翻译  Lesson 7  The Libido for the Ugly
Paragraph 1
  On a winter day some years ago, coming out of Pittsburgh on one of the expresses of the Pennsylvania Railroad, I rolled eastward for an hour through the coal and steel towns of Westmoreland country.
  It was familiar ground; boy and man, I had been through it often before. But somehow I had never quite sensed its appalling desolation.
  Here was the very heart of industrial Ameria, the center of its most lucrative and characteristic activity, the boast and pride of the richest and grandest nation ever seen on earth---and here was a scene so dreadfully hideous, so intolerably bleak and forlorn that it reduced the whole aspiration of man to a macabre and depressing joke.
  Here was wealth beyond computation, almost beyond imagination---and here were human habitations so abominable that they would have disgraced a race of alley cats.
Paragraph 2
  I am not speaking of mere filth. One expects steel towns to be dirty. What I allude to is the unbroken and agonizing ugliness, the sheer revolting monstrousness, of every house in sight.
  From East Liberty to Greensburg, a distance of 25 miles, there was not one in sight from the train that did not insult and lacerate the eye.
  Some were so bad, and they were among the most pretentious --churches, stores, warehouses, and the like--that they were downright startling; one blinked before them as one blinks before a man with his face shot away.
  A few linger in memory, horrible even there: a crazy little church just west of Jeannette, set like a dormer window on the side of a bare leprous hill; the headquarters of the Veterans of Foreign Wars at another forlorn town, a steel stadium like a huge rat--trap somewhere further down the line.
  But most of all I recall the general effect--of hideousness without a break. There was not a single decent house within eyerange from the Pittsburgh to the Greensburg yards.
  There was not one that was not misshapen, and there was not one that was not shabby.
Lesson 6 Disappearing through the Skylight
Paragraph 13
  The playfulness of the modern aesthetic is, finally, its most striking---and also its most serious and, by corollary, its most disturbing ---feature.
  The playfulness imitates the playfulness of science that produces game theory and virtual particles and black holes and that, by introducing human growth genes into cows, forces students of ethics to reexamine the definition of cannibalism.
  The importance of play in the modern aesthetic should not come as a surprise. It is announced in every city in the developed world by the fantastic and playful buildings of pos
tmodernism and neomodernism and by the fantastic juxtapositions of architectural styles that typify collage city and urban adhocism.
Paragraph 14
  Today modern culture includes the geometries of the International Style, the fantasies of facadism, and the gamesmanship of theme parks and museum villages.
  It pretends at times to be static but it is really dynamic. Its buildings move and sway and reflect dreamy visions of everything that is going on around them.
  It surrounds its citizens with the linear sculpture of pipelines and interstate highways and high--tension lines and the delicate virtuosities of the surfaces of the Chrysler Airflow and the Boeing 747 and the lacy weavings of circuits etched on silicon, as well as with the brutal assertiveness of oil tanker and bulldozers and the Tinkertoy complications of trusses and geodesic domes and lunar landers.
  It abounds in images and sounds and values utterly different from those of the world of na
tural things seen from a middle distance.
Lesson 5  Love Is a Fallacy
Paragrath 145-154
  I dashed perspiration from my brow. “Polly,” I croaked, “you mustn’t take all these things so literally. I mean this is just classroom stuff. You know that the things you learn in school don’t have anything to do with life.”
  “Dicto Simpliciter, ” she said, wagging her finer at me playfully.
  That did it. I leaped to my feet, bellowing like a bull. “Will you or will you not go steady with me?”
  “I will not,” she replied.
  “Why not?” I demanded.
  “Because this afternoon I promised Petey that I would go steady with him.”
  I reeled back, overcome with the infamy of it. After he promised, after he made a deal, after he shook my hand! “The rat!” I shrieked, kicking up great chunks of turf. “You can’t go with him, Polly. He is a liar. He is a cheat. He is a rat.”

版权声明：本站内容均来自互联网，仅供演示用，请勿用于商业和其他非法用途。如果侵犯了您的权益请与我们联系QQ:729038198，我们将在24小时内删除。