before adam(亚当之前)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 0 0 370.84KB 104 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

Before Adam

Jack London

1906

Before Adam

"These are our ancestors, and their history is our history. Remember

that as surely as we one day swung down out of the trees and walked

upright, just as surely, on a far earlier day, did we crawl up out of the sea

and achieve our first adventure on land."

Before Adam

CHAPTER I

Pictures! Pictures! Pictures! Often, before I learned, did I wonder

whence came the multitudes of pictures that thronged my dreams; for they

were pictures the like of which I had never seen in real wake-a-day life.

They tormented my childhood, making of my dreams a procession of

nightmares and a little later convincing me that I was different from my

kind, a creature unnatural and accursed.

In my days only did I attain any measure of happiness. My nights

marked the reign of fear--and such fear! I make bold to state that no man

of all the men who walk the earth with me ever suffer fear of like kind and

degree. For my fear is the fear of long ago, the fear that was rampant in

the Younger World, and in the youth of the Younger World. In short, the

fear that reigned supreme in that period known as the Mid-Pleistocene.

What do I mean? I see explanation is necessary before I can tell you of

the substance of my dreams. Otherwise, little could you know of the

meaning of the things I know so well. As I write this, all the beings and

happenings of that other world rise up before me in vast phantasmagoria,

and I know that to you they would be rhymeless and reasonless.

What to you the friendship of Lop-Ear, the warm lure of the Swift One,

the lust and the atavism of Red-Eye? A screaming incoherence and no

more. And a screaming incoherence, likewise, the doings of the Fire

People and the Tree People, and the gibbering councils of the horde. For

you know not the peace of the cool caves in the cliffs, the circus of the

drinking-places at the end of the day. You have never felt the bite of the

morning wind in the tree-tops, nor is the taste of young bark sweet in your

mouth.

It would be better, I dare say, for you to make your approach, as I

made mine, through my childhood. As a boy I was very like other boys--

in my waking hours. It was in my sleep that I was different. From my

earliest recollection my sleep was a period of terror. Rarely were my

dreams tinctured with happiness. As a rule, they were stuffed with fear--

and with a fear so strange and alien that it had no ponderable quality. No

fear that I experienced in my waking life resembled the fear that possessed

Before Adam

me in my sleep. It was of a quality and kind that transcended all my

experiences.

For instance, I was a city boy, a city child, rather, to whom the country

was an unexplored domain. Yet I never dreamed of cities; nor did a

house ever occur in any of my dreams. Nor, for that matter, did any of

my human kind ever break through the wall of my sleep. I, who had seen

trees only in parks and illustrated books, wandered in my sleep through

interminable forests. And further, these dream trees were not a mere blur

on my vision. They were sharp and distinct. I was on terms of

practised intimacy with them. I saw every branch and twig; I saw and

knew every different leaf.

Well do I remember the first time in my waking life that I saw an oak

tree. As I looked at the leaves and branches and gnarls, it came to me

with distressing vividness that I had seen that same kind of tree many and

countless times n my sleep. So I was not surprised, still later on in my

life, to recognize instantly, the first time I saw them, trees such as the

spruce, the yew, the birch, and the laurel. I had seen them all before, and

was seeing them even then, every night, in my sleep.

This, as you have already discerned, violates the first law of dreaming,

namely, that in one's dreams one sees only what he has seen in his waking

life, or combinations of the things he has seen in his waking life. But all

my dreams violated this law. In my dreams I never saw ANYTHING of

which I had knowledge in my waking life. My dream life and my

waking life were lives apart, with not one thing in common save myself. I

was the connecting link that somehow lived both lives.

Early in my childhood I learned that nuts came from the grocer, berries

from the fruit man; but before ever that knowledge was mine, in my

dreams I picked nuts from trees, or gathered them and ate them from the

ground underneath trees, and in the same way I ate berries from vines and

bushes. This was beyond any experience of mine.

I shall never forget the first time I saw blueberries served on the table.

I had never seen blueberries before, and yet, at the sight of them, there

leaped up in my mind memories of dreams wherein I had wandered

through swampy land eating my fill of them. My mother set before me a

Before Adam

dish of the berries. I filled my spoon, but before I raised it to my mouth I

knew just how they would taste. Nor was I disappointed. It was the

same tang that I had tasted a thousand times in my sleep.

Snakes? Long before I had heard of the existence of snakes, I was

tormented by them in my sleep. They lurked for me in the forest glades;

leaped up, striking, under my feet; squirmed off through the dry grass or

across naked patches of rock; or pursued me into the tree-tops, encircling

the trunks with their great shining bodies, driving me higher and higher or

farther and farther out on swaying and crackling branches, the ground a

dizzy distance beneath me. Snakes!--with their forked tongues, their beady

eyes and glittering scales, their hissing and their rattling--did I not already

know them far too well on that day of my first circus when I saw the

snake-charmer lift them up?

They were old friends of mine, enemies rather, that peopled my nights

with fear.

Ah, those endless forests, and their horror-haunted gloom! For what

eternities have I wandered through them, a timid, hunted creature, starting

at the least sound, frightened of my own shadow, keyed-up, ever alert and

vigilant, ready on the instant to dash away in mad flight for my life. For

I was the prey of all manner of fierce life that dwelt in the forest, and it

was in ecstasies of fear that I fled before the hunting monsters.

When I was five years old I went to my first circus. I came home

from it sick--but not from peanuts and pink lemonade. Let me tell you.

As we entered the animal tent, a hoarse roaring shook the air. I tore my

hand loose from my father's and dashed wildly back through the entrance.

I collided with people, fell down; and all the time I was screaming with

terror. My father caught me and soothed me. He pointed to the crowd

of people, all careless of the roaring, and cheered me with assurances of

safety.

Nevertheless, it was in fear and trembling, and with much

encouragement on his part, that I at last approached the lion's cage. Ah, I

knew him on the instant. The beast! The terrible one! And on my inner

vision flashed the memories of my dreams,--the midday sun shining on tall

grass, the wild bull grazing quietly, the sudden parting of the grass before

Before Adam

the swift rush of the tawny one, his leap to the bull's back, the crashing

and the bellowing, and the crunch crunch of bones; or again, the cool quiet

of the water-hole, the wild horse up to his knees and drinking softly, and

then the tawny one--always the tawny one!-- the leap, the screaming and

the splashing of the horse, and the crunch crunch of bones; and yet again,

the sombre twilight and the sad silence of the end of day, and then the

great full-throated roar, sudden, like a trump of doom, and swift upon it

the insane shrieking and chattering among the trees, and I, too, am

trembling with fear and am one of the many shrieking and chattering

among the trees.

At the sight of him, helpless, within the bars of his cage, I became

enraged. I gritted my teeth at him, danced up and down, screaming an

incoherent mockery and making antic faces. He responded, rushing

against the bars and roaring back at me his impotent wrath. Ah, he knew

me, too, and the sounds I made were the sounds of old time and

intelligible to him.

My parents were frightened. "The child is ill," said my mother. "He

is hysterical," said my father. I never told them, and they never knew.

Already had I developed reticence concerning this quality of mine, this

semi-disassociation of personality as I think I am justified in calling it.

I saw the snake-charmer, and no more of the circus did I see that night.

I was taken home, nervous and overwrought, sick with the invasion of my

real life by that other life of my dreams.

I have mentioned my reticence. Only once did I confide the

strangeness of it all to another. He was a boy--my chum; and we were

eight years old. From my dreams I reconstructed for him pictures of that

vanished world in which I do believe I once lived. I told him of the

terrors of that early time, of Lop-Ear and the pranks we played, of the

gibbering councils, and of the Fire People and their squatting places.

He laughed at me, and jeered, and told me tales of ghosts and of the

dead that walk at night. But mostly did he laugh at my feeble fancy. I

told him more, and he laughed the harder. I swore in all earnestness that

these things were so, and he began to look upon me queerly. Also, he

gave amazing garblings of my tales to our playmates, until all began to

Before Adam

look upon me queerly.

It was a bitter experience, but I learned my lesson. I was different

from my kind. I was abnormal with something they could not understand,

and the telling of which would cause only misunderstanding. When the

stories of ghosts and goblins went around, I kept quiet. I smiled grimly

to myself. I thought of my nights of fear, and knew that mine were the

real things--real as life itself, not attenuated vapors and surmised shadows.

For me no terrors resided in the thought of bugaboos and wicked ogres.

The fall through leafy branches and the dizzy heights; the snakes that

struck at me as I dodged and leaped away in chattering flight; the wild

dogs that hunted me across the open spaces to the timber--these were

terrors concrete and actual, happenings and not imaginings, things of the

living flesh and of sweat and blood. Ogres and bugaboos and I had been

happy bed-fellows, compared with these terrors that made their bed with

me throughout my childhood, and that still bed with me, now, as I write

this, full of years.

Before Adam

CHAPTER II

I have said that in my dreams I never saw a human being. Of this

fact I became aware very early, and felt poignantly the lack of my own

kind. As a very little child, even, I had a feeling, in the midst of the

horror of my dreaming, that if I could find but one man, only one human, I

should be saved from my dreaming, that I should be surrounded no more

by haunting terrors. This thought obsessed me every night of my life for

years--if only I could find that one human and be saved!

I must iterate that I had this thought in the midst of my dreaming, and I

take it as an evidence of the merging of my two personalities, as evidence

of a point of contact between the two disassociated parts of me. My dream

personality lived in the long ago, before ever man, as we know him, came

to be; and my other and wake-a-day personality projected itself, to the

extent of the knowledge of man's existence, into the substance of my

dreams.

Perhaps the psychologists of the book will find fault with my way of

using the phrase, "disassociation of personality." I know their use of it, yet

am compelled to use it in my own way in default of a better phrase. I take

shelter behind the inadequacy of the English language. And now to the

explanation of my use, or misuse, of the phrase.

It was not till I was a young man, at college, that I got any clew to the

significance of my dreams, and to the cause of them. Up to that time

they had been meaningless and without apparent causation. But at

college I discovered evolution and psychology, and learned the

explanation of various strange mental states and experiences. For

instance, there was the falling-through-space dream--the commonest

dream experience, one practically known, by first-hand experience, to all

men.

This, my professor told me, was a racial memory. It dated back to

our remote ancestors who lived in trees. With them, being tree-dwellers,

the liability of falling was an ever-present menace. Many lost their lives

that way; all of them experienced terrible falls, saving themselves by

clutching branches as they fell toward the ground.

Before Adam

Now a terrible fall, averted in such fashion, was productive of shock.

Such shock was productive of molecular changes in the cerebral cells.

These molecular changes were transmitted to the cerebral cells of progeny,

became, in short, racial memories. Thus, when you and I, asleep or dozing

off to sleep, fall through space and awake to sickening consciousness just

before we strike, we are merely remembering what happened to our

arboreal ancestors, and which has been stamped by cerebral changes into

the heredity of the race.

There is nothing strange in this, any more than there is anything

strange in an instinct. An instinct is merely a habit that is stamped into

the stuff of our heredity, that is all. It will be noted, in passing, that in

this falling dream which is so familiar to you and me and all of us, we

never strike bottom. To strike bottom would be destruction. Those of

our arboreal ancestors who struck bottom died forthwith. True, the shock

of their fall was communicated to the cerebral cells, but they died

immediately, before they could have progeny. You and I are descended

from those that did not strike bottom; that is why you and I, in our dreams,

never strike bottom.

And now we come to disassociation of personality. We never have

this sense of falling when we are wide awake. Our wake-a-day

personality has no experience of it. Then--and here the argument is

irresistible--it must be another and distinct personality that falls when we

are asleep, and that has had experience of such falling--that has, in short, a

memory of past-day race experiences, just as our wake-a-day personality

has a memory of our wake-a-day experiences.

It was at this stage in my reasoning that I began to see the light. And

quickly the light burst upon me with dazzling brightness, illuminating and

explaining all that had been weird and uncanny and unnaturally impossible

in my dream experiences. In my sleep it was not my wake-a-day

personality that took charge of me; it was another and distinct personality,

possessing a new and totally different fund of experiences, and, to the

point of my dreaming, possessing memories of those totally different

experiences.

What was this personality? When had it itself lived a wake-a-day life

Before Adam

on this planet in order to collect this fund of strange experiences? These

were questions that my dreams themselves answered. He lived in the

long ago, when the world was young, in that period that we call the Mid-

Pleistocene. He fell from the trees but did not strike bottom. He

gibbered with fear at the roaring of the lions. He was pursued by beasts

of prey, struck at by deadly snakes. He chattered with his kind in council,

and he received rough usage at the hands of the Fire People in the day that

he fled before them.

But, I hear you objecting, why is it that these racial memories are not

ours as well, seeing that we have a vague other-personality that falls

through space while we sleep?

And I may answer with another question. Why is a two-headed calf?

And my own answer to this is that it is a freak. And so I answer your

question. I have this other-personality and these complete racial

memories because I am a freak.

But let me be more explicit.

The commonest race memory we have is the falling-through-space

dream. This other-personality is very vague. About the only memory it

has is that of falling. But many of us have sharper, more distinct other-

personalities. Many of us have the flying dream, the pursuing-monster

dream, color dreams, suffocation dreams, and the reptile and vermin

dreams. In short, while this other-personality is vestigial in all of us, in

some of us it is almost obliterated, while in others of us it is more

pronounced. Some of us have stronger and completer race memories than

others.

It is all a question of varying degree of possession of the other-

personality. In myself, the degree of possession is enormous. My

other-personality is almost equal in power with my own personality. And

in this matter I am, as I said, a freak--a freak of heredity.

I do believe that it is the possession of this other-personality--but not

so strong a one as mine--that has in some few others given rise to belief in

personal reincarnation experiences. It is very plausible to such people, a

most convincing hypothesis. When they have visions of scenes they have

never seen in the flesh, memories of acts and events dating back in time,

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：

BeforeAdam1BeforeAdamJackLondon1906BeforeAdam2"Theseareourancestors,andtheirhistoryisourhistory.Rememberthatassurelyasweonedayswungdownoutofthetreesandwalkedupright,justassurely,onafarearlierday,didwecrawlupoutoftheseaandachieveourfirstadventureonland."BeforeAdam3CHAPTERIPictures!Pictures!Pictures!O...

展开>> 收起<<

before adam(亚当之前).pdf

共104页,预览21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！

before adam(亚当之前)

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: