这个话题太大，我只摘录作者书中的描述。作者在书中写了这样一个故事。作者开着车，看到路边一位黑人疲惫不堪地走着，好心停了下来，想载黑人一程。黑人非常勉为其难地上了车，拘谨地回答着作者的提问(因为作者此行主要是体恤民情，了解民风的)。 黑人在回答时，每一句话的结尾都毕恭毕敬地加上Sir这样一个称呼。不知过了多久，如坐针毡的黑人问作者，他就住附近，可不可以放他下车了? 作者只有放他下车，无奈地从后视镜里看着劳动一天的黑人拖着沉重的脚步继续走。 他知道， 黑人不住在附近，但是"自己走路，比坐在我(作者)的车里安全" (but walking was safer than riding with me.)
1）American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash—all of them—surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish. Everything we use comes in boxes, cartons, bins, the so-called packaging we love so much. The mountains of things we throw away are much greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the wild and reckless exuberance of our production, and waste seems to be the index. Driving along I thought how in France or Italy every item of these thrown-out things would have been saved and used for something. This is not said in criticism of one system or the other but I do wonder whether there will come a time when we can no longer afford our wastefulness. (P.26)
2）….The big towns are getting bigger and the villages smaller. The hamlet store, whether grocery, general, hardware, clothing, cannot compete with the supermarket and the chain organization. Our treasured and nostalgic picture of the village store, the cracker-barrel store where an informed yeomanry gather to express opinion and formulate the national character, is very rapidly disappearing. People who once held family fortresses against wind and weather, against scourges of forest and drought and insect enemies, now cluster against the busy breast of the big town. (p71-72)
2）The new American finds his challenge and his love in traffic-choked streets, skies nested in smog, choking with the acids of industry, the screech of rubber and houses leashed in against one another while the townlets wither a time and die. … And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside. This prophecy is underwritten by the tendency of the rich to do this already. Where the rich lead, the poor will follow, or try to. (P.72)
2）Since I hadn’t seen the Middle West for a long time many impressions crowded in on me as I drove through Ohio and Michigan and Illinois. The first was the enormous increase in population. Villages had become towns and towns had grown to cities. The roads squirmed with traffic; the cities were so dense with people that all attention had to be devoted to not hitting anyone or being hit. (p.105)
3）It seemed to me that regional speech is in the process of disappearing, not gone but going. Forty years of radio and twenty years of television must have this impact. Communications must destroy localness, by a slow, inevitable process. I can remember a time when I could almost pinpoint a man’s place of origin by his speech. That is growing more difficult now and will in some foreseeable future become impossible. It is a rare house or building that is not rigged with spiky combers of the air. Radio and television speech becomes standardized, perhaps better English than we have ever used. Just as our bread, mixed and baked, package and sold without benefit of accident or human frailty, is uniformly good and uniformly tasteless, so will our speech become one speech. (p.106)
I who love words and the endless possibility of words am saddened by this inevitability. For with local accent will disappear local tempo. The idioms, the figures of speech that make language rich and full of the poetry of place and time must go. And in their place will be a national speech, wrapped and packaged, standard and tasteless. Localness is not gone but it is going. … What I am mourning is perhaps not worth saving, but I regret its loss nevertheless. (p. 107)
4）We Americans bring in mercenaries to do our hard and humble work. I hope we may not be overwhelmed one day by peoples not too proud or too lazy or too soft to bend to the earth and pick up the things we eat. (p.64)
These Canucks were a hardy people. They traveled and camped by families and groups of families, perhaps even clans: men, women, boys, girls, and small children too. (p64)
4）Most of these people traveled in big trucks covered with dark canvas tarpaulins, but there are some trailers and a few camper tops like Rocinante. At night some slept in the trucks and trailers, but there were tents pitched in pleasant places,….(p.69）
回复 '7grizzly' 的评论 : Thank you, my friend, for your kindness again. I believe so, and I will keep reading and writing. Hopefully I could surprise myself one day. Thank you for being there. I appreciate it!
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回复 '暖冬cool夏' 的评论 : Don't worry. You are well on your way to find those words as you are keeping reading and writing. For me, after first seeing an interesting word, I would forget it soon after. But over time, when the scenario calls, often that word will come to mind. So I think even reading word books is worth it.
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回复 '7grizzly' 的评论 : Thank you, my friend, for the input and kindness. I consulted online for the Tao's quotation, and agreed with you that the world is never perfect. I studied Tao once but did not finish it:)
Actually it was discouraging when I could not produce a book report in English. I tried, but the writing was so poor that I had to give up. Neither could I write something else good.
The word" trudging" in your last post is a good choice, and I happened to come across in the book when the author describe the way a tired Negro walked. Good for you!
Congratulations on finishing reading a great book. One real benefit is that it increases one's vocabulary and gives perspectives.
As for problems, there are always going to be problems, American or Chinese, French or Italian. But I as an immigrant, benefited from these problems. If it were not for capitalism, American greed and wastefulness, globalization, etc., I probably won't be here. The Tao said it the best, 人之不善，何弃之有！
