《瓦尔登湖·第十四章·旧居民、冬天的访客·Former Inhabitants and Winter Visitors》第9节
As I walked over the long causeway made for the railroad through the meadows, I encountered many a blustering and nipping wind, for nowhere has it freer play; and when the frost had smitten me on one cheek, heathen as I was, I turned to it the other also. Nor was it much better by the carriage road from Brister’s Hill. For I came to town still, like a friendly Indian, when the contents of the broad open fields were all piled up between the walls of the Walden road, and half an hour sufficed to obliterate the tracks of the last traveller. And when I returned new drifts would have formed, through which I floundered, where the busy north-west wind had been depositing the powdery snow round a sharp angle in the road, and not a rabbit’s track, nor even the fine print, the small type, of a meadow mouse was to be seen. Yet I rarely failed to find, even in mid-winter, some warm and springly swamp where the grass and the skunk-cabbage still put forth with perennial verdure, and some hardier bird occasionally awaited the return of spring. Sometimes, notwithstanding the snow, when I returned from my walk at evening I crossed the deep tracks of a woodchopper leading from my door, and found his pile of whittlings on the hearth, and my house filled with the odor of his pipe. Or on a Sunday afternoon, if I chanced to be at home, I heard the cronching of the snow made by the step of a long-headed farmer, who from far through the woods sought my house, to have a social “crack;” one of the few of his vocation who are “men on their farms;” who donned a frock instead of a professor’s gown, and is as ready to extract the moral out of church or state as to haul a load of manure from his barn-yard. We talked of rude and simple times, when men sat about large fires in cold bracing weather, with clear heads; and when other dessert failed, we tried our teeth on many a nut which wise squirrels have long since abandoned, for those which have the thickest shells are commonly empty.
注释摘要
这段文字将冬日的严酷与梭罗所珍视的那种稀薄而真实的交往编织在一起。开篇那句关于“霜打了左脸，便转过去让右脸也挨一下”的表述，直接翻转了《马太福音》里“有人打你的右脸，连左脸也转过来由他打”的训谕。他只是一个人在堤道上行走，并无他人在场施加暴力，寒风也无所谓公正与否；这番措辞却故意把自己摆在一个异教徒的位置上——“heathen as I was”——仿佛在…