英語聽書《白鯨記》 第4期

Should you ever be athirst in the great Americandesert, try this experiment,

if your caravan happen to be supplied with ametaphysical professor.

Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water arewedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you thedreamiest, shadiest, quietest,

most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in allthe valley of the Saco.

What is the chief element he employs? There standhis trees, each with a hollow trunk,

as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep hiscattle;

and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.

Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountainsbathed in their hill-side blue.

But though the picture lies thus tranced,

and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet allwere vain,

unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies inJune,

when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilieswhat is the one charmwanting?

Waterthere is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travelyour thousand miles to see it?

Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberatewhether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed,

or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robusthealthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him,

at some time or other crazy to go to sea? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger,

did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration,

when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?

Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, andown brother of Jove?

Surely all this is not without meaning.

And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp thetormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain,

plunged into it and was drowned. But that same image, we ourselves see in all rivers andoceans.

It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all.

Now, when I say that I am in the habit of going to sea whenever I begin to grow hazy about theeyes,

and begin to be over conscious of my lungs, I do not mean to have it inferred that I ever goto sea as a passenger.

For to go as a passenger you must needs have a purse, and a purse is but a rag unless youhave something in it.

Besides, passengers get sea-sickgrow quarrelsomedon't sleep of nightsdo not enjoy themselvesmuch,

as a general thing;no, I never go as a passenger; nor, though I am something of a salt,

do I ever go to sea as a Commodore, or a Captain, or a Cook.