How readily our thoughts swarm7 upon a new object, lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly8, and then leave it . . . If that mark was made by a nail, it can’t have been for a picture, it must have been for a miniature — the miniature of a lady with white powdered curls, powder-dusted cheeks, and lips like red carnations9. A fraud of course, for the people who had this house before us would have chosen pictures in that way — an old picture for an old room. That is the sort of people they were — very interesting people, and I think of them so often, in such queer places, because one will never see them again, never know what happened next. They wanted to leave this house because they wanted to change their style of furniture, so he said, and he was in process of saying that in his opinion art should have ideas behind it when we were torn asunder10, as one is torn from the old lady about to pour out tea and the young man about to hit the tennis ball in the back garden of the suburban11 villa12 as one rushes past in the train.
But as for that mark, I’m not sure about it; I don’t believe it was made by a nail after all; it’s too big, too round, for that. I might get up, but if I got up and looked at it, ten to one I shouldn’t be able to say for certain; because once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. Oh! dear me, the mystery of life; The inaccuracy of thought! The ignorance of humanity! To show how very little control of our possessions we have — what an accidental affair this living is after all our civilization — let me just count over a few of the things lost in one lifetime, beginning, for that seems always the most mysterious of losses — what cat would gnaw13, what rat would nibble14 — three pale blue canisters of book-binding tools? Then there were the bird cages, the iron hoops15, the steel skates, the Queen Anne coal-scuttle, the bagatelle16 board, the hand organ — all gone, and jewels, too. Opals and emeralds, they lie about the roots of turnips17. What a scraping paring affair it is to be sure! The wonder is that I’ve any clothes on my back, that I sit surrounded by solid furniture at this moment. Why, if one wants to compare life to anything, one must liken it to being blown through the Tube at fifty miles an hour — landing at the other end without a single hairpin18 in one’s hair! Shot out at the feet of God entirely19 naked! Tumbling head over heels in the asphodel meadows like brown paper parcels pitched down a shoot in the post office! With one’s hair flying back like the tail of a race-horse. Yes, that seems to express the rapidity of life, the perpetual waste and repair; all so casual, all so haphazard20 . . .
But after life. The slow pulling down of thick green stalks so that the cup of the flower, as it turns over, deluges21 one with purple and red light. Why, after all, should one not be born there as one is born here, helpless, speechless, unable to focus one’s eyesight, groping at the roots of the grass, at the toes of the Giants? As for saying which are trees, and which are men and women, or whether there are such things, that one won’t be in a condition to do for fifty years or so. There will be nothing but spaces of light and dark, intersected by thick stalks, and rather higher up perhaps, rose-shaped blots22 of an indistinct colour — dim pinks and blues23 — which will, as time goes on, become more definite, become — I don’t know what . . .
And yet that mark on the wall is not a hole at all. It may even be caused by some round black substance, such as a small rose leaf, left over from the summer, and I, not being a very vigilant24 housekeeper25 — look at the dust on the mantelpiece, for example, the dust which, so they say, buried Troy three times over, only fragments of pots utterly26 refusing annihilation, as one can believe.
The tree outside the window taps very gently on the pane27 . . . I want to think quietly, calmly, spaciously29, never to be interrupted, never to have to rise from my chair, to slip easily from one thing to another, without any sense of hostility30, or obstacle. I want to sink deeper and deeper, away from the surface, with its hard separate facts. To steady myself, let me catch hold of the first idea that passes . . . Shakespeare . . . Well, he will do as well as another. A man who sat himself solidly in an arm-chair, and looked into the fire, so — A shower of ideas fell perpetually from some very high Heaven down through his mind. He leant his forehead on his hand, and people, looking in through the open door — for this scene is supposed to take place on a summer’s evening — But how dull this is, this historical fiction! It doesn’t interest me at all. I wish I could hit upon a pleasant track of thought, a track indirectly31 reflecting credit upon myself, for those are the pleasantest thoughts, and very frequent even in the minds of modest mouse-coloured people, who believe genuinely that they dislike to hear their own praises. They are not thoughts directly praising oneself; that is the beauty of them; they are thoughts like this:
“And then I came into the room. They were discussing botany. I said how I’d seen a flower growing on a dust heap on the site of an old house in Kingsway. The seed, I said, must have been sown in the reign32 of Charles the First. What flowers grew in the reign of Charles the First?” I asked —(but, I don’t remember the answer). Tall flowers with purple tassels33 to them perhaps. And so it goes on. All the time I’m dressing34 up the figure of myself in my own mind, lovingly, stealthily, not openly adoring it, for if I did that, I should catch myself out, and stretch my hand at once for a book in self-protection. Indeed, it is curious how instinctively35 one protects the image of oneself from idolatry or any other handling that could make it ridiculous, or too unlike the original to be believed in any longer. Or is it not so very curious after all? It is a matter of great importance. Suppose the looking glass smashes, the image disappears, and the romantic figure with the green of forest depths all about it is there no longer, but only that shell of a person which is seen by other people — what an airless, shallow, bald, prominent world it becomes! A world not to be lived in. As we face each other in omnibuses and underground railways we are looking into the mirror that accounts for the vagueness, the gleam of glassiness, in our eyes. And the novelists in future will realize more and more the importance of these reflections, for of course there is not one reflection but an almost infinite number; those are the depths they will explore, those the phantoms36 they will pursue, leaving the description of reality more and more out of their stories, taking a knowledge of it for granted, as the Greeks did and Shakespeare perhaps — but these generalizations38 are very worthless. The military sound of the word is enough. It recalls leading articles, cabinet ministers — a whole class of things indeed which as a child one thought the thing itself, the standard thing, the real thing, from which one could not depart save at the risk of nameless damnation. Generalizations bring back somehow Sunday in London, Sunday afternoon walks, Sunday luncheons39, and also ways of speaking of the dead, clothes, and habits — like the habit of sitting all together in one room until a certain hour, although nobody liked it. There was a rule for everything. The rule for tablecloths40 at that particular period was that they should be made of tapestry41 with little yellow compartments42 marked upon them, such as you may see in photographs of the carpets in the corridors of the royal palaces. Tablecloths of a different kind were not real tablecloths. How shocking, and yet how wonderful it was to discover that these real things, Sunday luncheons, Sunday walks, country houses, and tablecloths were not entirely real, were indeed half phantoms, and the damnation which visited the disbeliever in them was only a sense of illegitimate freedom. What now takes the place of those things I wonder, those real standard things? Men perhaps, should you be a woman; the masculine point of view which governs our lives, which sets the standard, which establishes Whitaker’s Table of Precedency, which has become, I suppose, since the war half a phantom37 to many men and women, which soon — one may hope, will be laughed into the dustbin where the phantoms go, the mahogany sideboards and the Landseer prints, Gods and Devils, Hell and so forth43, leaving us all with an intoxicating44 sense of illegitimate freedom — if freedom exists . . .
In certain lights that mark on the wall seems actually to project from the wall. Nor is it entirely circular. I cannot be sure, but it seems to cast a perceptible shadow, suggesting that if I ran my finger down that strip of the wall it would, at a certain point, mount and descend45 a small tumulus, a smooth tumulus like those barrows on the South Downs which are, they say, either tombs or camps. Of the two I should prefer them to be tombs, desiring melancholy46 like most English people, and finding it natural at the end of a walk to think of the bones stretched beneath the turf . . . There must be some book about it. Some antiquary must have dug up those bones and given them a name . . . What sort of a man is an antiquary, I wonder? Retired47 Colonels for the most part, I daresay, leading parties of aged48 labourers to the top here, examining clods of earth and stone, and getting into correspondence with the neighbouring clergy49, which, being opened at breakfast time, gives them a feeling of importance, and the comparison of arrow-heads necessitates50 cross-country journeys to the county towns, an agreeable necessity both to them and to their elderly wives, who wish to make plum jam or to clean out the study, and have every reason for keeping that great question of the camp or the tomb in perpetual suspension, while the Colonel himself feels agreeably philosophic51 in accumulating evidence on both sides of the question. It is true that he does finally incline to believe in the camp; and, being opposed, indites52 a pamphlet which he is about to read at the quarterly meeting of the local society when a stroke lays him low, and his last conscious thoughts are not of wife or child, but of the camp and that arrowhead there, which is now in the case at the local museum, together with the foot of a Chinese murderess, a handful of Elizabethan nails, a great many Tudor clay pipes, a piece of Roman pottery53, and the wine-glass that Nelson drank out of — proving I really don’t know what.
No, no, nothing is proved, nothing is known. And if I were to get up at this very moment and ascertain54 that the mark on the wall is really — what shall we say? — the head of a gigantic old nail, driven in two hundred years ago, which has now, owing to the patient attrition of many generations of housemaids, revealed its head above the coat of paint, and is taking its first view of modern life in the sight of a white-walled fire-lit room, what should I gain? — Knowledge? Matter for further speculation55? I can think sitting still as well as standing56 up. And what is knowledge? What are our learned men save the descendants of witches and hermits57 who crouched58 in caves and in woods brewing59 herbs, interrogating60 shrew-mice and writing down the language of the stars? And the less we honour them as our superstitions61 dwindle62 and our respect for beauty and health of mind increases . . . Yes, one could imagine a very pleasant world. A quiet, spacious28 world, with the flowers so red and blue in the open fields. A world without professors or specialists or house-keepers with the profiles of policemen, a world which one could slice with one’s thought as a fish slices the water with his fin2, grazing the stems of the water-lilies, hanging suspended over nests of white sea eggs . . . How peaceful it is drown here, rooted in the centre of the world and gazing up through the grey waters, with their sudden gleams of light, and their reflections — if it were not for Whitaker’s Almanack — if it were not for the Table of Precedency!
I must jump up and see for myself what that mark on the wall really is — a nail, a rose-leaf, a crack in the wood?
Here is nature once more at her old game of self-preservation. This train of thought, she perceives, is threatening mere64 waste of energy, even some collision with reality, for who will ever be able to lift a finger against Whitaker’s Table of Precedency? The Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor65; the Lord High Chancellor is followed by the Archbishop of York. Everybody follows somebody, such is the philosophy of Whitaker; and the great thing is to know who follows whom. Whitaker knows, and let that, so Nature counsels, comfort you, instead of enraging66 you; and if you can’t be comforted, if you must shatter this hour of peace, think of the mark on the wall.
I understand Nature’s game — her prompting to take action as a way of ending any thought that threatens to excite or to pain. Hence, I suppose, comes our slight contempt for men of action — men, we assume, who don’t think. Still, there’s no harm in putting a full stop to one’s disagreeable thoughts by looking at a mark on the wall.
Indeed, now that I have fixed67 my eyes upon it, I feel that I have grasped a plank68 in the sea; I feel a satisfying sense of reality which at once turns the two Archbishops and the Lord High Chancellor to the shadows of shades. Here is something definite, something real. Thus, waking from a midnight dream of horror, one hastily turns on the light and lies quiescent69, worshipping the chest of drawers, worshipping solidity, worshipping reality, worshipping the impersonal70 world which is a proof of some existence other than ours. That is what one wants to be sure of . . . Wood is a pleasant thing to think about. It comes from a tree; and trees grow, and we don’t know how they grow. For years and years they grow, without paying any attention to us, in meadows, in forests, and by the side of rivers — all things one likes to think about. The cows swish their tails beneath them on hot afternoons; they paint rivers so green that when a moorhen dives one expects to see its feathers all green when it comes up again. I like to think of the fish balanced against the stream like flags blown out; and of water-beetles slowly raiding domes71 of mud upon the bed of the river. I like to think of the tree itself:— first the close dry sensation of being wood; then the grinding of the storm; then the slow, delicious ooze72 of sap. I like to think of it, too, on winter’s nights standing in the empty field with all leaves close-furled, nothing tender exposed to the iron bullets of the moon, a naked mast upon an earth that goes tumbling, tumbling, all night long. The song of birds must sound very loud and strange in June; and how cold the feet of insects must feel upon it, as they make laborious73 progresses up the creases63 of the bark, or sun themselves upon the thin green awning74 of the leaves, and look straight in front of them with diamond-cut red eyes . . . One by one the fibres snap beneath the immense cold pressure of the earth, then the last storm comes and, falling, the highest branches drive deep into the ground again. Even so, life isn’t done with; there are a million patient, watchful75 lives still for a tree, all over the world, in bedrooms, in ships, on the pavement, lining76 rooms, where men and women sit after tea, smoking cigarettes. It is full of peaceful thoughts, happy thoughts, this tree. I should like to take each one separately — but something is getting in the way . . . Where was I? What has it all been about? A tree? A river? The Downs? Whitaker’s Almanack? The fields of asphodel? I can’t remember a thing. Everything’s moving, falling, slipping, vanishing . . . There is a vast upheaval77 of matter. Someone is standing over me and saying —
“I’m going out to buy a newspaper.”
“Yes?”
“Though it’s no good buying newspapers . . . Nothing ever happens. Curse this war; God damn this war! . . . All the same, I don’t see why we should have a snail78 on our wall.”
Ah, the mark on the wall! It was a snail.
The End
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1
chrysanthemums
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| n.菊花( chrysanthemum的名词复数 ) | |
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fin
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| n.鳍；(飞机的)安定翼 | |
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lodged
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| v.存放( lodge的过去式和过去分词 )；暂住；埋入；（权利、权威等）归属 | |
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crimson
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| n./adj.深(绯)红色(的)；vi.脸变绯红色 | |
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cavalcade
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| n.车队等的行列 | |
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knights
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| 骑士； （中古时代的）武士( knight的名词复数 )； 骑士； 爵士； （国际象棋中）马 | |
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swarm
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| n.(昆虫)等一大群；vi.成群飞舞；蜂拥而入 | |
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feverishly
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| adv. 兴奋地 | |
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carnations
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| n.麝香石竹，康乃馨( carnation的名词复数 ) | |
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asunder
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| adj.分离的，化为碎片 | |
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suburban
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| adj.城郊的，在郊区的 | |
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villa
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| n.别墅，城郊小屋 | |
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gnaw
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| v.不断地啃、咬；使苦恼，折磨 | |
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nibble
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| n.轻咬，啃；v.一点点地咬，慢慢啃，吹毛求疵 | |
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hoops
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| n.箍( hoop的名词复数 )；（篮球）篮圈；（旧时儿童玩的）大环子；（两端埋在地里的）小铁弓 | |
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bagatelle
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| n.琐事；小曲儿 | |
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turnips
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| 芜青( turnip的名词复数 )； 芜菁块根； 芜菁甘蓝块根； 怀表 | |
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hairpin
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| n.簪,束发夹，夹发针 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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haphazard
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| adj.无计划的，随意的，杂乱无章的 | |
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deluges
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| v.使淹没( deluge的第三人称单数 )；淹没；被洪水般涌来的事物所淹没；穷于应付 | |
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blots
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| 污渍( blot的名词复数 )； 墨水渍； 错事； 污点 | |
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blues
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| n.抑郁，沮丧；布鲁斯音乐 | |
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vigilant
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| adj.警觉的，警戒的，警惕的 | |
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housekeeper
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| n.管理家务的主妇，女管家 | |
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utterly
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| adv.完全地，绝对地 | |
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pane
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| n.窗格玻璃，长方块 | |
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spacious
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| adj.广阔的，宽敞的 | |
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spaciously
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| adv.宽敞地；广博地 | |
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hostility
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| n.敌对，敌意；抵制［pl.］交战，战争 | |
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indirectly
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| adv.间接地，不直接了当地 | |
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reign
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| n.统治时期，统治，支配，盛行；v.占优势 | |
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tassels
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| n.穗( tassel的名词复数 )；流苏状物；（植物的）穗；玉蜀黍的穗状雄花v.抽穗， （玉米）长穗须( tassel的第三人称单数 )；使抽穗， （为了使作物茁壮生长）摘去穗状雄花；用流苏装饰 | |
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dressing
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| n.(食物)调料；包扎伤口的用品，敷料 | |
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instinctively
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| adv.本能地 | |
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phantoms
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| n.鬼怪，幽灵( phantom的名词复数 ) | |
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phantom
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| n.幻影，虚位，幽灵；adj.错觉的，幻影的，幽灵的 | |
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generalizations
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| 一般化( generalization的名词复数 )； 普通化； 归纳； 概论 | |
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luncheons
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| n.午餐，午宴( luncheon的名词复数 ) | |
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tablecloths
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| n.桌布，台布( tablecloth的名词复数 ) | |
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tapestry
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| n.挂毯，丰富多采的画面 | |
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compartments
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| n.间隔( compartment的名词复数 )；（列车车厢的）隔间；（家具或设备等的）分隔间；隔层 | |
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43
forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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intoxicating
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| a. 醉人的,使人兴奋的 | |
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45
descend
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| vt./vi.传下来，下来，下降 | |
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46
melancholy
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| n.忧郁，愁思；adj.令人感伤（沮丧）的，忧郁的 | |
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retired
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| adj.隐退的，退休的，退役的 | |
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aged
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| adj.年老的，陈年的 | |
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clergy
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| n.[总称]牧师，神职人员 | |
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50
necessitates
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| 使…成为必要，需要( necessitate的第三人称单数 ) | |
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51
philosophic
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| adj.哲学的，贤明的 | |
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52
indites
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| vt.写（文章，信等）创作，赋诗，创作（indite的第三人称单数形式） | |
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53
pottery
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| n.陶器，陶器场 | |
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54
ascertain
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| vt.发现，确定，查明，弄清 | |
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55
speculation
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| n.思索，沉思；猜测；投机 | |
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56
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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hermits
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| （尤指早期基督教的）隐居修道士，隐士，遁世者( hermit的名词复数 ) | |
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crouched
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| v.屈膝，蹲伏( crouch的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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brewing
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| n. 酿造, 一次酿造的量 动词brew的现在分词形式 | |
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interrogating
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| n.询问技术v.询问( interrogate的现在分词 )；审问；（在计算机或其他机器上）查询 | |
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superstitions
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| 迷信，迷信行为( superstition的名词复数 ) | |
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dwindle
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| v.逐渐变小（或减少） | |
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63
creases
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| （使…）起折痕，弄皱( crease的第三人称单数 )； （皮肤）皱起，使起皱纹 | |
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mere
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| adj.纯粹的；仅仅，只不过 | |
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chancellor
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| n.(英)大臣；法官；(德、奥)总理；大学校长 | |
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66
enraging
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| 使暴怒( enrage的现在分词 ) | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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68
plank
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| n.板条，木板，政策要点，政纲条目 | |
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69
quiescent
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| adj.静止的，不活动的，寂静的 | |
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70
impersonal
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| adj.无个人感情的，与个人无关的，非人称的 | |
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71
domes
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| n.圆屋顶( dome的名词复数 )；像圆屋顶一样的东西；圆顶体育场 | |
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72
ooze
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| n.软泥，渗出物；vi.渗出，泄漏；vt.慢慢渗出，流露 | |
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73
laborious
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| adj.吃力的，努力的，不流畅 | |
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74
awning
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| n.遮阳篷；雨篷 | |
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75
watchful
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| adj.注意的，警惕的 | |
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76
lining
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| n.衬里，衬料 | |
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77
upheaval
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| n.胀起，(地壳)的隆起；剧变，动乱 | |
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78
snail
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| n.蜗牛 | |
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