英語聽書《白鯨記》第887期

Yet was this half-horrible stolidity in him, involving, too, as it appeared, an all-ramifying heartlessness;— yet was it oddly dashed at times, with an old, crutch-like, antediluvian, wheezing humorousness, not unstreaked now and then with a certain grizzled wittiness; such as might have served to pass the time during the midnight watch on the bearded forecastle of Noah's ark. Was it that this old carpenter had been a life-long wanderer, whose much rolling, to and fro, not only had gathered no moss; but what is more, had rubbed off whatever small outward clingings might have originally pertained to him? He was a stript abstract; an unfractioned integral; uncompromised as a new-born babe; living without premeditated reference to this world or the next. You might almost say, that this strange uncompromisedness in him involved a sort of unintelligence; for in his numerous trades, he did not seem to work so much by reason or by instinct, or simply because he had been tutored to it, or by any intermixture of all these, even or uneven; but merely by a kind of deaf and dumb, spontaneous literal process. He was a pure manipulator; his brain, if he had ever had one, must have early oozed along into the muscles of his fingers.

不過，正是他這種有點(diǎn)可怕的遲鈍，就不免使他象個(gè)十分不近人情的人——然而，說也奇怪，他有時(shí)也很健談，能夠顯出一種古樸的、轉(zhuǎn)彎抹角的詼諧突梯，時(shí)不時(shí)說出一種半新半舊的俏皮話來；這俏皮話，在挪亞方舟上那個(gè)古老的船頭樓值夜時(shí)，倒是可以解解悶的。這個(gè)老木匠是不是個(gè)終身的飄泊者，這樣顛沛飄泊得不但連苔蘚都沒有找到，而且把他本來那點(diǎn)外貌也給磨掉了呢？他可真是個(gè)徹底的心不在焉的人；一個(gè)沒有零數(shù)的整體；象一個(gè)初生嬰兒似的冥頑；既不考慮到今生，也不估計(jì)到來世地生活著。你簡直會(huì)認(rèn)為，他這種奇特的冥頑就不免是一種愚鈍；因?yàn)樵谒母鞣N工作中，他并不象是憑理智，或憑本能干的，也不完全是因?yàn)樗葸^師傅，或者是理智，本能，拜師傅都各有一點(diǎn)；而完全是憑不聞不問、不加思索的依樣畫葫蘆的方法。他是個(gè)純粹的手工匠；他的頭腦（如果說他有頭腦的話），一定是早就順著脈絡(luò)通到他的手指頭了。

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