the earth endure beneath it?Pacing through the house from window to window, I am moved toopen-mouthed wonder. Look how the lilac bends under the assault, how the day lilies are flattened, how the hillside steps are a new-made waterfall! Now hailstones thump upon the roof. They bounce white against the grass and splash into the puddles. I think of the vegetable garden, the fruit trees, the crops in the fields; but, thankfully, the hailstones are not enough in numbers or size to do real damage. Not this time.For this storm is already beginning to pass. The tension is released from the atmosphere, the curtains of rain let in more light. The storm has spent most of its energy, and what is left will be expended on the countryside to the east.I am drawn outside while the rain still falls. All around, there is a cool and welcome feeling. I breathe deeply and watch the sun’s rays streak through breaking clouds. One ray catches the drops that form on the edge of the roof, and I am treated to a row of tiny, quivering colors—my private rainbow.I pick my way through the wet grass, my feet sinking into the saturated soil. The creek in the gully runs bank—full of brown water, but the small lakes and puddles are already disappearing into the earth. Every leaf, brick, shingle and blade of grass is fresh-washed and shining.Like the land, I am renewed, my spirit cleaned. I feel an infinite peace. For a time I have forgotten the worries and irritations I was nurturing before. They have been washed away by the glories of the storm. （翻译此文的第五段至第九段）2 Felicia's JourneyWilliam TrevorThe sun is warm now, the water of the river undisturbed. Seagulls teeter on the parapet in front of her, boats go by. The line of trees that breaks the monotony of the pavement is laden with leaves in shades of russet. Figures stride purposefully on a distant bridge, figures in miniature, creatures that could be unreal. Somewhere a voice is loud on a megaphone.She is not hungry. It will be a few hours before she begins to feel hungry and then there will be the throwaway stuff in the bins. The sky is azure, evenly blue, hardly faded at the edges at all. She moves a hand back and forth on a slat of the seat she is sitting on, her fingers caressing the smooth timber, the texture different where the paint has worn away.The gap left where a tooth was drawn a fortnight ago has lost its soreness. She feels it with her tongue, pressing the tip of her tongue into the cavity, recalling the aching there has been. It was the Welshman, Davo, who said that. They went along together because he knew the way, ―Not many would bother with your toothache,‖ Davo said. Not many would think toothache would occur in a derelict’s mouth.‖ You can always come back,‖ the woman dentist said. ―Don’t be in pain.‖The woman dentist has dedicated her existence to the rotten teeth of derelicts, to derelicts’ odour and filth. Her goodness is a great mystery.She turns her hands so that the sun may catch them differently, and slightly lifts her head to warm the other side of her face.3 Life in a Violin CaseThe turning point of my life was my decision to give up a promising business career and study music. My parents, although sympathetic, and sharing my love of music, disapproved of it as a profession. This was understandable in view of the family background. My grandfather had taught music for nearly forty years at Springhill College in Mobile and, though much beloved and respected in the community, earned barely enough to provide for his large family. My father often said it was only the hardheaded thriftiness of my grandmother that kept the wolf at bay. As a consequence of this example in the family, the very mention of music as a profession carried with it a picture of a precarious existence with uncertain financial rewards. My parents insisted upon college instead of a conservatory of music, and to college I went – quite happily, as I remember, for although I loved my violin and spent most of my spare time practicing, I had many other interests.Before my graduation form Columbia, the family met with severe financial reverses and I felt it my duty to leave college and take a job. Thus was I launched upon a business career – which I always think of as the wasted years.Now I do not for a moment mean to disparage business. My whole point I is that it was not for me. I went into it for money, and aside from the satisfaction of being able to help the family, money is all I got out of it. It was not enough. I felt that life was passing me by. From being merely discontented I became acutely miserable. My one ambition was to save enough to quit and go to Europe to study music. I used to get up at dawn to practice before I left for ―downtown‖, distracting my poor mother by bolting a hasty breakfast at the last minute. Instead of lunching with my business associates, I would seek out some cheap café, order a meager meal and scribble my harmony exercises. I continued to make money, and finally, bit by bit, accumulated enough to enable me to go abroad. The family being once more solvent, and my help no longer necessary, I resigned from my position and, feeling like a man released from jail, sailed for Europe. I stayed four years, worked harder than I had ever dreamed of working before and enjoyed every minute of it.―Enjoyed‖ is too mild a word. I walked on air. I really lived. I was a free man and I was doing what I loved to do and what I was meant to do.If I had stayed in business, I might be a comparatively wealthy man today, but I do not believe I would have made a success of living. I would have given up all those intangibles, those inner satisfactions, that money can never buy, and that are too often sacrificed when a man’s primary goal is financial success.Money is a wonderful thing, but it is possible to pay too high a price on it.4 Love Is Not Like MerchandiseSydney J. HarrisA reader in Florida, apparently bruised by some personal experience, writes into complain, ―If I steal a nickel’s worth of merchandise, I am a thief and punished; but if I steal the love of another’s wife, I am free.‖This is a prevalent misconception in many people’s minds---that love, like merchandise, can be ―stolen‖. Numerous states, in fact, have enacted laws allowin g damages for ―alienation of affections‖.But love is not a commodity; the real thing cannot be bought, sold, traded or stolen. It is an act of the will, a turning of the emotions, a change in the climate of the personality.When a husband or wif e is ―stolen‖ by another person, that husband or wife was already ripe for the stealing, was already predisposed toward a new partner. The ―love bandit‖ was only taking what was waiting to be taken, what wanted to be taken.We tend to treat persons li ke goods. We even speak of the children ―belonging‖ to their parents. But nobody ―belongs‖ to anyone else. Each person belongs to himself, and to God. Children are entrusted to their parents, and if their parents do not treat them properly, the state has a right to remove them from their parents’ trusteeship.Most of us, when young, had the experience of a sweetheart being taken from us by somebody more attractive and more appealing. At the time, we may have resented this intruder---but as we grew older, we recognized that the sweetheart had never been ours to begin with. It was not the intruder that ―caused‖ the break, but the lack of a real relationship.On the surface, many marriages seem to break up because of a ―third party‖. This is, however, a psychological illusion. The other woman or the other man merely serves as a pretext for dissolving or a marriage that had already lost its essential integrity.Nothing is more futile and more self-defeating than the bitterness of spurned love,the veng eful feeling that someone else has ―come between‖ oneself and a beloved. This is always a distortion of reality, for people are not the captives or victims of others---they are free agents, working out their own destinies for good or for ill.But the rejected lover or mate cannot afford to believe that his beloved has freely turned away from him--- and so he ascribes sinister or magical properties to the interloper. He calls him a hypnotist or a thief or a home-breaker. In the vast majority of cases, however, when a home is broken, the breaking has begun long before any―third party‖ has appeared on the scene.5 Chapter one Mellstock-Lane of Under The Greenwood TreeThomas HardyTo dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality.On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence. All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of his footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence:"With the rose and the lilyAnd the daffodowndilly,The lads and the lasses a-sheep-shearing go."The lonely lane he was following connected one of the hamlets of Mellstock parish with Upper Mellstock and Lewgate, and to his eyes, casually glancing upward, the silver and black-stemmed birches with their characteristic tufts, the pale grey boughs of beech, the dark-creviced elm, all appeared now as black and flat outlines upon the sky, wherein the white stars twinkled so vehemently that their flickering seemed like the flapping of wings. Within the woody pass, at a level anything lower than the horizon, all was dark as the grave. The copse-wood forming the sides of the bower interlaced its branches so densely, even at this season of the year, that the draught from the north-east flew along the channel with scarcely an interruption from lateral breezes.6 TrustAndy RooneyLast night I was driving from Harrisburg to Lewisburg , Pa. , a distance of about eighty miles. It was late, I was late and if anyone asked me how fast I was driving, I'd have to plead the Fifth Amendment to avoid self-incrimination. Several times I got stuck behind a slow-moving truck on a narrow road with a solid white line on my left, and I was clinching my fists with impatience.At one point along an open highway, I came to a crossroads with a traffic light. I was alone on the road by now, but as I approached the light, it turned red and I braked to a halt. I looked left, right and behind me. Nothing. Not a car, no suggestion of headlights, but there I sat, waiting for the light to change, the only human being for at least a mile in any direction.I started wondering why I refused to run the light. I was not afraid of being arrested, because there was obviously no cop around, and there certainly would have been no danger in going through it.Much later that night, after I'd met with a group in Lewisburg and had climbed into bed near midnight, the question of why I'd stopped for that light came back to me. I think I stopped because it's part of a contract we all have with each other. It's not only the law, but it's an agreement we have, and we trust each other to honor it: we don't go through red lights. Like most of us, I'm more apt to be restrained form doing something bad by the social convention that disapproves of it than by any law against it.It's amazing that we ever trust each other to do the right thing, isn't it? And we do, too. Trust is our first inclination. We have to make a deliberate decision to mistrust someone or to be suspicious or skeptical. Those attitudes don't come naturally to us. It's a damn good thing too, because the whole structure of our society depends on mutual trust, not distrust. This whole thing we have going for us would fall apart if we didn't trust each other most of the time. In Italy , they have an awful time getting any money for the government, because many people just plain don't pay their income tax. Here the Internal Revenue Service makes some gestures toward enforcing the law, but mostly they just have to trust that we'll pay what we owe. There has often been talk of a tax revolt in this country, most recently among unemployed auto workers in Michigan , and our government pretty much admits if there was a widespread tax revolt here, they wouldn't be able to do anything about it.We do what we say we'll do; we show up when we say we'll show up; we deliver when we say we'll deliver; and we pay when we say we'll pay. We trust each other in these matters, and when we don't do what we've promised, it's a deviation from the normal. It happens often that we don't act in good faith and in a trustworthy manner, but we still consider it unusual, and we're angry or disappointed with the person or organization that violates the trust we have in them. (I'm looking for something good to say about mankind today.)I hate to see a story about a bank swindler who has jiggered the books to his own advantage, because I trust banks. I don't like them, but I trust them. I don't go in and demand that they show me my money all the time just to make sure they still have it.It's the same buying a can of coffee or a quart of milk. You don't take the coffee home and weigh it to make sure it's a pound. There isn't time in life to distrust every person you meet or every company you do business with. I hated the company that started selling beer in eleven-ounce bottles years ago. One of the million things we take on trust is that a beer bottle contains twelve ounces.It's interesting to look around and at people and compare their faith or lack of faith in other people with their success or lack of success in life. The patsies, the suckers, the people who always assume everyone else is as honest as they are, make out better in the long run than the people who distrust everyone — and they're a lot happier even if they get taken once in a while.I was so proud of myself for stopping for that red light, and inasmuch as no one would ever have known what a good person I was on the road from Harrisburg to Lewisburg, I had to tell someone.。
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