1705007210 ● accoutrements（此字通常用复数形式）：配备。新的“配备”是些什么东西，下文有说明。

1705007211

1705007212 ● Change is the only stimulus：变化是唯一的刺激。这句话他是常常喜欢对学生们说的。他退休以后为怕精神颓唐，力求改变生活方式与生活环境（新的“配备”），以“改变”作为刺激自己的方法。

1705007213

1705007214 He took up the study of Japanese; he took up engraving and lettering (designed a new bookplate, designed a gravestone for his dead wife); he began to grow Persian melons under glass; he took up mycology, and mycophagy as well, sending his fidgety housekeeper off into shrill protests as he flirted with death by eating mushrooms gathered in cow pastures and on golf links. He abandoned chess for bridge, and two evenings a week played a cutthroat game with Miss Blossom Duveen, the bursar’s blond secretary, as his partner and as his opponents Mr. Street, the logician, and Mr. Street’s hopelessly scatterbrained wife.

1705007215

1705007216 ● took up the study of Japanese：开始研究日文。

1705007217

1705007218 ● engraving：镌刻（一种艺术）。lettering：刻美术字。

1705007219

1705007220 ● bookplate：藏书凭单。西洋藏书家，喜欢印一种凭单，粘贴在书的内封里。单上有图案画，并有“EX LIBRIS so-and-so”（某某之藏书）等字样。这位教授既然学了镌刻之术，便替自己设计（designed）了一种新的藏书凭单。gravestone：墓碑。他的太太已故，此处顺便提一笔。

1705007221

1705007222 ● grow（此处为及物动词）：培育。under glass：在花房（greenhouse）里种波斯瓜。

1705007223

1705007224 ● mycology：研究蕈菇这类东西的学问。这种学问，研究研究倒也无所谓，可是他吃起野蕈来了。mycophagy：普通字典中可能不载此字。此字源自希腊，myco原义是“蕈”，phagy原义是“吃”，两者连起来，就成“吃蕈”。

1705007225

1705007226 ● sending…off into protests：使（某人）提抗议。（send one crazy是英文成语：使某人发疯。）他那管家婆，原来就容易激动（fidgety），看见他从放牛场（pastures）和高尔夫球场（golf links）上找野蕈来吃，觉得这是在跟生命开玩笑（flirted with death：和死神调情），不由得尖声地大叫：使不得。

1705007227

1705007228 ● bridge：桥牌。原来下象棋的，现在改为桥牌。cutthroat（形容词）：竞争激烈的，谁也不肯饶谁的。（American College Dictionary引有cutthroat competition这样一个成语）。

1705007229

1705007230 ● bursar：（大学的）出纳主任。blond：金发的。这位秘书小姐是教授打桥牌的partner。Mr. Street和Miss Blossom Duveen一样，都是with的宾语。可是as his partner放在Duveen的后面，as his opponents（对手方）放在Mr. Street的前面，这样句法就不呆板。

1705007231

1705007232 ● logician：逻辑学家（逻辑教授）。hopelessly scatterbrained：心神不集中到不可救药的程度。这两个字一用，他们每星期两次牌局的情形，也稍为提到一点了。

1705007233

1705007234 But the radical thing about his new life was the house he had built for himself in the spring semester of his last year at the college. It was a house of tomorrow—cantilevered, half glass—six miles out on the prairies that confronted the mountain range in whose foothills lay Adams, the town where the college was. The house, though small and narrow, was long, and it looked like a ship, for there was a deck that went all the way around it; from certain points Dr. Bohrmann could see Pikes Peak, a hundred and fifty miles away, and from every point he could watch the multiform weather: there dark rain, here blinding sunshine, yonder a sulphurous dust storm, haze on the summit of one peak, a pillow of cloud concealing a second, hyaline light on the glacier of a third. The house amazed that nondescript, stick-in-the-mud Western town, which from the day it was founded, had been putting up the worst eyesores it could think of. Whoever on earth would have dreamed that the professor, absent-minded and old, riding a bicycle, wearing oldfangled gaiters and an Old World cape, would make such an angular nest for himself and drastically paint it bright pink? The incongruity between the man and his habitat could not possibly have been greater.

1705007235

1705007236 ● 上面这许多改变，还不算特别。根本（radical）改变的是他造了一所新房子。

1705007237

1705007238 ● a house of tomorrow：设计非常新颖的房子。cantilevered：这是建筑学上的名词。cantilever是“悬臂梁”，墙上横伸出来的梁，一头悬空。和两头有靠的正梁（beam）不同。他这座房子，可能是只用悬臂梁，不用正梁的。half glass：一半是玻璃。这两点都是新式建筑的特点。

1705007239

1705007240 ● prairies：大草原。他的房子造在大草原上，离镇六英里。mountain range：山脉。foothills：山脉下面的丘陵。他们的大学所在地，名Adams镇，镇倚山而建。

1705007241

1705007242 ● deck：甲板。that went all the way around it：房子的样子像船，周围有甲板，人可以在上面散步。went有“伸张”之意；around it=around the house。

1705007243

1705007244 ● Pikes Peak：Rocky Mountains（后面要讲到）的高峰之一。在“甲板”上散步，从某几处远望，可见高峰矗立。可是无论从那一点望出去，四时昼夜天气之变幻，尽收眼底（multiform：形状有多种的）。那边黑沉沉的在下雨；这边太阳亮得叫人睁不开眼睛，再远一点（yonder）是尘土飞扬，黄而且热，同硫磺相仿（sulphurous）；某一个山峰顶上是暖暖雾气；巨云一朵（pillow是枕头，好譬喻）把另一个山头遮掩住了；再有一个山峰上是冰河一片，发出玻璃样的光（hyaline light）。

1705007245

1705007246 ● 镇上的人（town）看了这座奇怪的房子大为惊奇。原来他们那个处在美国西部的镇，落后而不随时代前进，好像是插在泥里一样（stick-in-the-mud），外表也是非驴非马的难看（nondescript）。eyesores：看了使人眼睛不舒服的东西。镇上的人能够想到有多难看的房子，就造（putting up）多难看的。

1705007247

1705007248 ● 这样一个教授，怎么会造这样一座奇形怪状的房子（angular nest），而且更过激地把它漆成明亮的粉红色呢？（drastically：激烈地。）

1705007249

1705007250 ● 这一句里面还把教授的服饰，顺便描写了一下。他是骑脚踏车的，腿上扎了老式的裹腿（oldfangled gaiters），身上披了一种旧式披风（cape）。Old World原指旧世界（东半球），这种披风该是欧洲人的服饰，美国人很少穿的。披风裹腿都是骑脚踏车时候的装束。

1705007251

1705007252 ● habitat：住地。这样一个老派的老人，住这样一座新派的房子，其不调和（incongruity）已达极点（不可能有更不调和的东西了）。

1705007253

1705007254 Imagine this character, with his silver beard, wearing a mussed green tweed suit, those gaiters, a stiff-collared shirt, a Tyrolian hat, sitting in a black sling chair on the front deck of this gleaming, youthful house, drinking ginger beer out of an earthenware mug and looking through binoculars at eagles and the weather. Or look at him pottering in his pretty Oriental garden, shading himself with the kind of giant black bumbershoot one associates with hotel doormen in a pouring rain. No matter where you placed him in that house, he simply would not match. It was the joke of Adams, but a good-natured one, for Dr. Bohrmann was the pet of the town.

1705007255

1705007256 ● this character：这个人，这个“角色”。character：行为乖僻的人。（He is a character：他是个怪人。）

1705007257

1705007258 ● mussed（美国俗话）：皱而脏的；邋遢的。tweed：毛糙的花呢。suit：西装。those gaiters：上面所说的裹腿。stiff-collared：硬领。Tyrolian：大约是指奥地利Tyrol地方的。这种帽子，以及种种打扮，都是旧式的。

1705007259

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