我静静地躺在地上，沉浸在满足和渴望之中。这时，隐约一阵声响从松林间传来。最初，我猜想是远处农庄的鸡鸣或犬吠。但这声音有规律地传入我的耳朵，最终我明白了，那是山谷公路上一个赶路人在高声歌唱。他唱歌不是为了显示他歌声的婉转，而是为了表露出内心的美好情感。他底气十足，声音嘹亮，歌声围着山梁，飘荡在草木茂盛的幽谷间。以前在城市里，我也曾在深夜时，听过人们路过的声音，记得其中一些人也唱歌，有个人把风笛吹得婉转动听。还有一次，我静静地躺在床上，在数小时的沉静后，不知是一辆马车还是大车忽然驶过，绝尘而去，隆隆的声音不绝于耳。懂得浪漫的人才会在黑夜里独自外出，出于兴奋好奇，我们常常去猜测他们的行踪。但这种浪漫有着双重含义：一方面是指这个欢快的夜行人，由于体内酒精燃烧的作用，在黑夜里引吭高歌；另一方面，是关于我自己，结结实实地把自己裹在睡袋里，在星空下四五千英尺的地方，我独自在松林里惬意地抽着烟。
有一种相随，比孤独来得平静，如果正确地理解，那就是孤独创造完美。懂得浪漫的人会在黑夜里独自外出，在夜里引吭高歌。
林湖重游
Once More to the Lake
[美国]埃尔文·布鲁克斯·怀特/Elwyn Brooks White
One summer, along about 1904, my father rented a camp on a lake in Maine and took us all there for the month of August. We all got ringworm from some kittens and had to rub Pond' s Extract on our arms and legs night and morning, and my father rolled over in a canoe with all his clothes on; but outside of that the vacation was a success and from then on none of us ever thought there was any place in the world like that lake in Maine. We returned summer after summer — always on August 1st for one month. I have since become a salt-water man, but sometimes in summer there are days when the restlessness, of the tides and the fearful cold of the sea water and the incessant wind which blow across the afternoon and into the evening make me wish for the placidity of a lake in the woods. A few weeks ago this feeling got so strong I bought myself a couple of bass hooks and a spinner and returned to the lake where we used to go, for a week' s fishing and to revisit old haunts.
I took along my son, who had never had any fresh water up his nose and who had seen lily pads only from train windows. On the journey over to the lake I began to wonder what it would be like. I wondered how time would have marred this unique, this holy spot — the coves and streams, the hills that the sun set behind, the camps and the paths behind the camps. I was sure the tarred road would have found it out and I wondered in what other ways it would be desolated. It is strange how much you can remember about places like that once you allow your mind to return into the grooves which lead back, you remember one thing, and that suddenly reminds you of another thing. I guess I remembered clearest of all the early mornings, when the lake was cool and motionless, remembered how the bedroom smelled of the lumber it was made of and of the wet woods whose scent entered through the screen. The partitions in the camp were thin and did not extend clear to the top of the rooms, and as I was always the first up I would dress softly so as not to wake the others, and slide out into the sweet outdoors and start out the canoe, keeping close along the shore in the long shadows of the pines. I remember being very careful never to rub my paddle against the gunwale for fear of disturbing the stillness of the cathedral.
The lake had never been what you would call a wild lake. There were cottages sprinkled around the shores, and it was in farming country although the shore of the lake were quite heavily wooded. Some of the cottages were owned by nearby farmers, and you would live at the shore and eat your meals at the farmhouse. That' s what our family did. But although it wasn' t wild, it was a fairly large and undisturbed lake and there were places in it which, to a child at least, seemed infinitely remote and primeval.
I was right about the tar: it led to within half a mile of the shore. But when I got back there, with my boy, and we settled into a camp near a farmhouse and into the kind of summertime I had known, I could tell that it was going to be pretty much the same as it had been before — I knew it, lying in bed the first morning, smelling the bedroom, and hearing the boy sneak quietly out and go off along the shore in a boat. I began to sustain the illusion that he was I, and therefore, by simple transposition, that I was my father. This sensation persisted, kept cropping up all the time we were there. It was not an entirely new feeing, but in this setting it grew much stronger. I seemed to be living a dual existence. I would be in the middle of some simple act, I would be picking up a bait box or laying down a table fork, or I would be saying something, and suddenly it would be not I but my father who was saying the words or making the gesture. It gave me a creepy sensation.