《瓦尔登湖·第十五章·冬天的禽兽·Winter Animals》第1节
When the ponds were firmly frozen, they afforded not only new and shorter routes to many points, but new views from their surfaces of the familiar landscape around them. When I crossed Flint’s Pond, after it was covered with snow, though I had often paddled about and skated over it, it was so unexpectedly wide and so strange that I could think of nothing but Baffin’s Bay. The Lincoln hills rose up around me at the extremity of a snowy plain, in which I did not remember to have stood before; and the fishermen, at an indeterminable distance over the ice, moving slowly about with their wolfish dogs, passed for sealers or Esquimaux, or in misty weather loomed like fabulous creatures, and I did not know whether they were giants or pygmies. I took this course when I went to lecture in Lincoln in the evening, travelling in no road and passing no house between my own hut and the lecture room. In Goose Pond, which lay in my way, a colony of muskrats dwelt, and raised their cabins high above the ice, though none could be seen abroad when I crossed it. Walden, being like the rest usually bare of snow, or with only shallow and interrupted drifts on it, was my yard, where I could walk freely when the snow was nearly two feet deep on a level elsewhere and the villagers were confined to their streets. There, far from the village street, and except at very long intervals, from the jingle of sleigh-bells, I slid and skated, as in a vast moose-yard well trodden, overhung by oak woods and solemn pines bent down with snow or bristling with icicles.
注释摘要
这段文字开篇就给出了一个意味深长的对照：冰封的湖面既是实用的通道，也是视野的刷新。梭罗没有把这两件事分开来讲，而是把走路和看世界当成同一件事。他从弗林特湖的冰面上走过时，一个他划船和溜冰都熟悉的水体突然变得陌生，宽得不像内陆的池塘，倒像是北极的巴芬湾。巴芬湾这个地名不是随口一说的比喻，它在十九世纪中叶新英格兰读者的耳朵里，指向的是当时北极探险叙事中那些危险…