A Ball to Roll Around.docVIP

A Ball to Roll Around 　　原文? 　　I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight (运货) yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty?two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what red color is. It would be wonderful to see ?again,? but a calamity (灾难) can do strange things to people.? 　　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.? 　　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 (困惑的，不知所措) 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.? 　　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 (门廊) 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 (复杂难解的) pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.? 　　It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Once a man gave me an indoor baseball, I thought he was mocking (讥笑，嘲笑) me and I was hurt. “I can?t use this,” I said. “Take it with you,” he urged me, “and roll it