Reading　閱讀

Reading

閱　讀

Henry David Thoreau

亨利·戴維·梭羅

作者簡介

亨利·戴維·梭羅（Henry David Thoreau，1817—1862），美國超驗主義作家、詩人和思想家。梭羅生前只出版過兩本書，其一是1854年出版的《瓦爾登湖》（Walden）。他在生前鮮為人知，20世紀后才逐漸在世界范圍內產(chǎn)生巨大影響。

梭羅崇尚回歸自然。他曾說，要將《圣經(jīng)》里說的一周工作6天休息1天，改為工作1天休息6天。他在瓦爾登湖實現(xiàn)了這一愿望。在那里，他一年只需工作6周就可掙足生活費，剩下46周可做自己愛做的事。他通常用寫作和觀察自然來“打發(fā)”時間?！锻郀柕呛肪褪撬e適田園生活的收獲。

本文節(jié)選自《瓦爾登湖》中關于閱讀的篇章。梭羅引用詩人烏亭之語“靜坐不動而盡覽神界，此類益處我曾在書中得見”，一語道破閱讀的妙處。此外，作者對閱讀經(jīng)典原著的推崇和對閱讀庸俗文學的嘲諷，都值得現(xiàn)代人深思。

My residence was more favorable, not only to thought, but to serious reading, than a university; and though I was beyond the range of the ordinary circulating library, I had more than ever come within the influence of those books which circulate round the world, whose sentences were first written on bark, and are now merely copied from time to time on to linen paper. Says the poet Mir Camar Uddin Mast, “Being seated, to run through the region of the spiritual world; I have had this advantage in books. To be intoxicated by a single glass of wine; I have experienced this pleasure when I have drunk the liquor of the esoteric doctrines.”I kept Homer's Iliad on my table through the summer, though I looked at his page only now and then. Incessant labor with my hands, at first, for I had my house to finish and my beans to hoe at the same time, made more study impossible. Yet I sustained myself by the prospect of such reading in future. I read one or two shallow books of travel in the intervals of my work, till that employment made me ashamed of myself, and I asked where it was then that I lived.

The student may read Homer or Aeschylus in the Greek without danger of dissipation or luxuriousness, for it implies that he in some measure emulate their heroes, and consecrate morning hours to their pages. The heroic books, even if printed in the character of our mother tongue, will always be in a language dead to degenerate times; and we must laboriously seek the meaning of each word and line, conjecturing a larger sense than common use permits out of what wisdom and valor and generosity we have.

The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity. They seem as solitary, and the letter in which they are printed as rare and curious, as ever. It is worth the expense of youthful days and costly hours, if you learn only some words of an ancient language, which are raised out of the trivialness of the street to be perpetual suggestions and provocations. It is not in vain that the farmer remembers and repeats the few Latin words which he has heard. Men sometimes speak as if the study of the classics would at length make way for more modern and practical studies; but the adventurous student will always study classics, in whatever language they may be written and however ancient they may be. For what are the classics but the noblest recorded thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.

To read well, that is, to read true books in a true spirit, is a noble exercise, and one that will task the reader more than any exercise which the customs of the day esteem. It requires a training such as the athletes underwent, the steady intention almost of the whole life to this object. Books must be read as deliberately and reservedly as they were written. It is not enough even to be able to speak the language of that nation by which they are written, for there is a memorable interval between the spoken and the written language, the language heard and the language read. The one is commonly transitory, a sound, a tongue, a dialect merely, almost brutish, and we learn it unconsciously, like the brutes, of our mothers. The other is the maturity and experience of that; if that is our mother tongue, this is our father tongue, a reserved and select expression, too significant to be heard by the ear, which we must be born again in order to speak.

…

However much we may admire the orator's occasional bursts of eloquence, the noblest written words are commonly as far behind or above the fleeting spoken language as the firmament with its stars is behind the clouds. There are the stars, and they who can may read them. The astronomers forever comment on and observe them. They are not exhalations like our daily colloquies and vaporous breath. What is called eloquence in the forum is commonly found to be rhetoric in the study. The orator yields to the inspiration of a transient occasion, and speaks to the mob before him, to those who can hear him; but the writer, whose more equable life is his occasion, and who would be distracted by the event and the crowd which inspire the orator, speaks to the intellect and health of mankind, to all in any age who can understand him.

No wonder that Alexander carried the Iliad with him on his expeditions in a precious casket. A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself. It may be translated into every language, and not only be read but actually breathed from all human lips; —not be represented on canvas or in marble only, but be carved out of the breath of life itself. The symbol of an ancient man's thought becomes a modern man's speech. Two thousand summers have imparted to the monuments of Grecian literature, as to her marbles, only a maturer golden and autumnal tint, for they have carried their own serene and celestial atmosphere into all lands to protect them against the corrosion of time. Books are the treasured wealth of the world and the fit inheritance of generations and nations. Books, the oldest and the best, stand naturally and rightfully on the shelves of every cottage. They have no cause of their own to plead, but while they enlighten and sustain the reader his common sense will not refuse them. Their authors are a natural and irresistible aristocracy in every society, and, more than kings or emperors, exert an influence on mankind. When the illiterate and perhaps scornful trader has earned by enterprise and industry his coveted leisure and independence, and is admitted to the circles of wealth and fashion, he turns inevitably at last to those still higher but yet inaccessible circles of intellect and genius, and is sensible only of the imperfection of his culture and the vanity and insufficiency of all his riches, and further proves his good sense by the pains which be takes to secure for his children that intellectual culture whose want he so keenly feels; and thus it is that he becomes the founder of a family.

Those who have not learned to read the ancient classics in the language in which they were written must have a very imperfect knowledge of the history of the human race; for it is remarkable that no transcript of them has ever been made into any modern tongue, unless our civilization itself may be regarded as such a transcript. Homer has never yet been printed in English, nor Aeschylus, nor Virgil even—works as refined, as solidly done, and as beautiful almost as the morning itself; for later writers, say what we will of their genius, have rarely, if ever, equalled the elaborate beauty and finish and the lifelong and heroic literary labors of the ancients. They only talk of forgetting them who never knew them. It will be soon enough to forget them when we have the learning and the genius which will enable us to attend to and appreciate them. That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.

The works of the great poets have never yet been read by mankind, for only great poets can read them. They have only been read as the multitude read the stars, at most astrologically, not astronomically. Most men have learned to read to serve a paltry convenience, as they have learned to cipher in order to keep accounts and not be cheated in trade; but of reading as a noble intellectual exercise they know little or nothing; yet this only is reading, in a high sense, not that which lulls us as a luxury and suffers the nobler faculties to sleep the while, but what we have to stand on tip-toe to read and devote our most alert and wakeful hours to.

我的住處比大學更宜進行思考，更宜進行嚴肅的閱讀。雖然我讀的書在普通流動圖書館的借閱范圍外，我受傳世之書的影響卻最多。這些書的語句最初寫在樹皮上，如今經(jīng)過代代相傳才落于布紋紙上。詩人密爾·喀爾·烏亭·瑪斯脫說：“靜坐不動而盡覽神界，此類益處我曾在書中得見。一杯紅酒即令人沉醉，此類愉悅我曾在暢飲秘教之液時體驗?！蔽艺麄€夏天都把荷馬的《伊利亞特》放在桌邊，盡管只是偶爾翻看上幾頁。起初，我手頭有無盡的工作，既要蓋房又需種豆，使得我沒時間讀書。但我告訴自己，以后會有讀它的機會。我在工作間歇讀了一兩本膚淺的游記，直到我自慚形穢，我捫心自問，自己到底住在什么地方。

學者閱讀希臘文的荷馬或埃斯庫羅斯作品，或許不會有奢侈浪費的危險。因為這暗示著，他在某種程度上會效仿書中英雄，將神圣的清晨時光奉獻給書頁。這些偉大的書籍，即使以我們的母語印成，也總會在衰退的時代變成死去的語言。因此我們必須努力尋找每個詞、每句話的含義，用我們擁有的智慧、勇氣和氣量去推測它們超越普通用法的深遠涵義。

廉價而眾多的現(xiàn)代版本及其各種譯本，并未拉近我們和古時偉大作家的距離。這些作品看上去仍然寂寞，書中文字仍然一如既往地稀奇。年輕時值得花點時間學習一門古代語言，即便只學到一些詞語也好。那些街頭瑣事中提煉出的語言，是那么意味深長、啟迪心智。農(nóng)夫將聽見的幾個拉丁詞記在心中、掛在嘴邊，這并非徒勞無益。人們有時會說，對經(jīng)典的研究最終會讓位于更時興、更實用的研究，但愛冒險的學者總會去研究經(jīng)典，無論它們以哪種語言寫成，無論這些書有多古老。原因在于，難道經(jīng)典不是人類思想最崇高的記錄嗎？它們是唯一不朽的神諭。德爾斐1和多多那2神殿無法解答的現(xiàn)代問題，在經(jīng)典中卻可以找到答案。如果因為經(jīng)典古老就不去研究，那我們也無須研究古老的大自然了。

好好閱讀，即閱讀擁有真正靈魂的真正的書籍，是一種崇高的鍛煉，這種鍛煉比讀者平常習慣的鍛煉更加艱難。讀者需要接受運動員般的訓練，并且持之以恒，終生全心投入。閱讀時應當如作者寫書時一般謹慎矜持。能用該書所用的語言講話還不足以閱讀該書，因為口語和書面語——聆聽的語言和閱讀的語言——之間存在顯著的差別?？谡Z通常是暫時性的，不過是一種聲音、一種語言、一種土話，幾乎可以說是野蠻的，我們像野蠻人一樣從母親那里無意識地習得。書面語則是口語的成熟洗練版。如果說口語是母語，書面語則是父語。后者是含蓄委婉地選詞擇句后的表達，意味深長到不能只用耳傾聽，我們必須重生才能張口說出。

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無論我們多么欽佩演說家偶爾的雄辯，最崇高的文字通常隱藏在瞬息即逝的口語背后，就像隱藏在浮云背后的群星閃耀的蒼穹。群星在天空閃耀，凡能觀察者皆可解讀星空。天文學家永遠在觀察星空、解釋群星。它們不像我們的日常對話和呼吸，不會隨風飄散。講壇上所謂的雄辯，在學者看來只是浮夸修辭。演說家依賴于轉瞬即逝的靈感，向面前的烏合之眾、向愿意聽他說的人雄辯滔滔。但對作家來說，較為穩(wěn)定平和的生活才是他們施展抱負的舞臺，讓演說家熱血沸騰的事件和人群只會讓他們心煩意亂。他們只向智者和健康者、向每個時代理解他們的人娓娓道來。

無怪乎亞歷山大遠征時將《伊利亞特》裝在寶匣中隨身攜帶。撰寫的文字是最上等的圣物。它比其他藝術品更加普及，和我們也更加親密。它是最接近生命本身的藝術品。它能被譯為各種文字，不僅可以讓人閱讀，還可以在人類唇間呼吸吞吐。它不僅呈現(xiàn)為油畫和大理石雕像，還展現(xiàn)為生命本身的呼吸。古代智者的思想象征成為現(xiàn)代人的言談。在希臘文學的遺跡上，兩千載光陰只留下了一抹深邃的秋色，正如它在大理石雕像上留下的一抹金色。因為希臘文學帶著獨特的寧靜安詳和神圣氣息，傳播到世界各地，為自己抵御了時間的剝蝕。書是全世界的珍寶，是每一代人、每個民族的優(yōu)秀遺產(chǎn)。最老最好的書自然應當置于每間屋舍的書架之上。書沒有理由為自己申訴，但隨著讀者從中獲得啟迪和支持，他具備的常識就會讓他接受書。在任何一個社會里，書的作者都必然是精英貴族，對全人類的影響遠在帝王之上。當一個目不識丁、或許遭人鄙夷的商人靠勤奮進取獲得了閑暇和自由，成功躋身于百萬富翁和時尚人士的圈子，他最后會不可避免地希望進入智者和天才的圈子，盡管那個圈子仍然高不可攀。于是，他會發(fā)覺自己缺少文化修養(yǎng)，自己所有的財富也買不來文化。他會煞費苦心地讓孩子擁有自己求之不得的文化氛圍，以此證明自己的良好品味，并進而成為了一個家族的創(chuàng)始人。

沒有學會閱讀古代經(jīng)典的原版著作之人，對人類歷史的了解存在極大的缺陷。因為值得注意的是，沒有一部古代經(jīng)典被譯成了現(xiàn)代語言，除非你認為我們的文明本身就是一份副本。荷馬的著作沒有被譯成英文，埃斯庫羅斯和維吉爾也沒有——那是多么精煉優(yōu)美的作品，美得一如黎明。至于后世作家，即使被我們稱為才華橫溢，也極少能寫出像古代作家那樣復雜精致、完美無缺的豪邁杰作。只有不知道它們的人，才會叫人忘記它們。如果我們擁有學問和天賦，能夠接近和欣賞它們，便會迅速忘記那些人的話。當那些被稱為“經(jīng)典”的圣物持續(xù)增多，當那些更加古老、更不為人所知的各民族經(jīng)文不斷累積，當梵蒂岡堆滿了吠陀經(jīng)、阿維斯陀經(jīng)、《圣經(jīng)》以及荷馬、但丁、莎士比亞的作品，當未來的歲月在世界的講壇上堆滿自己的紀念品，那個時代將是多么富庶。借著這樣的書堆，我們或許有希望攀上天堂。

人類從未閱讀過偉大詩人的作品，因為只有偉大詩人能夠理解它們。人類閱讀這些詩篇就像大多數(shù)人解讀星空，最多是星象學意義上的觀察，而不是天文學意義上的研究。大多數(shù)人學習閱讀是為了尋個小方便，就像他們學算術是為了記賬和免得做買賣受騙；但他們并不清楚或根本不知道，閱讀是一種崇高的智力鍛煉。從高級的層面看，閱讀不是一種奢侈的享受，使我們高貴的能力沉沉睡去；相反，我們要踮起足尖以集中注意力，將最警覺、最清醒的時刻獻給閱讀。

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1．德爾斐，希臘太陽神阿波羅的神殿所在地。古人有重大疑難問題時會到此占卜，請求神冥指點前程迷津。

2．多多那，希臘眾神之神宙斯的神諭圣殿所在地。