Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

Джек Лондон

Легко читаем по-английски

Профессор Дэррел Стэндинг, осужденный за убийство, отбывает пожизненное заключение в тюрьме Сан-Квентин, где надзиратели пытают заключенных с помощью «смирительной рубашки». Чтобы выжить, Стэндинг находит способ усилием воли погружать себя в транс и покидать свое физическое тело. Каждое из подобных «путешествий» позволяет ему странствовать по самым отдаленным эпохам и странам. Книга содержит грамматический комментарий и словарь, облегчающие чтение.

Предназначается для продолжающих изучать английский язык высшей ступени (уровень 4 – UpperIntermediate).

Джек Лондон / Jack London

Странник по звездам / The Star-Rover

© Матвеев С. А., адаптация текста, коммент. и словарь, 2020

© ООО «Издательство АСТ», 2020

Chapter I

All my life I have had an awareness of other times and places. I have been aware of other persons in me.

Our dreams are grotesquely compounded of the things we know.

My reader, as a child, you dreamed you flew through the air; you were vexed by crawling spiders; you heard other voices, saw other faces, and gazed upon sunrises and sunsets other than you know now.

Very well. These child glimpses are of other-worldness[1 - are of other-worldness – принадлежат к другому миру], of other-lifeness, of things that you had never seen in this particular world of your particular life. Then whence? Other lives? Other worlds?

Truly, shades of the prison close about us[2 - close about us – смыкаются над нами], and we all forget.

And yet, when we were new-born we did remember other times and places. Yes; and we endured the torment and torture of nightmare fears of dim and monstrous things. We new-born infants, without experience, were born with fear, with memory of fear; and memory is experience.

As for myself, even at the beginning of my life, I knew that I had been a star-rover. Yes, I, whose lips had never lisped the word “king,” remembered that I had once been the son of a king.

More—I remembered that once I had been a slave and a son of a slave, and worn an iron collar round my neck.

Still more. When I was three, and four, and five years of age, I was not yet I[3 - I was not yet I – я не был самим собой]. I was a mere becoming, a flux of spirit. Silly, isn’t it? But remember, my reader, remember, please, that I have thought much on these matters.