Passage one
There are not many places that I find it more agreeable to revisit when I am in an idle mood, than some places to which I have never been. For, my acquaintance with those spots is of such long standing, and has ripened into an intimacy of so affectionate a nature, that I take a particular interest in assuring myself that they are unchanged. I never was in Robinson Crusoe’s Island, yet I frequently return there. I was never in the robbers’ cave, where Gil Blas lived, but I often go back there and find the trap-door just as heavy to raise as it used to be. I was never in Don Quixote’s study, where he read his books of chivalry until he rose and hacked at imaginary giants, yet you couldn’t move a book in it without my knowledge. So with Damascus, and Lilliput, and the Nile, and Abyssinia, and the North Pole, and many hundreds of places — I was never at them, yet it is an affair of my life to keep them intact, and I am always going back to them.
Passage two
The books one reads in childhood create in one’s mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can even survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent. The pampas, the Amazon, the coral islands of the Pacific, Russia, land of birch-tree and samovar, Transylvania with its boyars and vampires, the China of Guy Boothby, the Paris of du Maurier—one could continue the list for a long time. But one other imaginary country that I acquired early in life was called America. If I pause on the word ―America‖, and deliberately put aside the existing reality, I can call up my childhood vision of it.
【題組】The first sentence of passage one contains an element of
(A) self-deprecation (B) legend (C) melancholy (D) paradox
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