東京大学
英文和訳問題集

Censorship may be as old as literature itself. ["You can't say that!" I imagine someone sitting around an evening fire suddenly shouting to the community's favorite storyteller.] "If you say that, tomorrow we will return empty from the hunt," calls out another. And so for the next gathering, the storyteller modifies the tale, omits a few details, changes some words and expressions.

Then, gradually, he discovers different ways to communicate what he wants, maybe through a moral story, an unusual figure of speech, an ironic joke ― and he smiles to himself knowing his listeners are none the wiser. Most, that is; he also notices that a small part of his clan understands what he's done. [They silently "get it" and a bond is now formed between them. These few "insiders" have done what alert audiences would do throughout all succeeding generations.] We call it "reading between the lines."

What does it mean to "read between the lines"? Essentially, it's to realize that what we are hearing ― or reading ― is not what it appears to be, that hidden inside what is being said is another message or implication, one the apparent audience doesn't, or hopefully doesn't, recognize. [The exciting tale of how the dangerous beast was skillfully trapped and killed is really ― as some listeners figure out ― a story about ridding themselves of their vicious leader.]

My mother had raised me vegetarian, and though I harbored no real desire to eat meat, sometimes, in summer, I would take a large piece of watermelon to a remote corner of our yard and pretend it was a fresh dead animal. On all fours, I would bury my face in the sweet red fruit-meat and bite into it. [Sometimes, I'd rip handfuls out and stuff them in my mouth, which wasn't much like the way any animal I knew of ate.] I was less playing a particular kind of animal than enacting a form of wildness that I recognized in myself.

I watched Wild America, a PBS show on which conservationist Marty Stouffer revealed the wildness of the animal world. [Alone in the woods behind our house I had beaten my chest, acted out my own invented stories without a thought to how another's gaze might see me.] I sympathized with the restless business of squirrels and wild obsessions of our golden retriever. I was embarrassed by forks and knives ― why they should exist when we had such perfect instruments at the ends of our arms.

However often Stouffer imposed human narratives on the animals depicted (very often), it was still always clear that survival was the priority that assigned value to everything in the animal world. If the wild marten was overcome by her own feelings, she didn't let it stop her from getting dinner for her babies. [I learned in elementary school that we were animals, but unlike other animals we did not seem driven by the instinct for physical survival.] My teachers emphasized the continuity, but we were so far up the food chain that survival was no longer even visible to us.

Food and feelings become mixed from early childhood, according to some theories of relationships based on food and feeding. [Right from the start food becomes a way to satisfy our feelings, and throughout life feelings influence when, what and how much we eat.] One of the most reliable, everyday examples is that many of us tend to be bad-tempered or irritated as a result of hunger ― a feeling that has come to be known as 'hangry'.

Sometimes the food itself allows us to work backwards to find the feelings and the context; opening a bottle of champagne tends to signal the celebration of success, whereas the food writer Nigella Lawson suggests her chocolate cake is 'the sort of cake you'd want to eat the whole of when you'd been chucked'. [The power of sugar to soothe appears to be present from the very beginning, with effects demonstrated in those as young as one day old.] Yet Lawson's philosophy takes us to an area of food research that still has many unresolved questions: emotional or comfort eating; the kind of eating where the body is in no real need of calories and feelings take over.

The research on comfort eating and emotional eating tends to produce conflicting results, which has led some to conclude that comfort food is a myth. For example, chicken soup is often a front-runner for comfort food, coming in first place for nearly half of the participants in one study. However, another study found that chicken soup was comforting only for those who considered chicken soup to be a comfort food. This makes sense ― [the choice of comfort food depends on unique memories of both good and bad times and the foods associated with them; what's comforting to me, might not be to you.] Comfort foods have been shown to vary by age, sex, culture, the type of food itself and the feeling that brings out comfort eating ― it is a big melting pot.

One year, as the school library supervisor, I was in an elementary school library that had begun circulating books on the first day of school. I was helping at the circulation desk. One fourth grader asked if he could have a specific book. "Of course!" I said. [He didn't think so, as his teacher had told him to check out a book with a yellow label.] So, I took out my library supervisor's business card, wrote a note to the teacher on the back of it, stuck the note in the book, and checked it out to the child.

I imagine this scenario ― in which children must choose between books based on instructional priorities and those they want to read for pleasure ― plays out frequently in school libraries or classrooms. [There is a divide between the noble calling to teach children how to read and the equally noble calling to inspire a love of reading.] We school librarians dance across this divide daily.

The motivation to read is largely self-determined, and choice is a powerful driver. People, including children, choose to do that which is fun, personally rewarding, or easy. ... We need to consider how our policies, procedures, and routines inspire children and encourage their engagement with text, as well as how they guarantee all learners' rights to intellectual freedom. [Reducing choice, whether through labeling, age-related rules, or restrictive policies, is not a strategy that makes children fall in love with books and reading.] If our goal is to help learners self-identify as readers, then we must help them make connections with text through practices that celebrate the reading life.

We do not tell others everything we think. At least, this applies to most people in (perhaps) a majority of social situations. A scholar even concludes that "we lie ― therefore we think." Perhaps, one would also want to reverse this saying ("we think, therefore we sometimes lie"). In any case, there is a constant struggle between revealing and hiding, between disclosure and non-disclosure in communication. We are more or less skilled in suppressing the impulses to express all kinds of responses. [If we were to make everything we think public by saying it aloud, it would sometimes be quite embarrassing, or face-threatening, not only for the speaker, but for both (or all) parties.] Another researcher points out that narration in social contexts often involves circumstances that promote non-disclosure such as silent resistance and secret alliances.

Another researcher points out that narration in social contexts often involves circumstances that promote non-disclosure such as silent resistance and secret alliances. [Accordingly, some things get said, others not.]

One may argue that we need a dialogical theory of inner dialogue to account for the struggle between disclosure and non-disclosure. Surely, ecological psychologist Edward Reed suggests that "one could argue that [the primary function of language is for concealing thoughts, diverting others' attention from knowing what one is thinking.]"

The social psychologist and writer Daniel Gilbert suggests that human beings are "works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished." And he claims, "the person you are right now doesn't remain as it is. It is as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our lives is change." [Time is a powerful force, he says, and one that perpetually revises our values, personalities, and preferences in everything from music and the places we would like to go to friendship.]

Researchers at the University of Edinburgh, who conducted the longest-ever study of the stability of human character, have come to a similar conclusion, finding that those qualities that seemed to mark us as teenagers could be almost gone in our later lives. ... The researchers used data taken from a part of the 1947 Scottish Mental Survey, which tracked development in a pool of 70,805 children. They used a smaller sample of 1,208 fourteen-year-olds to study personality stability in the kids as they went from being adolescents to adults. The survey had identified six particular characteristics: self-confidence, determination, mood stability, sincerity, originality, and the desire to learn. [In 2012, an attempt was made to track down that same pool of participants and, of those found, 174 agreed to take part in the continued research.] They were asked to rate themselves on these same six characteristics and the degree to which they remained dominant factors in their behavior; family members, partners, and friends close to the participants were also asked to assess the continued presence of the earlier characteristics.

The results determined that [while some of these characteristics remained steady over shorter periods of the participants' lives, most of them, with the exception of mood stability, had changed markedly, sometimes vanishing entirely.]

Last July, I went to Honolulu to meet Fred and to spend the summer with my parents. My parents and I have a warm relationship, even though, or perhaps because, I don't speak to or visit them frequently; until my most recent trip there, the previous July, I hadn't seen them in six years. I live in New York, and they live in Hawaii, and [while it is true that traveling to the islands requires a certain commitment of time, the real reason I stayed away is that there were other places I wanted to visit.] Of all the gifts and advantages my parents have given me, one of the greatest is their conviction that it is the duty of children to leave and do what they want, and the duty of parents not just to accept this but to encourage it.

When I was 14 and first leaving my parents ― then living in East Texas ― to attend high school in Honolulu, my father told me that any parent who expected anything from his child was bound to be disappointed, because [it was foolish and selfish to raise children in the hope that they might someday pay back the debt of their existence]; he has maintained this ever since.

[This philosophy explains their love for a pet that, in many ways, contradicts what we generally believe a pet should be.] Those of us with animals in our lives don't like to think of ourselves as having expectations for them, but we do. We want their loyalty and affection, and we want these things to be expressed in a way that we can understand. Fred, however, provides none of these things. Although he is, in his way, friendly, he is not a creature who, you feel, has any particular fondness for you.

As a class, birds have been around for more than 100 million years. They are one of nature's great success stories, inventing new strategies for survival, using their own distinctive brands of intelligence, which, in some respects at least, seem to far exceed our own. ... Now there are some 10,400 different bird species ― more than double the number of mammal species. In the late 1990s, scientists estimated the total number of wild birds on the planet. They came up with 200 to 400 billion individual birds. [That's roughly 30 to 60 live birds per person.] To say that humans are more successful or advanced really depends on how you define those terms.

After all, evolution isn't about advancement; it's about survival. It's about learning to solve the problems of your environment, something birds have done surprisingly well for a long, long time. [This, to my mind, makes it all the more surprising that many of us have found it hard to swallow the idea that birds may be bright in ways we can't imagine.]

Birds learn. They solve new problems and invent novel solutions to old ones. They make and use tools. They count. They copy behaviors from one another. They remember where they put things. [Even when their mental powers don't quite match or mirror our own complex thinking, they often contain the seeds of it ― insight, for instance, which has been defined as the sudden emergence of a complete solution without trial-and-error learning.]

How can the capacity for solitude be cultivated? With attention and respectful conversation. ... One philosopher has a beautiful formulation: "Language ... has created the word 'loneliness' to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the word 'solitude' to express the glory of being alone." [Loneliness is emotionally and even physically painful, born from a lack of warmth in early childhood, when we need it most.] Solitude ― the capacity to be contentedly and constructively alone ― is built from successful human connection at just that time.

Recently, while I was working on my computer during a train ride from Boston to New York, we passed through a magnificent snowy landscape. [I wouldn't have known this but for the fact that I happened to look outside on my way to get a coffee.] Then I noticed that every other adult on the train was staring at a computer.

Then I noticed that every other adult on the train was staring at a computer. [We deny ourselves the benefits of solitude because we see the time it requires as a resource to use more profitably.] These days, instead of using time alone to think (or not think), we hurry to fill it with some digital connection.

News reports from Afghanistan in the 1990s tended to portray little more than a ruined place, destroyed by extremist military groups. Such images were rarely balanced by insights into ordinary life. Countries at war are described by reporters who tend, especially in dangerous places, to stay together, reporting only on isolated events. [In Kabul, visiting television crews invariably asked to be taken to the worst-hit parts of the city; one reporter even described Kabul as "ninety percent destroyed."]

Wars complicate matters: there is a terrible fascination to war which tends to overshadow less dramatic news. Conflict is a notoriously difficult thing to convey accurately. Fighting comes and goes, and modern conflicts move with an unpredictable will of their own. Key battles are fought overnight and absorbed into the landscape. [Even a so-called war zone is not necessarily a dangerous place: seldom is a war as comprehensive as the majority of reports suggest.]

Yet there was a deeper obstacle to describing the place: Afghanistan was, to outsiders, a broken mirror, yielding an image as broad or narrow as the observer's gaze. [Even in peacetime Afghanistan had been open to outsiders for only a brief interval, a forgotten period from the 1960s until the 1970s.] It had never been a single nation but a historically improbable mixture of races and cultures, each with its own treasures of customs, languages and visions of the world.

Eugene Crawford is a Navajo, a Native American; he cannot forget the day he and his friends were recruited for the United States military. Upon arrival at Camp Elliott, they were led to a classroom, which reminded him of the ones he had entered in boarding schools as a child. Those memories were far from pleasant. [He could almost taste the harsh brown soap the teachers had forced him to use to wash his mouth out when he was caught speaking Navajo.] His thoughts were interrupted when the door suddenly opened and an officer entered.

The first hour they spent in that building changed their lives forever, and the shock of what occurred is still felt by them to this day. They could never have imagined the project the military had recruited them for. ... Navajo had been chosen as a code for secret messages because unless you were a Navajo, you'd never understand a word of it. Navajo is a complex language and a slight change in pronunciation can completely change the meaning of a message. The government's decision was wise ― it turned out to be the only code the enemy never managed to break ― but for the young Navajo soldiers, it was a nightmare. [At no time under any circumstances were they to leave the building without permission or alone.] They were forbidden to tell anyone about the project, even their families, until it was finally made public in 1968.

Many of these men had been punished, sometimes brutally, for speaking Navajo in classrooms similar to this, classrooms in schools run by the same government. [Now this government that had punished them in the past for speaking their own language was asking them to use it to help win the war.] White people were stranger than the Navajos had imagined.

If a welfare state is acting on behalf of the community at large, it can distribute resources on the same basis to every member of that community, or it may operate selectively, providing resources only to those who need or deserve help. [A case can be made on grounds of efficiency for either approach.] If sufficient benefits and services are available on the same basis to everybody, then all are guaranteed the minimum level of help to secure their basic needs.

If sufficient benefits and services are available on the same basis to everybody, then [all are guaranteed the minimum level of help to secure their basic needs.] Because everybody gets the same, no shame can be attached to receiving that help and nobody need be discouraged from seeking it.

If, on the other hand, benefits and services are made available only to those who need or deserve them, then those resources will be put to the most effective use; more generous levels of help may be given to those in the greatest need; and [those people who do not require help will not be made to feel unfairly treated by high levels of taxation.]

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge or beliefs that have changed. Once you adopt a new view of the world (or of any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed. ... Finally, the participants report the opinion they held beforehand. This task turns out to be surprisingly difficult. [Asked to reconstruct their former beliefs, people repeat their current ones instead ― an instance of substitution ― and many cannot believe that they ever felt differently.]

[Your inability to reconstruct past beliefs will inevitably cause you to underestimate the extent to which you were surprised by past events.]

It's perhaps not much known that Ish has a musical side. I was only vaguely aware of it, if at all, when I interviewed him, though I'd known him by then for several years ― [a good example of how he doesn't give much away.] Ish plays the piano and the guitar, both well.

One of the few regrets of my life is that I have no formal grounding in music. I never had a musical education or came from the sort of 'musical home' that would have made this possible or probable, and always rather readily assumed that music was what those other, 'musical' people did. [I've never felt, on the other hand, though a great many people who didn't grow up reading books have perhaps felt it, that writing is what those other, 'writerly' people do.]

This contrast between writing and music is strange, however, since I increasingly feel that a lot of my instincts about writing are in fact musical, and I don't think that writing and music are fundamentally so far apart. The basic elements of narrative ― timing, pacing, flow, tension and release, repetition of themes ― are musical ones too. And [where would writing be without rhythm, the large rhythms that shape a story, or the small ones that shape a paragraph?]