旅行的藝術:Ⅵ 壯闊-3

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我們因一些風景而引發(fā)的情思，很少能用三言兩語就形容出來：好比在初秋的黃昏看著天色漸漸暗去，或者在一片空曠的平地上看到一池靜謐的湖水，我們往往要用一大堆拗口的詞藻來描繪我們的情感。

There are few emotions about places for which adequate single words exist: we have to make awkward piles of words to convey what we felt when watching light fade on an early autumn evening or when encountering a pool of perfectly still water in a clearing.

不過，到了18世紀初，終于出現(xiàn)了一個詞，它能夠清晰地反映出我們對懸崖峭壁、山川冰河，以及遼闊夜空和巨石林立的沙漠的特別感受。這個詞就是“壯闊”（sublime），在這些景觀面前，我們完全可以體會到這樣的感受，而且一提到“壯闊”，別人也可以理解是什么樣的風景。

But at the beginning of the eighteenth century, a word came to prominence with which it became possible to indicate a specific response towards precipices and glaciers, the night skies and boulder-strewn deserts. In their presence, we were likely to experience, and could count on being understood for later reporting that we had felt, a sense of the sublime.

這個詞源自公元200年左右，希臘作家隆吉努斯的一篇論文《論壯闊》。這篇文章后來被人遺忘，直到1712年重新翻譯成英語，才重燃起評論家對它的強烈興趣。雖然各家對這個詞的分析不盡相同，但是基本共識非常明確，那就是把一系列似乎毫不相關的景致，依據(jù)它們的雄壯、空曠或險峻等特征，歸納成同一類，并指出這些景致能引起共鳴，讓人產(chǎn)生一種美好而充滿道德感的感受。景觀的價值不再單純依賴于正式的審美準則（比如顏色是否協(xié)調(diào)、線條是否勻稱），也非基于經(jīng)濟或實用的考量，而是看它是否能引發(fā)壯闊的感覺。

The word itself had originated around AD 200 in a treatise, On the Sublime, ascribed to the Greek author Longinus, though it languished until a retranslation of the essay into English in 1712 renewed intense interest among critics. While the writers often differed in their specific analyses of the word, their shared assumptions were more striking. They grouped into a single category a variety of hitherto unconnected landscapes by virtue of their size, emptiness or danger, and argued that such places provoked an identifiable feeling that was both pleasurable and morally good. The value of landscapes was no longer to be decided solely on formal aesthetic criteria (the harmony of colours or arrangement of lines) or on economic or practical concerns, but according to the power of places to arouse the mind to sublimity.

約瑟·艾迪生 [5] 在《論想象的愉悅》一文中寫道，面對“一片廣闊郊野、廣垠荒蕪的大沙漠、懸崖峭壁和浩瀚江河”，總會感覺到一種“美好的寧靜和驚異”。希爾德布蘭·雅各布也在《壯闊之觀如何提升心靈》一文中，列出了能夠引發(fā)這種感受的景致，它們包括：大海（不論平靜還是波濤洶涌）、落日、懸崖、洞窟和瑞士的高山。

Joseph Addison, in his Essay on the Pleasures of the Imagination, wrote of 'a delightful stillness and amazement' that he had felt before 'the prospects of an open champian country, a vast uncultivated desert, huge heaps of mountains, high rocks and precipices and a wide expanse of waters'. Hildebrand Jacob, in an essay on How the Mind is raised by the Sublime, offered a list of places most likely to set off the prized feeling: oceans, either in calm or storm, the setting sun, precipices, caverns and Swiss mountains.

旅人紛紛前去探密。1739年，詩人托馬斯·格雷 [6] 到阿爾卑斯山遠足，他是幾個有意識地追求壯闊景致的先鋒之一。他寫道：“在登上大夏特魯茲修道院的短途上，無需走上十步，就有令人嘆為觀止之處。這里沒有懸崖峭壁，沒有驚濤駭浪，卻處處孕育著神圣而充滿詩意的氣息。”

Travellers went to investigate. In 1739, the poet Thomas Gray undertook a walking tour of the Alps, the first of many selfconscious pursuits of the sublime, and reported: 'In our little journey up to the Grande Chartreuse, I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation that there was no restraining. Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry.'