1. They have more in common than it might seem
2. HUMAN BEINGS are fond of certainty.
3. They trust their own senses to report what is true about the world, and are mildly outraged when their eyes or ears play them false.
4. They also, often unreasonably, want things to last.
5. Though creation is in flux all around them, from the atoms that make up everything to global weather and the stockmarket, from Moon and tides to the daily flakes and spasms of bodily decay, they like to think that things will stay as they are. Stability is the comforting illusion by which people try to organise their lives.
in flux: in constant change; ever-changing.
Flake: a small, flat, thin piece of something, typically one that has broken away or been peeled off from a larger piece.
[ˈspæzəm]痉挛
6. Mortals cling to the hope that they will leave some permanent trace of themselves behind.
7. They prefer to think that houses will not crumble
8. works, on canvas or paper, will endure.
9. The grandiose or tyrannical put up monuments; writers make sure their books are deposited in libraries; the multitude order gravestones and label photographs, though all this floats in impermanence too.
[ˈgrændiəʊs] 宏伟的；[tɪˈrænɪkl] 专横的
10. Two new books grapple with this paradox by considering phenomena that symbolise instability itself.
11. embarks on a quest to understand the relationship between ice, which is now melting faster than ever, and the fleeting written and spoken word.
12. Ms Campbell, a penniless but intrepid traveller, braves miserable bus journeys, freezing rain, dark and intense cold, but still manages to write rapturously of the beauties of the Arctic.
[ɪnˈtrepɪd] 无畏的；['ræptʃərəslɪ] 狂喜地
13. Mr Pinney has gone no further than various libraries, but through the words of generations of desert travellers he paints the shimmering heat, the dazzling sand and the strange visions hanging in the sky.
['ʃɪmərɪŋ] v.闪闪发光，发微光( shimmer的现在分词 );
耀眼的
14. He reproduces fascinating postcards, engravings and photos of floating ships and castles, palm trees and palaces that “possess every possible stability”, including one alleged photograph of a skyscraper city emerging from the Muir Glacier in Alaska.
版画；[əˈlæskə]
15. For ice, too, makes mirages, as light refracts through the different temperatures and densities of air.
[ˈmɪrɑ:ʒ] 海市蜃楼；
16. There are other unexpected similarities.
17. Ms Campbell looks down into a world of fissured glass in which bubbles are trapped, as in the toy snow-domes she knew as a child.
[ˈfɪʃə(r)]裂缝的；
18. In historical descriptions of mirages, too, the images seem cut into facets, or viewed through thicknesses of inferior glass with bubbles trapped inside.
19. a Japanese silk-painter’s depiction of a mirage over the sea
20. And the blue of the ocean is itself an illusion created by the rods and cones in the eye, like the blue sky above
['rɒdz]杆；视杆细胞和视锥细胞；
21. Ice is mostly very quiet. But Ms Campbell, eager to link transitory frozen water to transitory frozen words, and delighting in Inuit terms for ice that is too thin, too slippery or frost-flowered, hears anything it has to say.
[ˈɪnjuɪt]因纽特人；
22. The ice on ponds whoops, bangs and fizzes; glaciers “chatter” as they grind over different kinds of rock.
['bæŋz]猛撞；[fɪz]发嘶嘶声；
23. The sound of melting ice has even been turned by Carmen Braden, a Canadian, into a score for ice, piano and strings.
Score：乐谱
24. Mirages, though mostly silent, can seem to talk, too.
25. The most obvious distinction between ice and mirages is that ice has been used for centuries to preserve what would otherwise decay; whereas mirages seem to show what may exist, in some dreamlike future.
26. Though ice melts away—though nothing remains, save disappearing scratches, of even the most perfect routines of figure skaters—it melts slowly, preserving not only bananas and butter but human habitations and records.
Scratches：抓痕；skaters:溜冰者；
27. Ms Campbell tells the story of the burned-down National Library of Greenland, whose charred books were shipped out, encased in ice, to save them from further damage; and in one especially poignant passage she leafs through the ice-preserved notebook of George Murray Levick, the photographer on Scott’s Terra Nova expedition, noting how his pencil had to dig through the ice-film of his breath on each page.
[ˈtʃɑ:d]烧焦；encased：把…放入盒内；[ˈpɔɪnjənt]尖锐的；leaf：匆匆翻阅
28. with his stomach full of ibex meat and an arrowhead still embedded in his scrawny shoulder.
[ˈaɪbeks]野山羊；[ˈskrɔ:ni]瘦的
29. But mirages, too, can seem to preserve things.
30. They can appear as long-vanished, astonishingly detailed cities of the dead, or as panoramas of paradise that hold the memories or speculations of ancient tribes—or, in Japan, of clam-monsters.
31. They can even become prisms that crystallise passing moral or political prejudices,
['prɪzəmz] 棱镜；['krɪstəlaɪz] 具体化
32. such as the supposed illusions (to Western minds) of Islamic teachings, or (to Protestants) the visual trickery of the Catholic church.
Protestants 新教徒；[ˈtrɪkəri] 哄骗
33. Mr Pinney enjoys this sharper political aspect of his misty subject.
34. Most cruelly, mirages seem to preserve water that may in fact have shone there, before the desert swallowed it.
35. They encapsulate vain hope; they are real, but they are not true.
36. Nothing much remains; treasures have broken; all is in flux, like the heaving, disappearing icebergs she has left behind, with their fragile cargo of human remains.
[ˈhi:vɪŋ]举起；
37. Mr Pinney concludes with Plato’s thought that nothing made or seen on this Earth can be more than a poor representation of the beautiful Ideal.
38. Might a mirage be that elusive original?
39. Do some truths exist that ordinary vision cannot grasp?
40. by exploring the impermanence of human thoughts and observations, they may have brushed against something more lasting.
to touch someone or something lightly in passing
