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2016 年 6 月 21 日 星期二  |
| in the following Narrative |
分類: 未分類 |
In the course of his Narrative, he relates two instances of murderous cruelty,—in one of which a planter deliberately shot a slave belonging to a neighboring plantation, who had unintentionally gotten within his lordly domain in quest of fish; and in the other, an overseer blew out the brains of a slave who had fled to a stream of water to escape a bloody scourging. Mr. Douglass states that in neither of these instances was any thing done by way of legal arrest or judicial investigation. The Baltimore American, of March 17, 1845, relates a similar case of atrocity, perpetrated with similar impunity—as follows:—"Shooting a slave.—
We learn, upon the authority of a letter from Charles county, Maryland, received by a gentleman of this city, that a young man, named Matthews, a nephew of General Matthews, and whose father, it is believed, holds an office at Washington, killed one of the slaves upon his father's farm by shooting him. The letter states that young Matthews had been left in charge of the farm; that he gave an order to the servant, which was disobeyed, when he proceeded to the house, obtained a gun, and, returning, shot the servant. He immediately, the letter continues, fled to his father's residence, where he still remains unmolested."—Let it never be forgotten, that no slaveholder or overseer can be convicted of any outrage perpetrated on the person of a slave, however diabolical it may be, on the testimony of colored witnesses, whether bond or free Douglass could be persuaded to consecrate his time and talents to the promotion of the anti-slavery enterprise.
By the slave code, they are adjudged to be as incompetent to testify against a white man, as though they were indeed a part of the brute creation. Hence, there is no legal protection in fact, whatever there may be in form, for the slave population; and any amount of cruelty may be inflicted on them with impunity. Is it possible for the human mind to conceive of a more horrible state of society?
The effect of a religious profession on the conduct of southern masters is vividly described, and shown to be any thing but salutary. In the nature of the case, it must be in the highest degree pernicious. The testimony of Mr. Douglass, on this point, is sustained by a cloud of witnesses, whose veracity is unimpeachable. "A slaveholder's profession of Christianity is a palpable imposture. He is a felon of the highest grade. He is a man-stealer. It is of no importance what you put in the other scale."
Reader! are you with the man-stealers in sympathy and purpose, or on the side of their down-trodden victims? If with the former, then are you the foe of God and man. If with the latter, what are you prepared to do and dare in their behalf? Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring in your efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free. Come what may—cost what it may—inscribe on the banner which you unfurl to the breeze, as your religious and political motto—"NO COMPROMISE WITH SLAVERY! NO union WITH SLAVEHOLDERS!"
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| 2016 年 6 月 20 日 星期一 |
| pencil an in the paper |
分類: 未分類 |
Next day the police came. Paul heard the car and then heard Annie running down the corridor to his room. He put the pencil carefully down on the paper he was covering in his untidy handwriting. Annie ran into the room. 'Get out of sight.' Her face was tight. She already had the bag with the gun around her shoulder. 'Get out of s-' She paused and saw that he had already rolled the wheelchair away from the window. 'Are you going to be good, Paul?' 'Yes,' he said. Her eyes searched his face. 'I'm going to trust you,' she said. She left the room and went outside to meet the policemen He'd be alive now and there would be none of this horrible mess to clean up..
Paul moved so that he could sec out of the window without being seen himself. The policeman who had come three days ago had been hardly 76 more than a child; these two were completely different. One was in uniform and one was a detective. Both were old and experienced. The detective looked tired, but his eyes were watching everything. The other policeman was large and obviously extremely strong. They got out of the car and stood close to Annie while they asked her some questions which Paul could not hear, He thought about breaking the window again, but two things stopped him. First, the detective had his coat buttoned, so he would not be able to get his gun quickly. If he had noticed that, then Annie certainly had too. She would shoot the other policeman first and then the detective. The second thing that stopped him was his desire for revenge.
The police would only put Annie in prison. He himself could hurt her, and he wanted to do that. The big policeman pointed towards the house and Annie led them in through the kitchen door. Paul could now hear the conversation. The policemen were asking her about Officer Kushner, which was the young man's name, and Annie was telling them her story. She sounded very calm, but Paul thought he noticed some signs of suspicion in the policemen's voices. They left and Annie came into Paul's room. She stared at him for a full minute. 'Why didn't you shout?' she asked. She couldn't understand it. In her world everyone was against her, so why hadn't he shouted?
Annie refused to let them on to her laud and fired a shot into the air to warn them off. Afterwards she said, 'You know what they want, Paul? This is what they want.' She scratched her forehead viciously with her fingernails, so that blood flowed down her face. 77 'Annie, stop it!' ''This is what they want too.' She hit herself on the cheek. 'And this.' She hit her other cheek, hard. 'STOP IT!' he screamed. 'It's what they want!' she screamed back. She pressed her hands against the wounds on her forehead and then held her hands out to him so that he could see the blood. Then she left the room and he took up his again. The next day two different policemen came, to take a statement from her. She told them the story about Kushner and the Pepsi-Cola bottle. They asked her about the scratches on her forehead. 'How did you get those?' 'I had a bad dream last night.' 'What?' 'I dreamed that people remembered me after all this time and started coming out here again,' Annie said. When they had gone Annie came into his room. Her face was distant and she looked ill. 'How much longer. Paul? When will you finish the book?' 'Tomorrow,' he said. 'Next time they'll have permission to search the house,' she said, and left before he could reply. It didn't take him long to get back to work. His swollen fingers were still locked tightly on to the pencil. Now more than ever he needed to finish the book.'Because I want to finish the book,' he said. 'Because I want to finish it for you, Annie.' She looked at him uncertainly, wanting to believe. Finally she did believe him. It was the truth, anyway. Three days later the local TV news programme sent a crew to Annie's farm. |
| 2016 年 6 月 17 日 星期五 |
| like the last time |
分類: 未分類 |
His next actions might seem heroic, he imagined, if someone looked at just the actions without seeing inside his mind. In immense pain he rolled the wheelchair over to the door. He slid down in the chair so that his hands could touch the floor. This caused him so much pain that he fainted for a few minutes. When he woke up he remembered what he was trying to do. He looked at the floor and saw the hairpins which he had noticed earlier. They had fallen out of Annie's hair when she had rushed at him. Slowly, painfully, he managed to pick them up .
There were three of them. Sitting up again in the chair brought fresh waves of pain. While writing Past Cuts he had taught himself to open locks with things like hairpins. It had helped him write abour a carthief. It was surprisingly easy. Now he was going to open the door and go out into the house. What made him overcome all his pain and do this? Was it because he was a hero? No, it was because he needed some Novril tablets and was afraid that Annie would not return for hours or would not give them to him when she did return. And he felt he needed an extra supply, to help him during those periods when she was too angry with him to give them to him. It was an old, heavy lock. One pin sprang out of his hands, skated across the wooden floor and disappeared under the bed. The second one broke - but as it broke, the door opened. 20 Thank you, God,' he whispered Tell me how to do to live in your heart .
A bad moment followed - no, not a bad moment, an awful moment - when it seemed as if the wheelchair would not fit through the door. She must have brought it into the room folded up, he realized. In the end he had to hold on to the frame of the door and pull himself through it. The wheels rubbed against the frame and for one terrible moment he thought the chair was going to stick there. But then he was suddenly through the door. After that he fainted again. When he woke up, the light in the corridor was different. Quite some time had passed. How long did he have before she returned? Fifty hours, or five minutes? He could see the bathroom through an open door down the corridor. Surely she would keep the medicine there. He rolled down the corridor and stopped at the bathroom door. At least this door was a little wider. He turned himself round so that he could go into the bathroom backwards, ready for a quick escape if necessary.
Inside the bathroom there was a bath, an open cupboard for storing towels and blankets, a basin - and a medicine cupboard on the wall over the basin! But how could he reach it from his wheelchair? It was too high up the wall. And even if he could reach it with a stick or something, he would only make things fall out of it and break in the basin. And then what would he tell her? That Misery had done it while looking for some medicine to bring her back to life? Tears of anger - and of shame at his need for the medicine - began to flow down his cheeks. He almost gave in and started to think about returning to his room. Then his eye saw something in the towel cupboard. Previously his eye had only quickly noticed the towels and blankets on the shelves. But there on the floor, underneath all the shelves, were two or three boxes. He rolled himself over to the cupboard. Now he could see some words printed on one of the boxes: MEDICAL SUPPLIES. His heart leapt. 21 He reached in and pulled one of the boxes but. |
| 2016 年 6 月 16 日 星期四 |
| feelings in writing |
分類: 未分類 |
Words like these, proceeding from a mind so different from the poet’s own, form perhaps as satisfactory a testimony to the value of his work as any writer can obtain. For they imply that Wordsworth has succeeded in giving his own impress to emotions which may become common to all; that he has produced a body of thought which is felt to be both distinctive and coherent, while yet it enlarges the reader’s capacities instead of making demands upon his credence. Whether there be theories, they shall pass; whether there be systems, they shall fail; the true epoch-maker in the history of the human soul is the man who educes from this bewildering universe a new and elevating joy.
I have alluded above to some of the passages, most of them familiar enough, in which Wordsworth’s sense of the mystic relation between the world without us and the world within—the correspondence between the seen and the unseen—is expressed in its most general terms. But it is evident that such a conviction as this, if it contain any truth, cannot be barren of consequences on any level of thought. The ommunion with Nature which is capable of being at times sublimed to an incommunicable ecstasy must be capable also of explaining Nature to us so far as she can be explained; there must be axiomata media of natural religion; there must be something in the nature of poetic truths, standing midway between mystic intuition and delicate observation the beginning of operations which are not measured by our hurrying time.
How rich Wordsworth is in these poetic truths—how illumining is the gaze which he turns on the commonest phenomena—how subtly and variously he shows us the soul’s innate perceptions or inherited memories as it were cooperating with Nature and “half creating” the voice with which she speaks—all this can be learnt by attentive study alone. Only a few scattered samples can be given here; and I will begin with one on whose significance the poet has himself dwelt. This is the poem called The Leech-Gatherer, afterwards more formally named Resolution and Independence.“I will explain to you,” says Wordsworth, “in prose, mythat poem, I describe myself as having been exalted to the highest pitch of delight by the joyousness and beauty of Nature; and then as depressed, even in the midst of those beautiful objects, to the lowest dejection and despair. A young poet in the midst of the happiness of Nature is described as overwhelmed by the thoughts of the miserable reverses which have befallen the happiest of all men, viz. poets.
I think of this till I am so deeply impressed with it, that I consider the manner in which I am rescued from my dejection and despair almost as an interposition of Providence. A person reading the poem with feelings like mine will have been awed and controlled, expecting something spiritual or supernatural. What is brought forward? A lonely place, ‘a pond, by which an old man was, far from all house or home:’ not stood, nor sat, but was—the figure presented in the most naked simplicity possible. The feeling of spirituality or supernaturalness is again referred to as being strong in my mind in this passage. How came he here? thought I, or what can he be doing? |
| 2016 年 6 月 15 日 星期三 |
| 看不見的美好 |
分類: 未分類 |
佛說，今生無論遇見誰，他都是我們生命中該出現的人，沒有人是因為偶然進入我們的生命，每個在我們周圍，和我們有互動的人，都代表一些事，也許要教會我們什麼。無論發生什麼事，那都是唯一會發生的，我們所經歷的每一種情境都是絕對完美的，即便不符合我們的理解和目標。每一件事都正好是在對的時刻開始的，不早也不晚。如此說來，這輩子和誰路遇，和誰接踵，和誰相親，和誰反目，都是命定，掙扎不出。生命中該發生的已經發生，該結束的也已結束。已經發生的事情已無法改變，只能完整接受，最好放下並持續前進。餘下的人生，盡可能要把握機緣，掌控未來。
今生，我將用有限的餘生不斷仰望高山，高山離太陽更近，離平原更遠，像是地球上最勇敢最孤獨的犄角。在忙碌中疏漏下的休閒時光裏，習慣性的把自己淹沒在書堆裏，在文字裏賞一季花開，斟一盞清茶，守一份在喧囂世界裏僅剩的一絲安暖它經歷了最殘酷的折疊，也贏得了最高聳的榮譽。雄壯巍峨，大美不言，令信仰慕。山的存在讓我們永葆謙遜和恭敬的姿態，知道在這個世界上有一些事物必須仰視。
今生，我將用餘生不倦地凝望綠色，這人間最滋潤的色彩，好似虛幻縹緲的夢境，是生命最美麗的歸宿，有了它生命才得以繁衍和興旺。今生，我還要去瞻望大海，欣賞大海的廣闊和包容，海納百川，滋養無數生命，感受大海平靜時的溫柔和憤怒時的咆哮。我要去看花，百花綻放，繽紛絢爛，美不勝收。今生，我還要用餘生目不轉睛地注視人群。站在明亮的窗前，看到朝氣蓬勃的青年，慈祥可親的老人，歡快活潑的少年，還有那天真無邪孩童，我心生歡喜。如果有來生，我希望自已還能成為這芸芸眾生中的一員，而不是其他的什麼動物和植物。儘管我知道人類有那麼多可怕的弱點和缺陷。我還是為 這個物種的智慧和勇敢讚歎。
看這世間萬物皆有情，體味這喜憂參半的世界，內心依然要保持柔軟安寧，無論這個世界對我怎樣，我都將一如既往地對她充滿希望，與她溫柔相擁。
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