by Robert G Allman
罗伯特·G·奥尔曼
I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty-two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what colour red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people.
4岁那年在大西洋城，我从货场一辆火车上摔下来，头先着地，于是双目失明。现在我已经32岁了。我还模糊地记得阳光是多么灿烂，红色是多么鲜艳。能恢复视觉固然好，但灾难也能对人产生奇妙的作用。
It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn' t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don' t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
有一天我突然想到，倘若我不是盲人，我或许不会变得像现在这样热爱生活。现在我相信生活，但我不能肯定如果自己是明眼人，会不会像现在这样深深地相信生活。这并不意味着我宁愿成为盲人，而只是意味着失去视力使我更加珍惜自己其他的能力。
Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me ——a potential to live, you might call it ——which I didn’t see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
我认为，生活要求人不断地自我调整以适应现实。人愈能及时地进行调整，他的个人世界便愈有意义。调整决非易事。我曾感到茫然害怕，但我很幸运，父母和老师在我身上发现了某种东西——可以称之为活下去的潜力吧——而我自己却没有发现。他们激励我誓与失明拼搏到底。
The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life . When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
我必须学会的最艰难的一课就是相信自己，这是基本条件。如做不到这一点，我的精神就会崩溃，只能坐在前门廊的摇椅中度过余生。相信自己并不仅仅指支持我独自走下陌生的楼梯的那种自信，那是一部分。我指的是大事：是坚信自己虽然有缺陷，却是一个真正的有进取心的人；坚信在芸芸众生错综复杂的格局当中，自有我可以安身立命的一席之地。
