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  3. Americans have a sense of space, not of place. Go to an American home outside the city, and almost the first thing you do is dri

Americans have a sense of space, not of place. Go to an American home outside the city, and almost the first thing you do is dri

admin2012-05-24  38
问题     Americans have a sense of space, not of place. Go to an American home outside the city, and almost the first thing you do is drift toward the picture window. How curious that the first compliment you pay your host inside his house is to say how lovely it is outside his house! He is pleased that you should admire his vistas. The distant horizon is not merely a line separating earth from sky; it is a symbol of the future. The American is not rooted in his place, however lovely: his eyes are drawn by the expanding space to a point on the horizon, which is his future.
    By contrast, consider traditional Chinese homes. Blank walls surround it. Step behind the spirit wall and you are in a courtyard with perhaps a very small garden around a corner. Once inside his private compound, you are wrapped in calm beauty, an ordered world of buildings, rock and decorative vegetation. But you have no distant view: nowhere does space open out before you. The Chinese is rooted in his place. When he has to leave, it is not for the promised land on the terrestrial horizon, but for another world altogether along the vertical, religious axis of imagination. The majority of the Chinese people are engaged in the "root" industry of producing food, and they do not leave their country when it is in danger, being tied to their land.
    Homesickness is a recurrent theme in Chinese poetry. An American reader of translated Chinese poems may well be taken aback — even put off— by the frequency, as well as the sentimentality, of the lament for home. To understand the strength of this sentiment, we need to know that the Chinese desire for stability and rootedness in place springs from a history full of threat of war and natural disasters. By contrast, Americans move, for the most part, willingly. Their homesickness for their hometowns is really a longing for a childhood to which they cannot return; in the meantime the future beckons, and the future is "out there", in open space. When we criticize American rootlessness, we tend to forget that it is a result of ideals we admire, namely social mobility and optimism about the future. When we admire Chinese rootedness, we forget that the word "place" means both a location in space and a position in society: to be tied to a place is also to be bound to one’s station in life. Space symbolizes hope, place, achievement and stability.
For Americans, what does the distant horizon symbolize?
选项 A、rootedness
B、rootlessness
C、the future
D、the horizon
答案C
解析
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