时间:2018-11-30 作者:英语课 分类:英语励志美文精华


英语课

A Ball to Roll Around


By Robert Allman


I lost my sight when I was 4 years old by falling off a boxcar in a freight yard in Atlantic City, New Jersey 1, and landing on my head. Now, I am 32. I can vaguely 2 remember the brightness of sunshine and what color red is. It would be wonderful to see again. But a calamity 3 can do strange things to people.


It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life so, as I do, if I hadn’t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don’t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me more appreciate what I had left.


Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid, but I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me—oh, a potential to live you might call it—which I didn’t see. And they made me want to fight it out with blindness.


The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn’t been able to do that, I would have collapsed 4 and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life. When I say believe in myself, I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar 5 staircase alone. That is part of it, but I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person; that somewhere in the sweeping 6, intricate, pattern of people, there is a special place where I can make myself fit. It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things.


When I was a youngster, once a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me, and I was hurt.


“I can’t use this,” I said.


“Take it with you, “ he urged me, “and roll it around.”


The words stuck in my head: “Roll it around, roll it around.” By rolling the ball, I could listen where it went. This gave me an idea—how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia’s Overbrook School for the Blind, I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it groundball.


All my life, I have set ahead of me a series of goals, and then tried to reach them one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach, because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway, but on the average, I made progress.


I believe I made progress more readily because of a pattern of life shaped by certain values. I find it easier to live with myself if I try to be honest. I find strength in the friendship and interdependence of people. I would be blind, indeed, without my sighted friends. And very humbly 7, I say that I have found purpose and comfort in a mortal’s ambition toward godliness.


Perhaps a man without sight is blinded less by the importance of material things than other men are. All I know is that a belief in the higher existence of a nobility for men to strive for has been an inspiration that has helped me more than anything else to hold my life together.



1 jersey
n.运动衫
  • He wears a cotton jersey when he plays football.他穿运动衫踢足球。
  • They were dressed alike in blue jersey and knickers.他们穿着一致,都是蓝色的运动衫和灯笼短裤。
2 vaguely
adv.含糊地,暖昧地
  • He had talked vaguely of going to work abroad.他含糊其词地说了到国外工作的事。
  • He looked vaguely before him with unseeing eyes.他迷迷糊糊的望着前面,对一切都视而不见。
3 calamity
n.灾害,祸患,不幸事件
  • Even a greater natural calamity cannot daunt us. 再大的自然灾害也压不垮我们。
  • The attack on Pearl Harbor was a crushing calamity.偷袭珍珠港(对美军来说)是一场毁灭性的灾难。
4 collapsed
adj.倒塌的
  • Jack collapsed in agony on the floor. 杰克十分痛苦地瘫倒在地板上。
  • The roof collapsed under the weight of snow. 房顶在雪的重压下突然坍塌下来。
5 unfamiliar
adj.陌生的,不熟悉的
  • I am unfamiliar with the place and the people here.我在这儿人地生疏。
  • The man seemed unfamiliar to me.这人很面生。
6 sweeping
adj.范围广大的,一扫无遗的
  • The citizens voted for sweeping reforms.公民投票支持全面的改革。
  • Can you hear the wind sweeping through the branches?你能听到风掠过树枝的声音吗?
7 humbly
adv. 恭顺地,谦卑地
  • We humbly beg Your Majesty to show mercy. 我们恳请陛下发发慈悲。
  • "You must be right, Sir,'said John humbly. “你一定是对的,先生,”约翰恭顺地说道。
学英语单词
absidia spinosa
adjust error
ALIMD
ambiguous expression
american national standards institute standards
Anaphalis virgata
Angelico, Fra
apex of lung
apl environment
aufhauser
bistable latch
books sort
boulder stone
breakwall
butyl parahydroxybenzoate
cachectin
Chardjui
club member
CMJN
complanatum
conveniences
cu.
Dampal, Tk.
DEPL
Desmiophyllum
dishonorary
display delayed
double-endeds
dropside trailer
dust-ladden air
erasability of storage
Euclidean postulate
exchange anisotropy
false edge
festino
Finlepsin
forty weight
full-day
glucocanescein
glycolysis
gun ballistics
herta
Holcocerus vicarius
hot sodium hydroxide etching test
hot-water heating load
Hurwitz's generalization of binomial theorem
idiopathic neuralgia
inside micrometer gage
inter-country
inverted convertor
irremediable defect
johnson sirleaf
Lagenidiaceae
Las Varas
lechers
Linea glutealis posterior
logarithmic mean temperature degree(lmtd)
magnitude of reaction
main bedroom
make use
mechanical balance type
medium-width
microcontrolled seeder
mispricing
necking phenomena
non-periodic function
oranges
outer most dimension
Oxford English Dictionary
oxysulfide sulfoxide
packing paper
path dependency
piston velocity
potential biological fertility
ramsteins
re-engrave
roll hatch cover
row-galley
sex party
shuffle-board
signal quality detection
siss
speed clutch control handle
SQDG
take back one's words
take service in
tension-ridden
tetraneuris acauliss
theme park
three-dimensional motion
to smile
tsarships
uncle tomming
unwelcomes
us governments
v.32
Vaccinium uliginosum
varnish stick
vitaminoid
Volosovo
well-tie
wolfe i.