61、East of Eden (Excerpt)

East of Eden (Excerpt)

By John Steinbeck

When a child first catches adults out—when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just—his world falls into panic desolation. The gods are fallen and all safety gone. And there is one sure thing about the fall of gods: they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck. It is a tedious job to build them up again; they never quite shine. And the child’s world is never quite whole again. It is an aching kind of growing.
伊甸之东（节选）

作者: 约翰·斯坦贝克

当小孩初次发现大人的差错——当他的小脑袋里初次察觉到大人并没有超人的智慧，他们的判断不一定明智，想法不一定正确，裁决不一定公平的时候，小孩的世界就变成了令人惊慌的废墟。神的地位一落千丈，安全感全部消失。有一点是肯定的：神的垮台不是零敲碎打，而是猛然倒塌、摔得粉碎，或者掉到了长满绿苔的粪土堆，深深地陷了进去。重新把他们树立起来是费时费力的工作，他们再也不会像以前那么光亮了。小孩的世界也再不会像以前那么完整了。这是一种痛苦的成长过程。