People who are good listen, often with rapt[9] attention, to their bodies. Their body tells them what to do and they do it. Alas, virtue is not always rewarded and, the perfect regimen notwithstanding, illness sometimes—indeed always, in the long-term—supervenes.[10] When that happens, do people say, “I’m bad”?
Not often. They revert to the adverbial—not well.[11] At most they say that they are feeling bad, which is not the same as being bad, of course. There is an asymmetry[12] in our moral assessment of ourselves: goodness comes from within, badness from without.[13] People, as a general rule, don’t ask for an explanation of their good behaviour: only their bad is mysterious to them. In many years of medical practice, no one has ever asked me, “Do you think it could be my childhood that makes me so nice, doctor?”
If the fat lady on the plane had wanted the snack, would she have said, “Yes please, I’m bad.”
Vocabulary
1. snack: 点心,小吃。
2. moral: 道德上的,精神上的;put it mildly: 说得婉转些。
3. charity: 慈善;desiderata: 〈拉〉迫切需要得到之物,是desideratum的复数形式。
4. overindulgence: 过分沉溺于某事(尤指吃喝)。
5. blow one’s own trumpet: 自我吹嘘,自吹自擂。
6. complacent: 自鸣得意的;boastful: 自夸的,傲慢的;ring: 特性,特质。
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