Reading Early Autumn
新学期班会-以尝试为话题的作文
Early Autumn
By Langston Hughes
When Bill was very young, they had been in
love, many nights they had spent walking,
talking together. Then something not very
important had come between them, and they didn’t
speak, impulsively. She had married a man she
thought she loved. Bill went away, bitter about
women.
Yesterday, walking across
Washington Square, she saw him for the first time
in years.
“Bill Walker,” she said.
He
stopped. At first he did not recognize her; to
him she looked so old.
“Mary!” Where did you
come from?
Unconsciously, she lifted her face
as though wanting a kiss, but he held out his
hand. She
took it.
“I live in New York
now,” She said.
“Oh”-- smiling politely, then
a little frown came quickly between his eyes.
“Always wondered what happened to you, Bill.”
“I’m a lawyer. Nice firm, way downtown.”
“Married yet?”
“Sure. Two kids.”
“Oh,”
she said.
A great many people went past them
through the park. People they didn’t know. It was
late
afternoon. Nearly sunset.
“And your
husband?” he asked her.
“We have three
children. I work in the bursar’s office at
Columbia.”
“You are looking very … (he wanted
to say old)…well,” he said.
She understood.
Under the trees in Washington Square, she found
herself desperately
reaching back into the
past. She had been older than he then in Ohio. Now
she was not young at
all. Bill was still
young.
“We live on Central Park West,” She
said. “Come and see us sometime.”
“Sure,” he
replied.” You and your husband must have dinner
with my family some night. Any
night. Lucille
and I’d love to have you.”
The leaves fell
slowly from the trees in the square. Fell without
wind. Autumn dusk. She felt
a little sick.
“We’d love it,” she answered.
“You ought
to see my kids.” He grinned.
Suddenly the
lights came on up the whole length of Fifth
Avenue, chains of misty brilliance
in the blue
air.
“There’s my bus,” she said.
He held
out his hand, “Good-bye”
“When…” she wanted to
say, but the bus was ready to pull off. The lights
on the avenue
blurred, twinkled, blurred. And
she was afraid to open her mouth as she entered
the bus. Afraid it
would be impossible to
utter a word.
Suddenly she shrieked very
loudly, “Good-bye!” But the bus door had closed.
The bus started. People came between them
outside, people crossing the street, people they
didn't know. Space and people. She lost sight
of Bill. Then she remembered she had forgotten to
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give him her address—or
to ask him for his -- or tell him that her
youngest boy was named Bill,
too.
Note:
Notes
1.
Washington Square: 华盛顿广场（位于美国纽约市曼哈顿南部）；
way
downtown: 在市中心
2. Columbia: Columbia
University
3. Central Park West: 中央公园西部，纽约住宅区。
4. Fifth Avenue: 第五大道，纽约繁华的商业区。
Questions
for Discussion:
1. What caused Bill
and Mary to leave each other many years ago? Do
you think it is true
with many lovers in
reality?
2. How did Bill feel about
women when Mary married another man?
3.
Why couldn't Bill recognize Mary at first?
4.
What can you learn about Bill and Mary’s life
after they ended their relationship?
5.
Why did Mary feel a little sick in the middle of
their conversation?
6. Is it
understandable to you that Bill and Mary responded
differently to their unexpected
meeting?
7. How important is the description of
scenes in narrating the story?
Early
autumn 早秋 是美国著名文学家，诗人，短篇小说家兰斯顿·休斯的著名短篇小说，
故事以一
对昔日的恋人若干年后不期而遇为题材，通过两人极为普通的日常对话，辅以一定
的情景衬托，生动而细
腻地显现了两种截然不同的心态，尤其是女主人公玛丽那起伏跌宕的
感情波澜，充分表现了她的怀旧心态
。全文短短的445个词，一气呵成，向我们展示了一幅
平静而又波澜壮阔的感情画面，读来回味无穷…
…
THE DISCUS THROWER
By
Richard Selzer
I spy on my patients. Ought not
a doctor to observe his patients by any means and
from any
stance, that he might the more fully
assemble evidence? So I stand in the doorways of
hospital
rooms and gaze. Oh, it is not all
that furtive an act. Those in bed need only look
up to discover me
but they never do.
From
the doorway of Room 542 the man in the bed seems
deeply tanned. Blue eyes and
close-cropped
white hair give him the appearance of vigor and
good health. But I know that his
skin is not
brown from the sun. It is rusted, rather, in the
last stage of containing the vile repose
within. And the blue eyes are frosted, looking
inward like the windows of a snowbound cottage.
This man is blind. This man is also legless
---- the right leg missing from midthigh down, the
left
from just below the knee. It gives him
the look of a bonsai, roots and branches pruned
into the
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dwarfed
facsimile of a great tree.
Propped on pillows,
he cups his right thigh in both hands. Now and
then he shakes his head
as though
acknowledging the intensity of his suffering. In
all of this he makes no sound. Is he
mute as
well as blind?
The room in which he dwells is
empty of all possessions---- no get-well cards,
small, private
caches of food, day-old
flowers, slippers, all the usual kickshaws of the
sickroom. There is only
the bed, a chair, a
nightstand, and a tray on wheels that can be swung
across his lap for meals.
“What time is it?”
“Three o’clock.”
“Morning or afternoon?”
“Afternoon.”
He is silent. There is
nothing else he wants to know.
“How are you?”
he asks.
“It’s the doctor, how do you feel?”
He does not answer right away.
“Feel?” he
says.
“I hope you feel better,” I say.
I
press the button at the side of the bed.
“Down you go,” I say.
“Yes, down,” he
says.
He falls back upon the bed awkwardly.
His stumps, unweighted by legs and feet, rise in
the
air, presenting themselves. I unwrap the
bandages from the stumps, and begin to cut away
the
black scabs and the dead, glazed fat with
scissors and forceps. A shard of white bone comes
loose.
I pick it away. I wash the wounds with
disinfectant and redress the stumps. All this
while, he does
not speak. What is the thinking
behind those lids that do not blink? Is he
remembering a time
when he was whole? Does he
dream of feet? Of when his body was not a rotting
log?
He lies solid and inert. In spite of
everything, he remains impressive, as though he
were a
sailor standing athwart a slanting
deck.
“Any thing I can do for you?”
For a
long moment he is silent.
“Yes,” he says at
last and without the least irony. “You can bring
me a pair of shoes.”
In the corridor, the head
nurse is waiting for me.
“We have to do
something about him,” she says. “Every morning he
orders scrambled eggs
for breakfast, and,
instead of eating them, he picks up the plate and
throws it against the wall.”
“Throws his
plat?”
“Nasty. That’s what he is. No wonder
his family doesn’t come to visit. They probably
can’t
stand him any more than we can.”
She
is waiting for me to do something.
“Well?”
“We’ll see,” I say.
The next morning I am
waiting in the corridor when the kitchen delivers
his breakfast. I
watch the aide place the tray
on the stand and swing it across his lap. She
presses the button to
raise head of the bed.
Then she leaves.
In time the man reaches to
find the rim of the tray, then on to find the dome
of the covered
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dish. He
lifts off the cover and places it on the stand. He
fingers across the plate in both hands,
sets
it on the palm of his right hand, centers it,
balance it. He hefts it up and down slightly,
getting
the feel of it. Abruptly, he draws
back his right arm as far as he can.
There is
the crack of the plat breaking against the wall at
the foot of his bed and the small
wet wound of
the scrambled eggs dropping to the floor.
And
then he laughs. It is a sound you have never
heard. It is something new under the sun. It
could cure cancer.
Out in the corridor,
the eyes of the head nurse narrow.
“Laughed,
did he?”
She writes something down on the
clipboard.
A second aide arrives, brings a
second breakfast tray, puts it on the nightstand,
out of his
reach. She looks over at me shaking
her head and making her mouth go. I see that we
are to be
accomplices.
“I’ve got to feed
you,” she says to the man.
“Oh, no you don’t,”
the man says, “after the way you just did. Nurse
says so. ”
“Get me my shoes,” the man says.
“Here’s oatmeal,” the aide says. “Open.” And
she touches the spoon to his lower lip.
“I
ordered scrambled eggs,” says the man.
“That’s
right,” the aide says.
I step forward.
“Is
there anything I can do?” I say.
“Who are
you?” the man asks.
In the evening I go once
more to that ward to make my rounds. The head
nurse reports to me
that Room 542 is deceased.
She has discovered this quite by accident, she
says. No, there had been
no sound. Nothing.
It’s a blessing, she says.
I go into his room,
a spy looking for secrets. He is still there in
his bed. His face is relaxed,
grave,
dignified. After a while, I turn to leave. My gaze
sweeps the wall at the foot of the bed, and
I
see the place where it has been repeatedly washed,
where the wall looks very white.
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