Chapter 15

More famous was his pithier expression of the same sentiment, made in response to a spectator who asked what use this new balloon thing could be. “What is the use,” he replied, “of a newborn baby?”
He also, in the letter, ridiculed the symbol of the new Cincinnati order, a bald eagle, which had also been selected as a national symbol. That provoked one of Franklin’s most famous riffs about America’s values and the question of a national bird:I wish the bald eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country; he is a bird of bad moral character, he does not get his living honestly; you may have seen him perched on some dead tree, near the river where, too lazy to fish for himself, he watches the labors of the fishing-hawk…The turkey is, in comparison, a much more respectable bird, and a true original native of America…He is (though a little vain and silly, it is true, but not the worse emblem for that) a bird of courage, and would not hesitate to attack a grenadier of the British guards.
Franklin had reached an age when he no longer fretted about squandering his time. For hours on end, he would play cribbage or cards with friends, which caused him, he wrote Polly, to have brief twinges of guilt. “But another reflection comes to relieve me, whispering: ‘You know the soul is immortal; why then should you be such a niggard of a little time, when you have a whole eternity before you?’ So being easily convinced and, like other reasonable creatures, satisfied with a small reason when it is in favor of doing what I have a mind to, I shuffle the cards again, and begin another game.”
如果真有一个永恒在等待就好了。