《瓦尔登湖·第六章·访客·Visitors》第13节
I had some guests from those not reckoned commonly among the town’s poor, but who should be; who are among the world’s poor, at any rate; guests who appeal, not to your hospitality, but to your hospitalality; who earnestly wish to be helped, and preface their appeal with the information that they are resolved, for one thing, never to help themselves. I require of a visitor that he be not actually starving, though he may have the very best appetite in the world, however he got it. Objects of charity are not guests. Men who did not know when their visit had terminated, though I went about my business again, answering them from greater and greater remoteness. Men of almost every degree of wit called on me in the migrating season. Some who had more wits than they knew what to do with; runaway slaves with plantation manners, who listened from time to time, like the fox in the fable, as if they heard the hounds a-baying on their track, and looked at me beseechingly, as much as to say,— “O Christian, will you send me back?” One real runaway slave, among the rest, whom I helped to forward toward the northstar. Men of one idea, like a hen with one chicken, and that a duckling; men of a thousand ideas, and unkempt heads, like those hens which are made to take charge of a hundred chickens, all in pursuit of one bug, a score of them lost in every morning’s dew,—and become frizzled and mangy in consequence; men of ideas instead of legs, a sort of intellectual centipede that made you crawl all over. One man proposed a book in which visitors should write their names, as at the White Mountains; but, alas! I have too good a memory to make that necessary.
注释摘要
梭罗在这一段里对他所接待的访客做了一次分门别类，而归类本身就是在重申他隐居实验的核心原则。他把客人分成两类，一类是他愿意接待的，另一类则是以访客之名行寄生之实的人。值得注意的是，他首先把矛头对准的是那些在镇上不算穷人、但在梭罗看来本该算作穷人的人——这里“穷人”已经不是指钱包，而是指精神上已将自己判为无能自助者的状态。梭罗用了一个精巧的文字游戏：“appe…