64 Places and People

名称：64 Places and People
内容简介：
晨读英语美文 文化百科
[00:01.56]Where you are dropped,
[00:04.33]as the saying is, is who you are,
[00:07.09]at least in a certain limited sense.
[00:09.85] If you are dropped in Bitlis but
[00:13.43]are soon taken to New York,
[00:14.72]Bitlis is less who you are than New York is.
[00:18.25]But the place you knew first is
[00:21.22]at least a large part of who you are.
[00:23.70]Places make people. They very definitely do,
[00:28.03]almost physically.
[00:29.82]After the World, after being anywhere at all,
[00:33.20]my place was Fresno, and as far as I am concerned
[00:37.46]it was the very best possible place for me to be—
[00:40.92]and for this reason: that's where I was dropped.
[00:45.07]The minute we met, that was it.
[00:47.27] We belonged to each other.
[00:49.45] Forever. It was a fact. I was born there.
[00:53.57] I wasn't born in Bitlis, Marseilles, London, New York,
[00:57.79]or anywhere else. I was born in Fresno.
[01:00.55]It was my place. I loved it. I hated it.
[01:04.17] But had I been born in Paris,
[01:06.39]I would have loved Paris, and I would have hated it.
[01:09.59]Fresno had great early appeal for me.
[01:12.27]It had a fine smell of dust, of the desert,
[01:15.67] of rocks baking in the sun,
[01:17.66]of sand with cactus growing out of it,
[01:20.87]of water flowing in rivers and ditches,
[01:23.76] of orchards and vineyards set out
[01:26.66] in great geometric patterns,
[01:28.73]of leaf and blossom and fruit.
[01:30.66]It also had all of the smells of rot,
[01:33.37]decay, and ferment: the great heaps of grape pulp
[01:38.27]and skin at the wineries sent a smell all through the town
[01:42.43] if there was a little wind stirring.
[01:43.95]There were also the magnificent smells in the house
[01:47.92]in which one did one's early time:
[01:50.42] the very walls themselves,
[01:52.40]the people who lived in the house,
[01:54.23]and the things they cooked or baked:
[01:56.77]Armenian bread, for instance,
[01:58.76] in the three popular forms prepared by the Saroyan family:
[02:03.54]the round, wafer-thin flat bread,
[02:06.56]the oval loaf bread only an inch or two thick,
[02:09.76]and the diamond-shaped little loaves of butter bread.
[02:13.12]There was also always the smell of various green things,
[02:17.37]or growing things-parsley, mint, onions, bell peppers,
[02:21.80]tomatoes, cucumbers, and so on and so forth.
[02:25.98]All of these things were a part of the place,
[02:29.44]and very quickly a part of me.
[02:31.64]Fresno was my place, and my family was my place.