古大叔小木屋（100）过百岁纪念版 瓦尔登湖第七章 豆田（6）

古大叔小木屋（100） 2021年9月29日 周三 晚8:30——9:50 直播实况录制 腾讯会议版 英语文本 Walden [ˈwɔldən] (Issue 100) 7. The Bean-Field (6) [10] It was a singular experience that long acquaintance which I cultivated with beans, what with planting, and hoeing, and harvesting, and threshing, and picking over and selling them - the last was the hardest of all - I might add eating, for I did taste. I was determined to know beans. When they were growing, I used to hoe from five o'clock in the morning till noon, and commonly spent the rest of the day about other affairs. Consider the intimate and curious acquaintance one makes with various kinds of weeds - it will bear some iteration[ˌɪtəˈreɪʃən] 重申in the account, for there was no little iteration in the labor - disturbing their delicate organizations so ruthlessly[ˈruːθlɪslɪ], and making such invidious[ɪnˈvɪdɪəs] distinctions with his hoe, levelling whole ranks of one species, and sedulously[ˈsedjʊləslɪ] cultivating another. That's Roman wormwood - that's pigweed - that's sorrel - that's piper-grass - have at him, chop him up, turn his roots upward to the sun, don't let him have a fibre in the shade, if you do he'll turn himself t'other side up and be as green as a leek韭葱in two days./// A long war, not with cranes, but with weeds, those Trojans who had sun and rain and dews on their side. Daily the beans saw me come to their rescue armed with a hoe, and thin the ranks of their enemies, filling up the trenches with weedy dead. Many a lusty crest[krest]-waving Hector, that towered a whole foot above his crowding comrades, fell before my weapon and rolled in the dust. [11] Those summer days which some of my contemporaries devoted to the fine arts in Boston or Rome, and others to contemplation in India, and others to trade in London or New York, I thus, with the other farmers of New England, devoted to husbandry. Not that I wanted beans to eat, for I am by nature a Pythagorean[ˌpaiθæˈgəri:ən], so far as beans are concerned, whether they mean porridge or voting, and exchanged them for rice; but, perchance, as some must work in fields if only for the sake of tropes[trəʊp]转喻 and expression, to serve a parable-maker one day. It was on the whole a rare amusement, which, continued too long, might have become a dissipation[ˌdɪsɪˈpeɪʃən]. Though I gave them no manure, and did not hoe them all once, I hoed them unusualy well as far as I went, and was paid for it in the end, "there being in truth," as Evelyn[ˈi:vlin] says, "no compost[ˈkɒmpɒst] or laetation whatsoever comparable to this continual motion, repastination[rɪ'pɑːstineiʃən], and turning of the mould with the spade." "The earth," he adds elsewhere, "especially if fresh, has a certain magnetism[ˈmæɡnɪˌtɪzəm] in it, by which it attracts the salt, power, or virtue (call it either) which gives it life, and is the logic of all the labor and stir we keep about it, to sustain us; all dungings[dʌŋ] and other sordid temperings being but the vicars succedaneous[ˌsʌksɪˈdeɪnɪəs] to this improvement." Moreover, this being one of those "worn-out and exhausted lay fields which enjoy their sabbath," had perchance, as Sir Kenelm[ˈkenəm] Digby[ˈdigbi] thinks likely, attracted "vital spirits" from the air. I harvested twelve bushels['bʊʃl] of beans. 注：题图为梭罗文中提到的罗马苦艾(Roman wormwood)。