章节正文
his neck and tried to sleep. When he became drowsy
and closed his eyes, he raised a hand and with it
groped about in the darkness. "I have missed some-
thing. I have missed something Kate Swift was try-
ing to tell me," he muttered sleepily. Then he slept
and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that
winter night to go to sleep.
LONELINESS
HE WAS THE son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once
owned a farm on a side road leading off Trunion
Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the
town limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and
the blinds to all of the windows facing the road were
kept closed. In the road before the house a flock of
chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in
the deep dust. Enoch lived in the house with his
mother in those days and when he was a young boy
went to school at the Winesburg High School. Old
citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth
inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of the
road when he came into town and sometimes read
a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to
make him realize where he was so that he would
turn out of the beaten track and let them pass.
When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went
to New York City and was a city man for fifteen
years. He studied French and went to an art school,
hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In
his own mind he planned to go to Paris and to finish
his art education among the masters there, but that
never turned out.
Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He
could draw well enough and he had many odd deli-
cate thoughts hidden away in his brain that might
have expressed themselves through the brush of a
painter, but he was always a child and that was a
handicap to his worldly development. He never
grew up and of course he couldn't understand peo-
ple and he couldn't make people understand him.
The child in him kept bumping against things,
against actualities like money and sex and opinions.
Once he was hit by a street car and thrown against
an iron post. That made him lame. It was one of the
many things that kept things from turning out for
Enoch Robinson
In New York City, when he first went there to live
and before he became confused and disconcerted by
the facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal with
young men. He got into a group of other young
artists, both men and women, and in the evenings
they sometimes came to visit him in his room. Once
he got drunk and was taken to a police station
where a police magistrate frightened him horribly,
and once he tried to have an affair with a woman
of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging
house. The woman and Enoch walked together
three blocks and then the young man grew afraid
and ran away. The woman had been drinking and
the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall
of a building and laughed so heartily that another
man stopped and laughed with her. The two went
away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to
his room trembling and vexed.
The room in which young Robinson lived in New
York faced Washington Square and was long and
narrow like a hallway. It is important to get that
fixed in your mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the
story of a room almost more than it is the story of
a man.
And so into the room in the evening came young
Enoch's friends. There was nothing particularly
striking about them except that they were artists of
the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking
artists. Throughout all of the known history of the
world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They
talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly,
in earnest about it. They think it matters much more
than it does.
And so these people gathered and smoked ciga-
rettes and talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from
the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in
a corner and for the most part said nothing. How
his big blue childlike eyes stared about! On the walls
were pictures he had made, crude things, half fin-
ished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in
their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads
rocking from side to side. Words were said about
line and values and composition, lots of words, such
as are always being said.
Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn't know how.
He was too excited to talk coherently. When he tried
he sputtered and stammered and his voice sounded
strange and squeaky to him. That made him stop
talking. He knew what he wanted to say, but he
knew also that he could never by any possibility
say it. When a picture he had painted was under
discussion, he wanted to burst out with something
like this: "You don't get the point," he wanted to
explain; "the picture you see doesn't consist of the
things you see and say words about. There is some-
thing else, something you don't see at all, something
you aren't intended to see. Look at this one over
here, by the door here, where the light from the
window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that
you might not notice at all is, you see, the beginning
of everything. There is a clump of elders there such
as used to grow beside the road before our house
back in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders
there is something hidden. It is a woman, that's
what it is. She has been thrown from a horse and
the horse has run away out of sight. Do you not see
how the old man who drives a cart looks anxiously
about? That is Thad Grayback who has a farm up
the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be
ground into meal at Comstock's mill. He knows
there is something in the elders, something hidden
away, and yet he doesn't quite know.
"It's a woman you see, that's what it is! It's a
woman and, oh, she is lovely! She is hurt and is
suffering but she makes no sound. Don't you see
how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and
the beauty comes out from her and spreads over
everything. It is in the sky back there and all around
everywhere. I didn't try to paint the woman, of
course. She is too beautiful to be painted. How dull
to talk of composition and such things! Why do you
not look at the sky and then run away as I used
to do when I was a boy back there in Winesburg,
Ohio?"
That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson
trembled to say to the guests who came into his
room when he was a young fellow in New York
City, but he always ended by saying nothing. Then
he began to doubt his own mind. He was afraid
the things he felt were not getting expressed in the
pictures he painted. In a half indignant mood he
stopped inviting people into his room and presently
got into the habit of locking the door. He began to
think that enough people had visited him, that he
did not need people any more. With quick imagina-
tion he began to invent his own people to whom he
could really talk and to whom he explained the
things he had been unable to explain to living peo-
ple. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits
of men and women among whom he went, in his
turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch
Robinson had ever seen had left with him some es-
sence of himself, something he could mould and
change to suit his own fancy, something that under-
stood all about such things as the wounded woman
behind the elders in the pictures.
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a com-
plete egotist, as all children are egotists. He did not
want friends for the quite simple reason that no
child wants friends. He wanted most of all the peo-
ple of his own mind, people with whom he could
really talk, people he could harangue and scold by
the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among
these people he was always self-confident and bold.
They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions
of their own, but always he talked last and best. He
was like a writer busy among the figures of his
brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-
dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of
New York.
Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to
get lonely and to want to touch actual flesh-and-
bone people with his hands. Days passed when his
room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and de-
sire grew in his mind. At night strange fevers, burn-
ing within, kept him awake. He married a girl who
sat in a chair next to his own in the art school and
went to live in an apartment house in Brooklyn. Two
children were born to the woman he married, and
Enoch got a job in a place where illustrations are
made for advertisements.
That began another phase of Enoch's life. He
began to play at a new game. For a while he was
very proud of himself in the role of producing citi-
zen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things
and played with realities. In the fall he voted at an
election and he had a newspaper thrown on his
porch each morning. When in the evening he came
home from work he got off a streetcar and walked
sedately along behind some business man, striving
to look very substantial and important. As a payer
of taxes he thought he should post himself on how
things are run. "I'm getting to be of some moment,
a real part of things, of the state and the city and
all that," he told himself with an amusing miniature
air of dignity. Once, coming home from Philadel-
phia, he had a discussion with a man met on a train.
Enoch talked about the advisability of the govern-
ment's owning and operating the railroads and the
man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that
such a move on the part of the government would
be a good thing, and he grew quite excited as he
talked. Later he remembered his own words with
pleasure. "I gave him something to think about, that
fellow," he muttered to himself as he climbed the
stairs to his Brooklyn apartment.
and closed his eyes, he raised a hand and with it
groped about in the darkness. "I have missed some-
thing. I have missed something Kate Swift was try-
ing to tell me," he muttered sleepily. Then he slept
and in all Winesburg he was the last soul on that
winter night to go to sleep.
LONELINESS
HE WAS THE son of Mrs. Al Robinson who once
owned a farm on a side road leading off Trunion
Pike, east of Winesburg and two miles beyond the
town limits. The farmhouse was painted brown and
the blinds to all of the windows facing the road were
kept closed. In the road before the house a flock of
chickens, accompanied by two guinea hens, lay in
the deep dust. Enoch lived in the house with his
mother in those days and when he was a young boy
went to school at the Winesburg High School. Old
citizens remembered him as a quiet, smiling youth
inclined to silence. He walked in the middle of the
road when he came into town and sometimes read
a book. Drivers of teams had to shout and swear to
make him realize where he was so that he would
turn out of the beaten track and let them pass.
When he was twenty-one years old Enoch went
to New York City and was a city man for fifteen
years. He studied French and went to an art school,
hoping to develop a faculty he had for drawing. In
his own mind he planned to go to Paris and to finish
his art education among the masters there, but that
never turned out.
Nothing ever turned out for Enoch Robinson. He
could draw well enough and he had many odd deli-
cate thoughts hidden away in his brain that might
have expressed themselves through the brush of a
painter, but he was always a child and that was a
handicap to his worldly development. He never
grew up and of course he couldn't understand peo-
ple and he couldn't make people understand him.
The child in him kept bumping against things,
against actualities like money and sex and opinions.
Once he was hit by a street car and thrown against
an iron post. That made him lame. It was one of the
many things that kept things from turning out for
Enoch Robinson
In New York City, when he first went there to live
and before he became confused and disconcerted by
the facts of life, Enoch went about a good deal with
young men. He got into a group of other young
artists, both men and women, and in the evenings
they sometimes came to visit him in his room. Once
he got drunk and was taken to a police station
where a police magistrate frightened him horribly,
and once he tried to have an affair with a woman
of the town met on the sidewalk before his lodging
house. The woman and Enoch walked together
three blocks and then the young man grew afraid
and ran away. The woman had been drinking and
the incident amused her. She leaned against the wall
of a building and laughed so heartily that another
man stopped and laughed with her. The two went
away together, still laughing, and Enoch crept off to
his room trembling and vexed.
The room in which young Robinson lived in New
York faced Washington Square and was long and
narrow like a hallway. It is important to get that
fixed in your mind. The story of Enoch is in fact the
story of a room almost more than it is the story of
a man.
And so into the room in the evening came young
Enoch's friends. There was nothing particularly
striking about them except that they were artists of
the kind that talk. Everyone knows of the talking
artists. Throughout all of the known history of the
world they have gathered in rooms and talked. They
talk of art and are passionately, almost feverishly,
in earnest about it. They think it matters much more
than it does.
And so these people gathered and smoked ciga-
rettes and talked and Enoch Robinson, the boy from
the farm near Winesburg, was there. He stayed in
a corner and for the most part said nothing. How
his big blue childlike eyes stared about! On the walls
were pictures he had made, crude things, half fin-
ished. His friends talked of these. Leaning back in
their chairs, they talked and talked with their heads
rocking from side to side. Words were said about
line and values and composition, lots of words, such
as are always being said.
Enoch wanted to talk too but he didn't know how.
He was too excited to talk coherently. When he tried
he sputtered and stammered and his voice sounded
strange and squeaky to him. That made him stop
talking. He knew what he wanted to say, but he
knew also that he could never by any possibility
say it. When a picture he had painted was under
discussion, he wanted to burst out with something
like this: "You don't get the point," he wanted to
explain; "the picture you see doesn't consist of the
things you see and say words about. There is some-
thing else, something you don't see at all, something
you aren't intended to see. Look at this one over
here, by the door here, where the light from the
window falls on it. The dark spot by the road that
you might not notice at all is, you see, the beginning
of everything. There is a clump of elders there such
as used to grow beside the road before our house
back in Winesburg, Ohio, and in among the elders
there is something hidden. It is a woman, that's
what it is. She has been thrown from a horse and
the horse has run away out of sight. Do you not see
how the old man who drives a cart looks anxiously
about? That is Thad Grayback who has a farm up
the road. He is taking corn to Winesburg to be
ground into meal at Comstock's mill. He knows
there is something in the elders, something hidden
away, and yet he doesn't quite know.
"It's a woman you see, that's what it is! It's a
woman and, oh, she is lovely! She is hurt and is
suffering but she makes no sound. Don't you see
how it is? She lies quite still, white and still, and
the beauty comes out from her and spreads over
everything. It is in the sky back there and all around
everywhere. I didn't try to paint the woman, of
course. She is too beautiful to be painted. How dull
to talk of composition and such things! Why do you
not look at the sky and then run away as I used
to do when I was a boy back there in Winesburg,
Ohio?"
That is the kind of thing young Enoch Robinson
trembled to say to the guests who came into his
room when he was a young fellow in New York
City, but he always ended by saying nothing. Then
he began to doubt his own mind. He was afraid
the things he felt were not getting expressed in the
pictures he painted. In a half indignant mood he
stopped inviting people into his room and presently
got into the habit of locking the door. He began to
think that enough people had visited him, that he
did not need people any more. With quick imagina-
tion he began to invent his own people to whom he
could really talk and to whom he explained the
things he had been unable to explain to living peo-
ple. His room began to be inhabited by the spirits
of men and women among whom he went, in his
turn saying words. It was as though everyone Enoch
Robinson had ever seen had left with him some es-
sence of himself, something he could mould and
change to suit his own fancy, something that under-
stood all about such things as the wounded woman
behind the elders in the pictures.
The mild, blue-eyed young Ohio boy was a com-
plete egotist, as all children are egotists. He did not
want friends for the quite simple reason that no
child wants friends. He wanted most of all the peo-
ple of his own mind, people with whom he could
really talk, people he could harangue and scold by
the hour, servants, you see, to his fancy. Among
these people he was always self-confident and bold.
They might talk, to be sure, and even have opinions
of their own, but always he talked last and best. He
was like a writer busy among the figures of his
brain, a kind of tiny blue-eyed king he was, in a six-
dollar room facing Washington Square in the city of
New York.
Then Enoch Robinson got married. He began to
get lonely and to want to touch actual flesh-and-
bone people with his hands. Days passed when his
room seemed empty. Lust visited his body and de-
sire grew in his mind. At night strange fevers, burn-
ing within, kept him awake. He married a girl who
sat in a chair next to his own in the art school and
went to live in an apartment house in Brooklyn. Two
children were born to the woman he married, and
Enoch got a job in a place where illustrations are
made for advertisements.
That began another phase of Enoch's life. He
began to play at a new game. For a while he was
very proud of himself in the role of producing citi-
zen of the world. He dismissed the essence of things
and played with realities. In the fall he voted at an
election and he had a newspaper thrown on his
porch each morning. When in the evening he came
home from work he got off a streetcar and walked
sedately along behind some business man, striving
to look very substantial and important. As a payer
of taxes he thought he should post himself on how
things are run. "I'm getting to be of some moment,
a real part of things, of the state and the city and
all that," he told himself with an amusing miniature
air of dignity. Once, coming home from Philadel-
phia, he had a discussion with a man met on a train.
Enoch talked about the advisability of the govern-
ment's owning and operating the railroads and the
man gave him a cigar. It was Enoch's notion that
such a move on the part of the government would
be a good thing, and he grew quite excited as he
talked. Later he remembered his own words with
pleasure. "I gave him something to think about, that
fellow," he muttered to himself as he climbed the
stairs to his Brooklyn apartment.
- beaten [´bi:tn]
beat 的过去分词 (初中英语单词) - faculty [´fækəlti] n.才干；天赋；院，系 (初中英语单词)
- hidden [´hid(ə)n] hide 的过去分词 (初中英语单词)
- incident [´insidənt] n.小事件；事变 (初中英语单词)
- everyone [´evriwʌn] pron.=everybody 每人 (初中英语单词)
- earnest [´ə:nist] a.认真的 n.认真；诚恳 (初中英语单词)
- invent [in´vent] vt.发明；捏造 (初中英语单词)
- unable [ʌn´eibəl] a.不能的；无能为力的 (初中英语单词)
- writer [´raitə] n.作者；作家 (初中英语单词)
- lonely [´ləunli] a.孤独的；无人烟的 (初中英语单词)
- actual [´æktʃuəl] a.现实的；实际的 (初中英语单词)
- apartment [ə´pɑ:tmənt] n.一套房间 (初中英语单词)
- dignity [´digniti] n.尊严，尊贵；高官显贵 (初中英语单词)
- discussion [di´skʌʃən] n.讨论；辩论 (初中英语单词)
- farmhouse [´fɑ:mhaus] n.农场住房，农舍 (高中英语单词)
- studied [´stʌdid] a.故意的；有计划的 (高中英语单词)
- sidewalk [´saidwɔ:k] n.人行道 (高中英语单词)
- heartily [´hɑ:tili] ad.衷心地；亲切地 (高中英语单词)
- composition [,kɔmpə´ziʃən] n.写作；作曲；作品 (高中英语单词)
- saying [´seiŋ, ´sei-iŋ] n.言语；言论；格言 (高中英语单词)
- substantial [səb´stænʃəl] a.实质的，真的 (高中英语单词)
- amusing [ə´mju:ziŋ] a.有趣的 (高中英语单词)
- drawing [´drɔ:iŋ] n.画图；制图；图样 (英语四级单词)
- worldly [´wə:ldli] a.现世的；世俗的 (英语四级单词)
- passionately [´pæʃənitli] ad.多情地；热烈地 (英语四级单词)
- indignant [in´dignənt] a.义愤的，愤慨的 (英语四级单词)
- essence [´esəns] n.本质；要素；精华 (英语四级单词)
- sleepily [´sli:pili] ad.瞌睡地；懒散地 (英语六级单词)
- guinea [´gini] n.几尼(英国旧金币) (英语六级单词)
- hallway [´hɔ:lwei] n.(美)门厅，过道 (英语六级单词)
- taking [´teikiŋ] a.迷人的 n.捕获物 (英语六级单词)
- inviting [in´vaitiŋ] a.动人的 (英语六级单词)
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章节正文
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