《瓦尔登湖·第二章·我居住的地方，我为何而活·Where I Lived, and What I Lived For》第7节
Though the view from my door was still more contracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. There was pasture enough for my imagination. The low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the roving families of men. “There are none happy in the world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon,”—said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger pastures. Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer to those parts of the universe and to those eras in history which had most attracted me. Where I lived was as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astronomers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable places in some remote and more celestial corner of the system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but forever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only in moonless nights by him. Such was that part of creation where I had squatted;— “There was a shepherd that did live, / And held his thoughts as high / As were the mounts whereon his flocks / Did hourly feed him by.” What should we think of the shepherd’s life if his flocks always wandered to higher pastures than his thoughts?
注释摘要
梭罗在这一段里完成了一次空间观念上的翻转。他说从自家门口望出去，视野其实是收束的、更窄的，但他立刻否认这有任何局促或受困的感觉。原因是，想象力本身有自己的一片放牧之地。对面湖岸升起的那片低矮的灌木橡树高原，在他眼里不只是新英格兰某处一块不起眼的地形，而是一路向西延伸，连着北美西部的大草原，再远接到鞑靼草原——也就是欧亚大陆腹地那片游牧民族驰骋的辽阔地带。这…