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Exercise for Advanced English-Chinese
Translation 2-1
1
Fear of Dearth
（
1
）
Carl Tucker
I hate jogging.
Every dawn, as I thud around New York City’s
Central Park reservoir, I
am reminded
of how much I hate it. It’s so tedious. Some claim
jogging is thought
conducive;
others insist the scenery relieves the
monotony. For me, the pace is wrong for
contemplation
of
either
ideas
or
vistas.
While
jogging,
all
I
can
think
about
is
jogging
—
or
nothing.
One
advantage of jogging around a reservoir
is that there’s no d
ry-shortcut home.
From
the
listless
looks
of
some
fellow
trotters,
I
gather
I
am
not
alone
in
my
unenthusiasm: Bill-
paying, it seems, would be about as diverting.
Nonetheless, we continue to
jog; more,
we continue to choose to jog. From a practically
infinite array of opportunities, we
select one that we don’t enjoy and
can’t wait to have done with. Why?
For
any
trend,
there
are
as
many
reasons
as
there
are
participants.
This
person
runs
to
lower his blood pressure. That person
runs to escape the telephone or a cranky spouse or
a
filthy household. Another person runs
to avoid doing anything else, to dodge a decision
about
how to lead his life or a
realization that his life is leading nowhere. Each
of us has his carrot
and stick.
In my
case, the stick is
my slackening physical
condition,
which keeps me
from
beating opponents at tennis whom I
overwhelmed two years ago. My carrot is to win.
Beyond these disparate
reasons, however, lies a deeper cause. It is no
accident that now,
in the last third of
the 20
th
century, personal
fitness and health has suddenly become a popular
obsession. True, modern man likes to
feel
good, but
that hardly distinguishes him from
his
predecessors.
With
zany
myopia,
economists
like
to
claim
that
the
deeper
cause
of
every
thing
is
economic. Delightfully, there seems no
marketplace explanation for jogging. True, jogging
is
cheap, but then not jogging is
cheaper. And the scant and skimpy equipment which
jogging
demands must make it a
marketer’s least favored form of
recreation.
(336)
2
Fear of Dearth
（
2
）
Some
scout-
masterish
philosophers
argue
that
the
appeal
of
jogging
and
other
body-maintenance
programs
is
the
discipline
they
afford.
We
live
in
a
world
in
which
individuals have fewer and fewer
obligations. The workweek has shrunk. Weekend
worship is
less compulsory. Technology
gives us more free time. Satisfactorily filling
free time requires
imagination and
effort. Freedom is a wide and risky river, it can
drown the person who does
not
know
how
to
swim
across
it.
The
more
obligations
one
takes
on,
the
more
time
one
occupies,
the
less
threat
freedom
poses.
Jogging
can
become
an
instant
obligation.
For
a
portion of his day, the jogger is not
his own man, he is obedient to a regimen he
accepted.
Theologists may
take the argument one step farther. It is our
modern irreligion, our lack
of
confidence
in
any
hereafter,
that
makes
us
anxious
to
stretch
our
mortal
stay
as
long
as
possible.
We run, as the saying goes, for our lives, hounded
by the suspicion that these are the
only lives we are likely to enjoy.
1
All
of
these
theorists
seem
to
me
more
or
less
right.
As
the
growth
of
cults
and
charismatic religions
and the resurgence of enthusiasm for the military
draft suggest, we do
crave
commitment.
And
who
can
doubt,
watching
so
many
middle-aged
and
older
persons
torturing
themselves
in
the
name
of
fitness,
that
we
are
unreconciled
to
death,
more
so
perhaps than any generation in modern
memory?
But I have a hunch
there’s a further explanation of our obsession
with exercise. I suspect
that what
motivates us even more than a fear of death is a
fear of dearth. Our era is the first to
anticipate the eventual depletion of
all natural resources. We see wilderness
shrinking, rivers
losing
their
capacity
to
sustain
life;
the
air,
even
the
stratosphere,
being
loaded
with
potentially deadly junk. We see the
irreplaceable being squandered, and in the depths
of our
consciousness
we are
fearful
that we are creating an
uninhabitable would. We feel
more or
less helpless and yet, at the same
time, desirous to protect what resources we can.
We recycle
soda bottles and restore old
buildings and protect our nearest natural
resource
—
our physical
health
—
in the
almost superstitious hope that such small gestures
will help save an earth that
we are
blighting. Jogging becomes a sort of penance for
our sins of gluttony, greed, and waste.
Like a hairshirt or a bed of nails, the
more one hates it, the more virtuous it makes one
feel.
That is
why we jog. Why I jog is to win at tennis.
(433)
3
In Amy's Eyes
（
1
）
James Webb
Instead of
certainties, my generation has treated its
children to endless debates and
doubts.
How will they judge us?
On the dresser
in Amy' S empty bedroom was a music box with
Snoopy on the lid, a gift
when she was
four or five. She had outgrown it years before and
yet could never bear to part
with it.
It connected her to simpler days.
I
picked it up the evening after she departed for
college. Her bedroom haunted me with its
silence,
its
unaccustomed
tidiness,
with
the
odd
souvenirs
from
a
childhood
that
was
now
history.
But it was the music box that caught my eye. I
opened it and the plaintive song played
automatically, surprising me. I
remembered, tears filling my eyes, the small child
holding the
box before she went to
sleep. When I saw that she had placed my Marine
Corps ribbons from
Vietnam inside, I
wept like a fool.
I had not seen the
ribbons in ten years. When Amy was small, she wore
them to school,
picking out one or a
few to match a jacket or a sweater. It perplexed
her mother and caused
her teacher to
think I was a militarist at a time when virulent
antimilitarism was
de rigueur.
But even at five she could read inside
my heart. She had conceived a way to show her
loyalty
on an issue that was drowning
me in pain.
At
a
time
when
right
and
wrong
had
canceled
each
other
out,
when
the
country
was
in
chaos and I was
struggling with the wreckage of my life, my
daughter was my friend. At three,
she
comforted
me,
asking
the
right
questions
when
I
learned
that
my
closest
friend
in
law
school had died. At
five, she tried to take care of me when, badly
shaken by the suicide of a
young
veteran, I retreated to a remote campsite. At ten,
as her class cheered the return of our
hostages from Iran, she lectured them
on the difficult homecoming of our Vietnam
veterans.
Amy' s childhood years have
formed her view of the world, but like so many
compatriots,
2
her life echoed with the turmoil of her
elders. Amy has been treated to a view that
government
is corrupt and unfair. This
was fed by continuous debates over civil rights,
the Vietnam war,
Watergate and the
Iran-contra affair.
(394)
4
In Amy's Eyes
（
2
）
James Webb
Amy
grew
up
listening
to
the
disagreements
of
her
parents,
both
before
and
after
their
divorce. She learned
what it meant to be a
who had
celebrated the drug culture tell her
dealers started wearing beepers to
class. She knows that the generation that flaunted
sexual
freedom is queasy now, what with
abortion so common among teenagers and the
illegitimacy
rate triple that of 20
years ago.
The greatest legacy of the
babyboom generation's early adulthood has been
that it asked all
the right questions
but resolved nothing. Raised by parents whose
sacrifices during the Great
Depression
and World War II purchased for us the luxury of
being able to question, we all
understood the standards from which
some of us were choosing to deviate.
But riven by disagreement, we have
encouraged our children to believe that there are
no
touchstones,
no
true
answers,
no
commitments
worthy
of
sacrifice.
That
there
are
no
firm
principles: That for every cause there
is a countercause. That for every reason to fight
there is
a reason to run. That for
every yin there is a yang.
How
will
our
children
react
to
this
philosophical
quagmire?
My
bet
is
that
they
will
surprise us with
their
stability, that they will perhaps be
slower to
make commitments, but
more serious when they do.
Someone who has bounced between two
parents will not marry with the thought that
can always get a divorce if it doesn't
work.
of political policies and
recreational activities that were rather
innocently begun will be more
careful
to consider the implications of new seductions at
the outset. In the end, just as my tiny
daughter eased my personal turmoil
years ago, she and her contemporaries may become
the
arbiters of the generation that
spawned them.
Thinking of these things
as I sat in the quiet of her bed-room, listening
to the yellow music
box that still
reminds me of the adoration in Amy's eyes, I
understood another truth: we, the
members of a creative, sometimes
absurd, always narcissistic postwar generation,
will soon
receive a judgment. Whatever
it is, our children have earned the right to make
it.
(382)
5
You next computer
By Brad Stone
One
hundred
nineteen
hours,
41
minutes
and
16
seconds.
That’s
the
amount
of
time
Adam
Rappoport,
a
high-school
senior
in
Philadelphia,
has
spent
talking
into
his
silver
version LG phone sin
ce he
got it as a gift last Chanukah. That’s not even
the full extent of his
habit.
He
also
spends
countless
additional
hours
using
his
phone’s
Internet
connection
to
check sports scores, download new
ringtones (at a buck a piece) and send short
messages to
his
friends’
phones,
even
in
the
middle
of
class.
“I
know
the
touch
-tone
pad
on
the
phone
3
better than I know a
key-
board,” he says. “I’m a phone guy.”
(104)
In some European airport, Peter
Hiltunen, a
computer-sales executive
from Finland, is
waiting
fo
r another flight…. To pass the time,
he downloads the sports magazine
Riento!
to
his
mobile phone. For $$2, publisher
Sendandsee gives him eight
pages
of pictures and text
about
sporting events and athletes…
(48)
…
PalmOne is
among the firms racing to trot out the full-
featured computerlike phones that
the
industry dubs “smartphones”. Hawkins’s newest
product, the sleek, pocket
-size Treo
600,
has
a
tiny
key-board,
a
built-in
digital
camera
and
slots
for
added
memory.
Other
device
makers
have
introduced
their
own
unique
versions
of
the
smartphone.
Nokia’s
N
-Gage,
launched
last fall, with a new version to hit stores this
month, plays videogames. Motorola’s
upcoming MPx has a nifty
“dual
-
hings” design: the
handset opens in one direction and looks
like a regular phone, but it also flips
open along another axis and looks like an email
device,
with
the
expanded
phone
keypad
serving
as
a
small
QWERTY
keyboard.
There
are
also
smart-
phones on the way with video cameras, GPS antennas
and access to local Wi-fi hotspots,
the
superfast wireless networks often found in
offices, airports and local cafes. There’s not yet
a phone that doubles as an electric
toothbrush, but that can’t be far away.
(159)
6
Person of the
Year
Nancy Gibbs
Sept.11
delivered both a shock and a surprise - the
attack, and our response to it - and we
can argue forever over which mattered
more. There has been so much talk of the goodness
that erupted that day that we forget
how unprepared we were for it. We did not expect
much
from a generation that had spent
its middle age examining all the ways it failed to
measure up
to the one that had come
before - all fat, no muscle, less a beacon to the
world than a bully,
drunk on blessings
taken for granted.
It was tempting to
say that Sept. 11 changed all that, just as it is
tempting to say that every
hero needs a
villain, and goodness needs evil as its grinding
stone. But try looking a widow in
the
eye and talking about all the good that has come
of this. It may not be a coincidence, but
neither is it a partnership: good does
not need evil, we owe no debt to demons, and the
attack
did
not
make
us
better.
It
was
an
occasion
to
discover
what
we
already
were.
the
purpose of
all this,
find out if America today is
as strong as when we fought for our independence
or when we
fought
for
ourselves as a Union to
end slavery
or as
strong as
our fathers and grandfathers
who
fought
to
rid
the
world
of
Nazism.
The
terrorists,
he
argues,
were
counting
on
our
cowardice. They've learned a lot about
us since then. And so have we.
For
leading
that
lesson,
for
having
more
faith
in
us
than
we
had
in
ourselves,
for
being
brave
when
required
and
rude
where
appropriate
and
tender
without
being
trite,
for
not
sleeping
and
not
quitting
and
not
quitting
and
not
shrinking
from
the
pain
all
around
him,
Rudy
Giuliani, Mayor of the World, is TIME' s2001
Person of the Year.
(336)
(From
Time,
December31, 2001/January 7, 2002)
4