悠游度過一天的24小時：第五章 網(wǎng)球與不朽的靈魂

CHAPTER V Tennis And The Immortal Soul

第五章 網(wǎng)球與不朽的靈魂

You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already "put by" about three-quarters of an hour for use.

你拿著報紙，登上早晨的列車，心平氣靜、泰然自若地讀起報來。你一點也不著急，知道自己至少可以這樣安安穩(wěn)穩(wěn)地呆半個小時。你的目光在報紙外頁那些送貨和歌曲廣告中晃悠，儼然一副逍遙自在的神態(tài)，仿佛時間綽綽有余，好似你所在的星球，一天不是24小時，而是124小時。我酷愛讀報，每天讀五份英文日報、兩份法文日報，至于我平常閱讀的周報的數(shù)量，也只有報紙經(jīng)銷商知道了。我不得不提及這一個人愛好，是為了防備有人指責(zé)我反對早上坐車時讀報是對報紙有偏見。報紙匆促地刊印，人們匆促地閱讀。我的日程表里，沒有專門的讀報時間。我利用短暫的閑暇讀報，但我確實也讀報。而連續(xù)花三四十分鐘獨處的美妙時光讀報（因為除了呆在滿車廂安靜、內(nèi)斂、抽煙的男子中間以外，很難在其他場合得以徹底地沉浸于自我），這種想法讓我受不了。我不能允許你這般浪費時間這無價之寶，就像奢侈的東方財主在肆意揮霍。你不是主宰時間的帝王。讓我虔敬地提醒你，你擁有的時間并不比我多。不要在列車上讀報！這樣我又“儲存”了45分鐘可利用的時間。

Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o'clock. I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half) in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your newspapers then.

此時你已到辦公室。下午6點前，我都不管你。我知道午間通常有一個小時休息時間（事實上往往是一個半小時），午餐用不了其中一半的時間。我可以讓你自由安排那段時間，你還可以在那時讀報。

I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are pale and tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud, particularly in winter. You don't eat immediately on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano.... By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day's work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office— gone like a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone!

你從辦公室出來，我就又和你在一起了。你臉色蒼白、疲憊不堪。不管怎樣，你妻子說你氣色不佳，你也的確給她這種感覺?；丶衣飞希胍庠絹碓綕?。疲倦就像那籠罩著倫敦郊外上空的沉沉陰霾，尤其是在冬天。你到家后并不立即用餐。過了差不多半小時，你覺得該坐起來吸收點營養(yǎng)了，你才吃東西。接著認真地抽起煙來、會見朋友、悠哉游哉、打牌、翻翻書、意識到年齡不饒人、散散步、摸摸鋼琴……天哪！轉(zhuǎn)眼就是11點一刻。接下來足足40分鐘時間你在想是否該上床睡覺；可以想象你經(jīng)常喝上好的威士忌。最后，累了一天的你終于上床睡覺了。從你離開辦公室算起，六小時，也可能更多的時間就如夢一般神奇地消失了，說不清楚怎樣就那么消失了。

That is a fair sample case. But you say: "It's all very well for you to talk. A man is tired. A man must see his friends. He can't always be on the stretch." Just so. But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town in another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her home; you take yourself home. You don't spend three-quarters of an hour in "thinking about" going to bed. You go. Friends and fatigue have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when you were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two hours every other night for three months? Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy—the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?

這是一個很典型的例子。但你說：“隨你怎么說，但我確實疲憊了，也必須見朋友，不能總是把弦繃得緊緊的?！毖灾欣?。然而假如你去劇院看戲（特別是同漂亮女人一道），情況會怎樣呢？你匆忙趕去郊區(qū)，費盡周折翻騰出漂亮的衣服，把自己打扮得光鮮體面，又乘下一輛車趕回城里；這樣縱使不是五個小時，也至少有四個小時你的精神都很緊張；你把她送回家，然后自己才回家，你不會花45分鐘時間去“考慮”該不該睡覺，就立刻上床了。朋友和疲憊都被拋諸腦后，那個夜晚對你來說是多么漫長（或特別短暫）！可曾記得你在別人的勸說下參加業(yè)余劇團大合唱，三個月里隔天的晚上都艱苦訓(xùn)練兩小時的日子？黃昏時分有所期盼，要全副精力地去做事——想到這就令你整天的生活煥然生輝，活力倍增，你能否認這一點嗎？

What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-four hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking about going to bed." The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

我想對你提的建議是，在每天下午6點正視事實、承認自己并不疲倦（因為，你知道自己確實不疲倦），安排好晚間生活，中途不要讓晚餐打斷。這樣一來，你就至少連續(xù)擁有三個小時的時間，我不是說你一輩子都應(yīng)該用每晚三個小時耗盡所有腦力。但我確實建議，作為開端，你可以每隔一天晚上用一個半小時做一些重要的、能不斷提升心智的事情。你還有三個晚上可以會朋友、玩橋牌、打網(wǎng)球、料理家事、隨便翻翻書、吸幾口煙、種植花木、溜達或參加有獎競賽。你仍然擁有從周六下午2點到下周一早上10點之間44個小時的時間，這是一筆絕佳的財富。如果你堅持不懈，很快你就會樂意投入四個甚至五個晚上做那項需要持續(xù)投入精力的事情，過真正充實的生活。這樣你就會戒掉以前的習(xí)慣——往往在晚上11點15分時喃喃自語：“該考慮睡覺了。”在推開臥室門之前40分鐘就打算睡覺的人肯定是無聊至極，換句話說，他根本沒有在生活。

But remember, at the star t, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club," you must say, "... but I have to work." This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.

但是要記住，開始時，一周三個晚上，每晚90分鐘的時間是三天10,080分鐘里最為重要的。那段時間必須是神圣的，就跟戲劇彩排或網(wǎng)球比賽一樣神圣。不要說：“對不起，老伙計，我不能見你，我得趕緊去網(wǎng)球俱樂部了”；你應(yīng)當說：“……不過我得工作了。”我承認，說出這話異常困難。與追求不朽的靈魂相比，打網(wǎng)球要急迫得多。