高级英语 第九课.docx

1、高级英语 第九课The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas 从奥米勒斯城走出来的人URSULA LE GUIN1 WITH a clamor of bells that set the swallows soaring, the Festival of Summer came to the city Omelas, bright-towered by the sea. The rigging of the boats in harbor sparkled with flags. In the streets between houses with red roofs

2、and painted walls, between old moss-grown gardens and under avenues of trees, past great parks and public buildings, processions moved. Some were decorous: old people in long stiff robes of mauve and grey, grave master workmen, quiet, merry women carrying their babies and chatting as they walked. In

3、 other streets the music beat faster, a shimmering of gong and tambourine, and the people went dancing, the procession was a dance. Children dodged in and out, their high calls rising like the swallows crossing flights over the music and the singing. All the processions wound towards the north side

4、of the city, where on the great water-meadow called the Green Fields boys and girls, naked in the bright air, with mud-stained feet and ankles and long, lithe arms, exercised their restive horses before the race. The horses wore no gear at all but a halter without bit. Their manes were braided with

5、streamers of silver, gold, and green. They flared their nostrils and pranced and boasted to one another; they were vastly excited, the horse being the only animal who has adopted our ceremonies as his own. Far off to the north and west the mountains stood up half encircling Omelas on her bay. The ai

6、r of morning was so clear that the snow still crowning the Eighteen Peaks burned with white-gold fire across the miles of sunlit air, under the dark blue of the sky. There was just enough wind to make the banners that marked the race course snap and flutter now and then. In the silence of the broad

7、green meadows one could hear the music winding through the city streets, farther and nearer and ever approaching, a cheerful faint sweetness of the air that from time to time trembled and gathered together and broke out into the great joyous clanging of the bells. 2 joyous! How is one to tell about

8、joy? How describe the citizens of Omelas? 3 They were not simple folk, you see, though they were happy. But we do not say the words of cheer much any more. All smiles have become archaic. Given a description such as this one tends to make certain assumptions. Given a description such as this one ten

9、ds to look next for the King, mounted on a splendid stallion and surrounded by his noble knights, or perhaps in a golden litter borne by great-muscled slaves. But there was no king. They did not use swords, or keep slaves. They were not barbarians. I do not know the rules and laws of their society,

10、but I suspect that they were singularly few. As they did without monarchy and slavery, so they also got on without the stock exohan6e, the advertisement, the secret police, and the bomb. Yet I repeat that these were not simple folk, not dulcet shepherds, noble savages, bland utopians. They were not

11、less complex than us. The trouble is that we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible b

12、oredom of pain. If you cant lick em, join em. If it hurts, repeat it. But to praise despair is to condemn you about the people of Omelas? They were not naive and happy children-though their children were, in fact, happy.They were mature, intelli6ent, passionate adults whose delight, to embrace viole

13、nce is to lose hold of everything else. We have almost lost hold, we can no longer describe a happy man, nor make any celebration of joy. How can I tell lives were not wretched? O miracle! but I wish I could describe it better. I wish I could convince you. Omelas sounds in my words like a city-in a

14、fairy tale, long ago and far away, once upon a time. Perhaps it would be best if you imagined it as your own fancy bids, assuming it will rise to the occasion, for certainly I cannot suit you all. For instance, how about technology? I think that there would be no oars or helicopters in and above the

15、 streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people.Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive. In the middle category, howeverthat of the unnecessary but undestructive, that of comf

16、ort, luxury, exuberance, etc.-they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here, floating light-sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. Or they could have none of that: it doesnt matter. As you like

17、it. One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt .But what else should there be? I thought at first there were no drugs, but that is puritanical. For those who like it, the faint insistent sweetness of drooz may perfume the ways of the city, drooz which first brings a great lightness and bri

18、lliance to the mind and limbs, and then after some hours a dreamy languor, and wonderful visions at last of the very arcana and inmost secrets of the Universe, as well as ex-citing the pleasure of sex beyond all belief; and it is not habit-forming. For more modest tastes I think there ought to be be

19、er. What else, what else belongs in the joyous city? The sense of victory, surely, the celebration of courage .But as we did without clergy, let us do without soldiers. The joy built upon successful slaughter is not the right kind of joy: it will not do; it is fearful and it is trivial. A bound-less

20、 and generous contentment, a magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the worlds summer: this is what swells the hearts of the people of Ometas, and the victory they celebrate is that of

21、life. I really dont think many of them need to take drooz. 4 Most of the processions have reached the Green Fields by now. A marvelous smell of cooking goes forth from the red and blue tents of the provisioners. The faces of small children are amiably sticky; in the benign grey beard of a man a coup

22、le of crumbs of rich pastry are entangled. The youths and girls have mounted their horses and are beginning to group around the starting line of the course. Anold woman, small, fat, and laughing, is passing out flowersfrom a basket, and tall young men wear her flowers in their shining hair. A child

23、of nine or ten sits at the edge of the crowd, alone, playing on a wooden flute. People pause to listen, and they smile, but they do not speak to him, for he never ceases playing and never sees them, his dark eyes wholly rapt in the sweet, thin magic of the tune. 5 He finishes, and slowly lowers his

24、hands holding the wooden flute. 6 As if that little private silence were the signal, all at once a trumpet sounds from the pavilion near the starting line: imperious, melancholy, piercing. The horses rearon their slender legs, and some of them neigh in answer. Sober-faced, the young riders stroke th

25、e horses necks and soothe them, whispering, Quiet, quiet, there my beauty, my hope They begin to form in rank along the starting line. The crowds along the racecourse are like a field of grass and flowers in the wind. The Festival of Summer has begun. 7 Do you believe? Do you accept the festival, th

26、e city,the joy? No? Then let me describe one more thing. 8 In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the

27、 boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads, stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as celar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long

28、 and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It pick

29、s its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody w

30、ill come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes-the child has no understanding of time or interval-sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up, The others n

31、ever come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mothe

32、rs voice, sometimes speaks. 1 will be good, it says. Please let me out. I will be good! They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, eh-haa, eh-haa, and it speaks less and less often. It ls so thin there are no calves to

33、 its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually. 9 They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas.Some of them have come to see it, others are content merely to know it is the