Plague - Mar 05

…bent as they were on cherishing the all-too-real phantoms of their imagination and conjuring up with all their might pictures of a land where ________(一种特别的光束的闪烁), two or three hills, a favorite tree, a woman’s smile, composed for them a world that nothing could replace.

What first ________(使他们完全意识到) was the trouble they experienced in summoning up any clear picture of what the absent one was doing.

Hostile to the past, impatient of the present, and ________(对未来感到失望), we were much like those whom men’s justice, or hatred, forces to ________(在铁窗中度日).

And they ________(加深/加强) their despondency with fleeting intimations, messages as disconcerting as a flight of swallows, a dew-fall at sundown, or those queer glints the sun sometimes dapples on empty streets.

Therefore, they forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease ________(期待未来), and always to keep, so to speak, ________(一直低垂着眼睛过日子).

when they had drunk in advance the dregs of bitterness of those six black months, and painfully screwed up their courage to the ________(顶点), straining all their remaining energy to endure valiantly the long ordeal of all those weeks and days.

Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have ________(汲取到力量) only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.