原文
East of Eden（Excerpt） -By John Steinbeck
When a child first catches adults out-when it first walks into his grave little head that adults do not always have divine intelligence, that their judgments are not always wise, their thinking true, their sentences just-his world falls into panic desolation.
The gods are fallen and all safety gone.
And there is a true thing about fall of gods:they do not fall a little; they crash and shatter or sink deeply into green muck.
It is a tedious job to build them up agian; they never quite shine.
And the child's world is never quite whole again.
It is an aching kind of growing.
正文
伊甸之东（节选）
作者: 约翰·斯坦贝克
当小孩初次发现大人的差错——当他的小脑袋里初次察觉到大人并没有超人的智慧，他们的判断不一定明智，想法不一定正确，裁决不一定公平的时候，小孩的世界就变成了令人惊慌的废墟。
神的地位一落千丈，安全感全部消失。
有一点是肯定的：神的垮台不是零敲碎打，而是猛然倒塌、摔得粉碎，或者掉到了长满绿苔的粪土堆，深深地陷了进去。
重新把他们树立起来是费时费力的工作，他们再也不会像以前那么光亮了。
小孩的世界也再不会像以前那么完整了。
这是一种痛苦的成长过程。
