I have told how in my muddled5 and wounded phase I had snatched at the dull project of improving my languages, and under the cloak of that spying a little upon German military arrangements. Now my mind set such petty romanticism on one side. It had recovered the strength to look on the whole of life and on my place in it. It could resume the ideas that our storm of passion had for a time thrust into the background of my thoughts. I took up again all those broad generalizations6 that had arisen out of my experiences in South Africa, and which I had been not so much fitting into as forcing into the formulæ of English politics; I recalled my disillusionment with British Imperialism7, my vague but elaborating apprehension9 of a profound conflict between enterprise and labor8, a profound conflict between the life of the farm and the life of trade and finance and wholesale10 production, as being something far truer to realities than any of the issues of party and patriotism11 upon which men were spending their lives. So far as this rivalry12 between England and Germany, which so obsessed13 the imagination of Europe, went, I found that any faith I may have had in its importance had simply fallen out of my mind. As a danger to civilization, as a conceivable source of destruction and delay, it was a monstrous14 business enough, but that in the long run it mattered how or when they fought and which won I did not believe. In the development of mankind the thing was of far less importance than the struggle for Flanders or the wars of France and Burgundy. I was already coming to see Europe as no more than the dog's-eared corner of the page of history,—like most Europeans I had thought it the page—and my recovering mind was eager and open to see the world beyond and form some conception of the greater forces that lay outside our insularities. What is humanity as a whole doing? What is the nature of the world process of which I am a part? Why should I drift from cradle to grave wearing the blinkers of my time and nationality, a mere15 denizen16 of Christendom, accepting its beliefs, its stale antagonisms17, its unreal purposes? That perhaps had been tolerable while I was still an accepted member of the little world into which my lot had fallen, but now that I was thrust out its absurdity18 glared. For me the alternative was to be a world-man or no man. I had seemed sinking towards the latter: now I faced about and began to make myself what I still seek to make myself to-day, a son of mankind, a conscious part of that web of effort and perplexity which wraps about our globe....
All this I say came into my mind as if it were a part of that recovery of my mind from its first passionate19 abjection20. And it seemed a simple and obvious part of the same conversion21 to realize that I was ignorant and narrow, and that, too, in a world which is suffering like a beast in a slime pit by reason of ignorance and narrowness of outlook, and that it was my manifest work and purpose to make myself less ignorant and to see and learn with all my being. It came to me as a clear duty that I should get out of the land of hotels and leisure and go seeking the facts and clues to human inter-relationship nearer the earthy roots of things, and I turned my thoughts to India and China, those vast enigmas22 of human accumulation, in a spirit extraordinarily23 like that of some mystic who receives a call. I felt I must go to Asia and from Asia perhaps round the world. But it was the greatness of Asia commanded me. I wanted to see the East not as a spectacle but as the simmering vat24 in which the greater destiny of man brews25 and brews....
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1 drawn | |
v.拖,拉,拔出;adj.憔悴的,紧张的 | |
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2 metaphors | |
隐喻( metaphor的名词复数 ) | |
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3 infinitely | |
adv.无限地,无穷地 | |
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4 tangle | |
n.纠缠;缠结;混乱;v.(使)缠绕;变乱 | |
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5 muddled | |
adj.混乱的;糊涂的;头脑昏昏然的v.弄乱,弄糟( muddle的过去式);使糊涂;对付,混日子 | |
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6 generalizations | |
一般化( generalization的名词复数 ); 普通化; 归纳; 概论 | |
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7 imperialism | |
n.帝国主义,帝国主义政策 | |
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8 labor | |
n.劳动,努力,工作,劳工;分娩;vi.劳动,努力,苦干;vt.详细分析;麻烦 | |
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9 apprehension | |
n.理解,领悟;逮捕,拘捕;忧虑 | |
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10 wholesale | |
n.批发;adv.以批发方式;vt.批发,成批出售 | |
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11 patriotism | |
n.爱国精神,爱国心,爱国主义 | |
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12 rivalry | |
n.竞争,竞赛,对抗 | |
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13 obsessed | |
adj.心神不宁的,鬼迷心窍的,沉迷的 | |
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14 monstrous | |
adj.巨大的;恐怖的;可耻的,丢脸的 | |
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15 mere | |
adj.纯粹的;仅仅,只不过 | |
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16 denizen | |
n.居民,外籍居民 | |
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17 antagonisms | |
对抗,敌对( antagonism的名词复数 ) | |
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18 absurdity | |
n.荒谬,愚蠢;谬论 | |
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19 passionate | |
adj.热情的,热烈的,激昂的,易动情的,易怒的,性情暴躁的 | |
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20 abjection | |
n. 卑鄙, 落魄 | |
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21 conversion | |
n.转化,转换,转变 | |
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22 enigmas | |
n.难于理解的问题、人、物、情况等,奥秘( enigma的名词复数 ) | |
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23 extraordinarily | |
adv.格外地;极端地 | |
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24 vat | |
n.(=value added tax)增值税,大桶 | |
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25 brews | |
n.(尤指某地酿造的)啤酒( brew的名词复数 );酿造物的种类;(茶)一次的冲泡量;(不同思想、环境、事件的)交融v.调制( brew的第三人称单数 );酝酿;沏(茶);煮(咖啡) | |
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