心灵鸡汤：圣诞颂歌Christmas_小升初阅读

心灵鸡汤：圣诞颂歌Christmas

In my 20s, living in that odd no mans land of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, I stumbled onto[12] the L Train station in the evening during a snow storm. A smattering of people stood on the platform waiting for the train.[13] A hearty woman was singing Christmas carols in high operatic fashion as a rather more gnarled gentleman accompanied on his accordion.[14] It was probably the exact temperature in the air, and the way it carried her voice, and the sound of the accordion around and around the underground chamber[15]. The train came and no one got on it. No one said anything. We just stood there, we could do no other.

Walter Benjamin once wrote about his fear of clocks and the marching homogenous units of time they represent.[16] He wrote of fighters during the July Revolution[17] who suddenly turned their guns on the clock towers, trying to freeze the day, to get as much as they possibly could from those moments beyond the normal flow of history. There is no figure with a greater hold on the childhood imagination than Santa Claus.[18] We have given him extraordinary powers. He has mastery, for a night, that isnt exactly a night really, over space and time itself, the very fundaments[19] for the possibility of anything else. The Greek god of time, Chronos, is an elemental god, more powerful than the Olympians, more primal than the deities who control things on land and sea and earth and sky.[20] But Santa is his own logic and purpose for one infinite night every year.