《梦回》顾裳霜

4、LEGENDS What

　　HOW LEGENDS COME INTO PLAY

　　Accidentally, a group of people were separated from the modern society, and they never got back.

　　Let\'s suppose that they went into a rain forest.

　　At first, most people believed that they would be back to the society very soon, so they tried to survive on the food and water that they brought with them. They were so used to the safe and developed environment, that it was so difficult for them to survive in the dangerous forest.

　　Very soon, they ran out of everything. Just like any survivor game, they were forced to learn how to hunt, to collect, to fight against the beasts, and to build their shelters. They were always short of something, food, water, medicine weapon, tools, and in most cases, they were short of all of them. People who were not physically strong enough soon died of thirst, starvation, diseases, or greed -- not necessary their own greed, it might be others\'. People who were strong enough survived; and fortunate enough, they had children. From this point, this group of people became the owner of the rain forest, and generations later, a new civilization formed its shape -- a successful colonization.

　　There is one thing.

　　In the beginning, the forefathers brought a lot of things from the original civilization. They started with the experiences accumulated thousands of years through the history. Among those people might be farmers, physicians, scientists, historians and all kinds of people. In harsh conditions of survival, people might not preserve documents very well, so when these people died, their intellectual skills would be just gone.

　　After decades, at most a century, people from the original society all died, and the only humans left were born in the forest. These people never saw anything outside the forest. The only way they got to know about the original society was from their parents -- nevertheless, they didn\'t really know what their parents experienced since they never saw. So when these new generations tell their children, the description of the original society was slightly different from what they should be.

　　After a few generations, the description was more off. Different people had different stories, and the stories were far from the reality. Even the preserved evidence of the original society was slightly different, because they were made by humans, and changed by humans. Centuries later, for most people, the very few remaining documents and records, were so difficult that no one could understand them, so they tried to use their own way to describe them. Most people were good at fighting, but no one could understand calculus -- because no one thought it was worth learning.

　　Thousands of years later, the stories of the forefathers passed from mouth to mouth, and every person tell the stories with their own imaginations. Loads of details were lost, and loads of details were added by the story-tellers. As the stories became more and more unreal, most people believed those things depicted in the stories never existed.

　　So finally, people generally agreed that these depictions passed down by generations were just stories made up by their forefathers, trying to imagine where they came from.

　　And these people gave these imaginary stories a name.

　　They call them legends.

作者有话说

　　留学党，脸书上写了点东西，帖在这儿做个收集。