(完整版)课文原文Unit3TheRiteofSpring.docVIP

PAGE PAGE / 2 Unit 3 The Rite of Spring Arthur Miller I have never understood why we keep a garden and why over 36 years ago when I bought my first house in the country, I started digging up a patch for vegetables before doing anything else. When you think how easy and cheap, relatively, it is to buy a bunch of carrots or beets, why raise them? And root crops especially are hard to tell apart, when store-bought, from our own. There is a human instinct at work here, a kind of back-breaking make-believe that has no reality. Besides, I dont particularly like eating vegetables. Id much rather eat something juicy and fat. Like hot dogs. Now, if you could raise hot dogs outside your window, youd really have something you could justify without a seconds hesitation. As it is, though, I cannot deny that when April comes I find myself going out to lean on the fence and look at that miserable plot of land, resolving with all my rational powers not to plant it again. But inevitably a morning arrives when, just as I am awakening, a scent wafts through the window, something like earth-as-air, a scent that seems to come up from the very center of this planet. And the sun means business, suddenly, and has a different, deeper yellow in its beams on the carpet. The birds begin screaming hysterically, thinking what I am thinking — thweorms are deliciously worming their way through the melting soil. It is not only pleasure sending me back to stare at that plot of soil, it is really conflict. The question is the same each year — what method should we use? The last few years we put 36- inch-wide black plastic between the rows, and it worked perfectly, keeping the soil moist in dry times and weed-free. But black plastic looks so industrial, so unromantic, that I have gradually moved over to hay mulch. We cut a lot of hay and, as it rots, it does improve the soils Composition. Besides, it looks lovely, and comes to us free. Keeping a garden makes you aware of how delicate,