《瓦尔登湖·第十六章·冬天的湖·The Pond in Winter》第15节
Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta, drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, since whose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and in comparison with which our modern world and its literature seem puny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to be referred to a previous state of existence, so remote is its sublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go to my well for water, and lo! there I meet the servant of the Bramin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who still sits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells at the root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servant come to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it were grate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingled with the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it is wafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and the Hesperides, makes the periplus of Hanno, and, floating by Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts in the tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports of which Alexander only heard the names.
注释摘要
这一段是梭罗将瓦尔登湖的冰贸易与他个人的精神修炼并置而成的宏大收束。前文描写了冬季采冰的完整过程：成百的爱尔兰工人带着工具来到湖上，将冰锯成方块，堆叠成仿佛蓝色大理石废墟的巨大冰垛，这些冰将被运往遥远的南方城市乃至热带港口。梭罗在此突然转向自己的早晨仪式，将这两个看似毫无关联的场景缝合在一起。 他起笔的方式极为具体，列出一串地名：查尔斯顿、新奥尔良，然后跳…