《瓦尔登湖·第七章·豆田·The Bean-Field》第11节
“And as he spake, his wings would now and then / Spread, as he meant to fly, then close again,” so that we should suspect that we might be conversing with an angel. Bread may not always nourish us; but it always does us good, it even takes stiffness out of our joints, and makes us supple and buoyant, when we knew not what ailed us, to recognize any generosity in man or Nature, to share any unmixed and heroic joy. Ancient poetry and mythology suggest, at least, that husbandry was once a sacred art; but it is pursued with irreverent haste and heedlessness by us, our object being to have large farms and large crops merely. We have no festival, nor procession, nor ceremony, not excepting our Cattle-shows and so called Thanksgivings, by which the farmer expresses a sense of the sacredness of his calling, or is reminded of its sacred origin. It is the premium and the feast which tempt him. He sacrifices not to Ceres and the Terrestrial Jove, but to the infernal Plutus rather. By avarice and selfishness, and a grovelling habit, from which none of us is free, of regarding the soil as property, or the means of acquiring property chiefly, the landscape is deformed, husbandry is degraded with us, and the farmer leads the meanest of lives. He knows Nature but as a robber. Cato says that the profits of agriculture are particularly pious or just, (maximeque pius quæstus), and according to Varro the old Romans “called the same earth Mother and Ceres, and thought that they who cultivated it led a pious and useful life, and that they alone were left of the race of King Saturn.”
注释摘要
梭罗在这段话里，先是引了两行诗，出自十七世纪英国诗人夸尔斯。他看到的那个扶着锄头或铲子的人，不是全然匍匐于泥土的存在，而是像一只随时要振翅的鸟，又像一个让观者疑心可以与之交谈的天使。这个意象承接前文他对自己与豆田关系的反复打量：他为豆子出力，却又不愿被劳作的逻辑吞没。那个几乎要飞起来的人，正对应着他在锄豆时所体会到的短暂解放——锄头敲在石头上，音乐回荡在林…