It can hardly happen - to the extent of fifty words except in the case of a child: its memory-tablet is not lumbered with impressions, and the actual language can have graving-room there, and preserve the language a year or two, but a grown person s memory-tablet is a palimpsest, with hardly a bare space upon which to engrave a phrase.It must be a very rare thing that a whole page gets so sharply printed upon a man s mind, by a single reading, that it will stay long enough to turn up some time or other and be mistaken by him for his own.No doubt we are constantly littering our literature with disconnected sentences borrowed from books at some unremembered time and now imagined to be our own, but that is about the most we can do.In 1866 I read Dr.Holmes s poems, in the Sandwich Islands.A year and a half later I stole his dictation, without knowing it , and used it to dedicate my“Innocents Abroad”with.Then years afterwards I was talking with Dr.Holmes about it .
He was not an ignorant ass - no, not he: he was not a collection of decayed human turnips,like your“Plagiarism Court” ; and so when I said,“I know now where I stole it , but whom did you steal it from,”he said, “I don t remember; I only know I stole it from somebody, because I have never originated anything altogether myself, nor met anybody who had .”
To think of those solemn donkeys breaking a little child s heart with their ignorant rubbish about plagiarism !I couldn t sleep for blaspheming about it last night.Why, their whole lives, their whole histories, all their learning, all their thoughts, all their opinions were one solid ruck of plagiarism, and they didn t know it and never suspected it.A gang of dull and hoary pirates piously setting themselves the task of disciplining and purifying a kitten that they think they ve caught filching a chop ! Oh, dam -But you finish it , dear, I am running short of vocabulary today .
Ever lovingly your friend.
Mark.
Ⅰ.About the Author
Clemens, Samuel Langhorne (pen name: Mark Twain (1835 1910) ) is on nearly everyone s list of all-time great American authors.Also a humorist , and lecturer.Twain was raised in Hannibal, Missouri and as a young man held a series of jobs which included work as a printer s apprentice, a Mississippi riverboat pilot , and a newspaperman in Nevada and San Francisco.He moved gradually from journalism to travel writing and then to fiction, aided by the success of his 1869 travel memoir The Innocents Abroad.His humorous tales of human nature, especially The Adventures of Tom Sawyer ( 1876 ) and Huckleberry Finn (1885 ) , remain standard texts in high school and college literature classes.In his own day Twain was a tremendously popular figure and a celebrated public speaker who toured widely.Other Twain classics include Life on the Mississippi (1883) and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur s Court (1889) and the short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867).Twain began as a writer of light humorous verse; he ended as a grim,almost profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and acts of killing committed by mankind.At mid-career , with Huckleberry Finn, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism in a way almost unrivaled in world literature .
Ⅱ.Words and Expressions
affectionate a.having or showing fond feelings or affection ; loving and tender 充满或表示喜欢的, 感情的。
subsist v.to maintain life; live 维持生活;生活。
halo n.the aura of majesty or glory surrounding a person, a thing, or an event that is regarded with reverence,awe, or sentiment 光辉, 光环。
penetration n .the capacity or action of understanding; insight 洞察力。
competency n.the ability to do something well.