Clocks(时钟)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 38.5KB 11 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Clocks

by Jerome K. Jerome

Clocks

There are two kinds of clocks. There is the clock that is always

wrong, and that knows it is wrong, and glories in it; and there is the clock

that is always right--except when you rely upon it, and then it is more

wrong than you would think a clock _could_ be in a civilized country.

I remember a clock of this latter type, that we had in the house when I

was a boy, routing us all up at three o'clock one winter's morning. We had

finished breakfast at ten minutes to four, and I got to school a little after

five, and sat down on the step outside and cried, because I thought the

world had come to an end; everything was so death-like!

The man who can live in the same house with one of these clocks, and

not endanger his chance of heaven about once a month by standing up and

telling it what he thinks of it, is either a dangerous rival to that old

established firm, Job, or else he does not know enough bad language to

make it worth his while to start saying anything at all.

The great dream of its life is to lure you on into trying to catch a train

by it. For weeks and weeks it will keep the most perfect time. If there

were any difference in time between that clock and the sun, you would be

convinced it was the sun, not the clock, that wanted seeing to. You feel

that if that clock happened to get a quarter of a second fast, or the eighth

of an instant slow, it would break its heart and die.

It is in this spirit of child-like faith in its integrity that, one morning,

you gather your family around you in the passage, kiss your children, and

afterward wipe your jammy mouth, poke your finger in the baby's eye,

promise not to forget to order the coals, wave at last fond adieu with the

umbrella, and depart for the railway-station.

I never have been quite able to decide, myself, which is the more

irritating to run two miles at the top of your speed, and then to find, when

you reach the station, that you are three-quarters of an hour too early; or to

stroll along leisurely the whole way, and dawdle about outside the

booking-office, talking to some local idiot, and then to swagger carelessly

on to the platform, just in time to see the train go out!

As for the other class of clocks--the common or always-wrong clocks-

-they are harmless enough. You wind them up at the proper intervals,

Clocks

and once or twice a week you put them right and "regulate" them, as you

call it (and you might just as well try to "regulate" a London tom-cat).

But you do all this, not from any selfish motives, but from a sense of duty

to the clock itself. You want to feel that, whatever may happen, you have

done the right thing by it, and that no blame can attach to you.

So far as looking to it for any return is concerned, that you never

dream of doing, and consequently you are not disappointed. You ask

what the time is, and the girl replies:

"Well, the clock in the dining-room says a quarter past two."

But you are not deceived by this. You know that, as a matter of fact,

it must be somewhere between nine and ten in the evening; and,

remembering that you noticed, as a curious circumstance, that the clock

was only forty minutes past four, hours ago, you mildly admire its energies

and resources, and wonder how it does it.

I myself possess a clock that for complicated unconventionality and

light-hearted independence, could, I should think, give points to anything

yet discovered in the chronometrical line. As a mere time-piece, it leaves

much to be desired; but, considered as a self-acting conundrum, it is full of

interest and variety.

I heard of a man once who had a clock that he used to say was of no

good to any one except himself, because he was the only man who

understood it. He said it was an excellent clock, and one that you could

thoroughly depend upon; but you wanted to know it--to have studied its

system. An outsider might be easily misled by it.

"For instance," he would say, "when it strikes fifteen, and the hands

point to twenty minutes past eleven, I know it is a quarter to eight."

His acquaintanceship with that clock must certainly have given him an

advantage over the cursory observer!

But the great charm about my clock is its reliable uncertainty. It

works on no method whatever; it is a pure emotionalist. One day it will

be quite frolicsome, and gain three hours in the course of the morning, and

think nothing of it; and the next day it will wish it were dead, and be

hardly able to drag itself along, and lose two hours out of every four, and

stop altogether in the afternoon, too miserable to do anything; and then,

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

Clocks1ClocksbyJeromeK.JeromeClocks2Therearetwokindsofclocks.Thereistheclockthatisalwayswrong,andthatknowsitiswrong,andgloriesinit;andthereistheclockthatisalwaysright--exceptwhenyourelyuponit,andthenitismorewrongthanyouwouldthinkaclock_could_beinacivilizedcountry.Irememberaclockofthislattertype,that...

展开>> 收起<<

Clocks(时钟).pdf

共11页,预览3页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

Clocks(时钟)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: