Donde Adán,
el personaje de la biblia, primer hombre sobre la tierra, explica su incómoda
situación ante Eva. El hombre empieza
así: “tal vez debería recordar que es muy joven, una niña. Es todo interés,
afán, vivacidad. El mundo para ella es encanto…”
Adán
reconoce que empieza a simpatizar con ella y que es realmente bella.
Desde Extracts from Adam's Diary (Extractos del diario de Adán), de Mark Twain, cuento publicado en 1904.
Paragraphs
… Perhaps I
ought to remember that she is very young, a mere girl and make allowances. She
is all interest, eagerness, vivacity, the world is to her a charm, a wonder, a
mystery, a joy; she can't speak for delight when she finds a new flower, she
must pet it and caress it and smell it and talk to it, and pour out endearing
names upon it. And she is color-mad: brown rocks, yellow sand, gray moss, green
foliage, blue sky; the pearl of the dawn, the purple shadows on the mountains,
the golden islands floating in crimson seas at sunset, the pallid moon sailing
through the shredded cloud-rack, the star-jewels glittering in the wastes of
space—none of them is of any practical value, so far as I can see, but because
they have color and majesty, that is enough for her, and she loses her mind
over them. If she could quiet down and keep still a couple minutes at a time,
it would be a reposeful spectacle. In that case I think I could enjoy looking
at her; indeed I am sure I could, for I am coming to realize that she is a
quite remarkably attractive creature—attractive, slender, trim, rounded,
shapely, lively, graceful; and once when she was standing marble-white and
sun-drenched on a boulder, with her young head tilted back and her hand shading
her eyes, watching the flight of a bird in the sky, I recognized that she was
beautiful.
MONDAY NOON.—If
there is anything on the planet that she is not interested in it is not in my
list. There are animals that I am indifferent to, but it is not so with her.
She has no discrimination, she takes to all of them, she thinks they are all
treasures, every new one is welcome.
When the mighty
brontosaurus came striding into camp, she regarded it as an acquisition, I
considered it a calamity; that is a good sample of the lack of harmony that
prevails in our views of things. She wanted to domesticate it, I wanted to make
it a present of the homestead and move out. She believed it could be tamed by
kind treatment and would be a good pet; I said a pet twenty-one feet high and
eighty-four feet long would be no proper thing to have about the place,
because, even with the best intentions and without meaning any harm, it could
sit down on the house and crush it, for any one could see by the look of its
eye that it was absent-minded.
Still, her heart
was set upon having that monster, and she couldn't give it up. She thought we
could start a dairy with it, and wanted me to help
milk it; but I wouldn't; it was too risky. The sex wasn't right, and we hadn't
any ladder anyway. Then she wanted to ride it, and look at the scenery. Thirty
or forty feet of its tail was lying on the ground, like a fallen tree, and she
thought she could climb it, but she was mistaken; when she got to the steep
place it was too slick and down she came, and would have hurt herself but for
me.
Was she
satisfied now? No. Nothing ever satisfies her but demonstration; untested theories
are not in her line, and she won't have them. It is the right spirit, I concede
it; it attracts me; I feel the influence of it; if I were with her more I think
I should take it up myself. Well, she had one theory remaining about this
colossus: she thought that if we could tame it and make him friendly we could
stand in the river and use him for a bridge. It turned out that he was already
plenty tame enough—at least as far as she was concerned—so she tried her
theory, but it failed: every time she got him properly placed in the river and
went ashore to cross over him, he came out and followed her around like a pet
mountain. Like the other animals. They all do that… (Extracts from Adam's Diary, by Mark
Twain.)Tapa de Extracts from Adam´s Diary
Vocabulario
Dairy: used to
refer to cows that are used for producing milk, rather than meat, or to foods
that are made from milk, such as cream, butter, and cheese.
A place where
milk and cream are stored and processed.
Recursos
Extracts
from Adam's Diary,
audiobook. Un audio para practicar nuestro inglés escuchando
los escritos de Mark Twain.
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