A Ball to Roll Around滚球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。

It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance.

It had to start with the most elementary things.

Onc e a man gave me an indoor baseball.

I thought he was mocking me and I was hurt .

"I can' t use this," I said.

"Take it with you," he urged me," and roll it around.

"The words stuck in my head.

" Roll it around!

" By rolling the ball I could hear where it went.

This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball.

At Philadelphia' s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball.

We called it ground ball.

我花了很长时间才树立并不断加强这一信念。

这要从最简单的事做起。

有一次一个人给我一个室内玩的棒球，我以为他在嘲笑我，心里很难受。

我不能使这个。

”我说。

你拿去，”他竭力劝我，在地上滚。

”他的话在我脑子里生了根。

在地上滚!

” 滚球使我听见它朝哪儿滚动。

我马上想到一个我曾认为不可能达到的目标：打棒球。

在费城的奥弗布鲁克盲人学校，我发明了一种很受人欢迎的棒球游戏，我们称它为地面球。

All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time.

I had to learn my limitations.

It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure.

I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.

我这一辈子给自己树立了一系列目标，然后努力去达到，一次一个。

我必须了解自己能力有限，若开始就知道某个目标根本达不到却硬要去实现，那不会有任何好处，因为那只会带来失败的苦果。

我有时也失败过，但一般来说总有进步。

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