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"All your friends are outside." It was true; they always were. Sometimes I went out with them, coaxed into the street, out into the fields, down by the creek, by the lure of what I knew instinctively was normal childhood.
“你的朋友都在外面呢。”我知道，的确如此。他们的确总在外面。我有时受他们的诱惑和他们一起上街，到田野里、小河边去。我知道这种诱惑对一孩子而言是正常的。
I have clear memories of that sort of life, of lifting the rocks in the creek that trickled through Naylor's Run to search for crayfish, of laying pennies on the tracks of the trolley and running to fetch them, flattened，when the trolley had passed. But the best part of me was always at home, within some book that had been laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people waiting for me to return and bring them to life.
我清楚地记得那样的日子，在内勒河那条潺潺的小溪里搬起石头，寻找躲在下面的小龙虾；在电车轨道上放上小硬帀，等电车开过，再跑去把压成片的硬币取回来。但我的心总还是在家里，在某本书里，书摊在桌上，那是我留下的标记。书里那些想象中的人物都在等我回去将他们唤醒。
In the years since those days in that club chair I have learned that I was not alone in this, although at the time I surely was, the only child I knew, or my parents knew, or my friends knew, who preferred reading to playing. In books I have traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. I learned the difference between good and evil, right and wrong. There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books, a kind of parallel universe in which I might be a newcomer but was never really a stranger. My real, true world. My perfect island.
躺在那张椅子里看书的日子已经过去多年了，这些年来我发现，这么做的不只我一个人。尽管在那个时候，就我所知，就我父母和我的朋友所知，我是唯一一个对读书比对玩更着迷的孩子。在书本中，我不仅游历其他世界，也探索自己的世界。我了解了自己，明白了自己想成为什么样的人，发现了自己心中的愿望，敢于对自己以及所处的世界进行种种幻想。我学会分辨善恶是非。每天睡觉、起床，除此之外，就是读书。这些书，就像一个平行存在的宇宙，在这里，我也许是个新人，但绝不是个陌生人。这些书对我来说，是真正的、真实的世界，是完美的小岛。
