《瓦尔登湖·第一章·经济篇·Economy》第31节
It is the luxurious and dissipated who set the fashions which the herd so diligently follow. The traveller who stops at the best houses, so called, soon discovers this, for the publicans presume him to be a Sardanapalus, and if he resigned himself to their tender mercies he would soon be completely emasculated. I think that in the railroad car we are inclined to spend more on luxury than on safety and convenience, and it threatens without attaining these to become no better than a modern drawing room, with its divans, and ottomans, and sun-shades, and a hundred other oriental things, which we are taking west with us, invented for the ladies of the harem and the effeminate natives of the Celestial Empire, which Jonathan should be ashamed to know the names of. I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. I would rather ride on earth in an ox cart with a free circulation, than go to heaven in the fancy car of an excursion train and breathe a malaria all the way.
注释摘要
在这段文字里，梭罗把批评的锋刃对准了十九世纪中叶美国生活中一个极其具体的目标：奢侈的风尚如何通过模仿自上而下地腐蚀了人。他把开风气的人直呼为“奢侈而放荡的人”，而芸芸众生不过是“畜群”一般在后面紧随。这个说法已经很重了，但他紧接着又用一个微妙的比喻把意思加深了一层。他设想一个旅行者下榻在所谓最好的旅馆里，那些店主立即把他当成“萨丹纳帕路斯”来伺候——这是传…