Reading 阅读
Reading
阅 读
Henry David Thoreau
亨利·戴维·梭罗
作者简介
亨利·戴维·梭罗（Henry David Thoreau，1817—1862），美国超验主义作家、诗人和思想家。梭罗生前只出版过两本书，其一是1854年出版的《瓦尔登湖》（Walden）。他在生前鲜为人知，20世纪后才逐渐在世界范围内产生巨大影响。
梭罗崇尚回归自然。他曾说，要将《圣经》里说的一周工作6天休息1天，改为工作1天休息6天。他在瓦尔登湖实现了这一愿望。在那里，他一年只需工作6周就可挣足生活费，剩下46周可做自己爱做的事。他通常用写作和观察自然来“打发”时间。《瓦尔登湖》就是他闲适田园生活的收获。
本文节选自《瓦尔登湖》中关于阅读的篇章。梭罗引用诗人乌亭之语“静坐不动而尽览神界，此类益处我曾在书中得见”，一语道破阅读的妙处。此外，作者对阅读经典原著的推崇和对阅读庸俗文学的嘲讽，都值得现代人深思。
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.
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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.
我的住处比大学更宜进行思考，更宜进行严肃的阅读。虽然我读的书在普通流动图书馆的借阅范围外，我受传世之书的影响却最多。这些书的语句最初写在树皮上，如今经过代代相传才落于布纹纸上。诗人密尔·喀尔·乌亭·玛斯脱说：“静坐不动而尽览神界，此类益处我曾在书中得见。一杯红酒即令人沉醉，此类愉悦我曾在畅饮秘教之液时体验。”我整个夏天都把荷马的《伊利亚特》放在桌边，尽管只是偶尔翻看上几页。起初，我手头有无尽的工作，既要盖房又需种豆，使得我没时间读书。但我告诉自己，以后会有读它的机会。我在工作间歇读了一两本肤浅的游记，直到我自惭形秽，我扪心自问，自己到底住在什么地方。
学者阅读希腊文的荷马或埃斯库罗斯作品，或许不会有奢侈浪费的危险。因为这暗示着，他在某种程度上会效仿书中英雄，将神圣的清晨时光奉献给书页。这些伟大的书籍，即使以我们的母语印成，也总会在衰退的时代变成死去的语言。因此我们必须努力寻找每个词、每句话的含义，用我们拥有的智慧、勇气和气量去推测它们超越普通用法的深远涵义。
廉价而众多的现代版本及其各种译本，并未拉近我们和古时伟大作家的距离。这些作品看上去仍然寂寞，书中文字仍然一如既往地稀奇。年轻时值得花点时间学习一门古代语言，即便只学到一些词语也好。那些街头琐事中提炼出的语言，是那么意味深长、启迪心智。农夫将听见的几个拉丁词记在心中、挂在嘴边，这并非徒劳无益。人们有时会说，对经典的研究最终会让位于更时兴、更实用的研究，但爱冒险的学者总会去研究经典，无论它们以哪种语言写成，无论这些书有多古老。原因在于，难道经典不是人类思想最崇高的记录吗？它们是唯一不朽的神谕。德尔斐1和多多那2神殿无法解答的现代问题，在经典中却可以找到答案。如果因为经典古老就不去研究，那我们也无须研究古老的大自然了。
好好阅读，即阅读拥有真正灵魂的真正的书籍，是一种崇高的锻炼，这种锻炼比读者平常习惯的锻炼更加艰难。读者需要接受运动员般的训练，并且持之以恒，终生全心投入。阅读时应当如作者写书时一般谨慎矜持。能用该书所用的语言讲话还不足以阅读该书，因为口语和书面语——聆听的语言和阅读的语言——之间存在显著的差别。口语通常是暂时性的，不过是一种声音、一种语言、一种土话，几乎可以说是野蛮的，我们像野蛮人一样从母亲那里无意识地习得。书面语则是口语的成熟洗练版。如果说口语是母语，书面语则是父语。后者是含蓄委婉地选词择句后的表达，意味深长到不能只用耳倾听，我们必须重生才能张口说出。
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无论我们多么钦佩演说家偶尔的雄辩，最崇高的文字通常隐藏在瞬息即逝的口语背后，就像隐藏在浮云背后的群星闪耀的苍穹。群星在天空闪耀，凡能观察者皆可解读星空。天文学家永远在观察星空、解释群星。它们不像我们的日常对话和呼吸，不会随风飘散。讲坛上所谓的雄辩，在学者看来只是浮夸修辞。演说家依赖于转瞬即逝的灵感，向面前的乌合之众、向愿意听他说的人雄辩滔滔。但对作家来说，较为稳定平和的生活才是他们施展抱负的舞台，让演说家热血沸腾的事件和人群只会让他们心烦意乱。他们只向智者和健康者、向每个时代理解他们的人娓娓道来。
无怪乎亚历山大远征时将《伊利亚特》装在宝匣中随身携带。撰写的文字是最上等的圣物。它比其他艺术品更加普及，和我们也更加亲密。它是最接近生命本身的艺术品。它能被译为各种文字，不仅可以让人阅读，还可以在人类唇间呼吸吞吐。它不仅呈现为油画和大理石雕像，还展现为生命本身的呼吸。古代智者的思想象征成为现代人的言谈。在希腊文学的遗迹上，两千载光阴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。因为希腊文学带着独特的宁静安详和神圣气息，传播到世界各地，为自己抵御了时间的剥蚀。书是全世界的珍宝，是每一代人、每个民族的优秀遗产。最老最好的书自然应当置于每间屋舍的书架之上。书没有理由为自己申诉，但随着读者从中获得启迪和支持，他具备的常识就会让他接受书。在任何一个社会里，书的作者都必然是精英贵族，对全人类的影响远在帝王之上。当一个目不识丁、或许遭人鄙夷的商人靠勤奋进取获得了闲暇和自由，成功跻身于百万富翁和时尚人士的圈子，他最后会不可避免地希望进入智者和天才的圈子，尽管那个圈子仍然高不可攀。于是，他会发觉自己缺少文化修养，自己所有的财富也买不来文化。他会煞费苦心地让孩子拥有自己求之不得的文化氛围，以此证明自己的良好品味，并进而成为了一个家族的创始人。
没有学会阅读古代经典的原版著作之人，对人类历史的了解存在极大的缺陷。因为值得注意的是，没有一部古代经典被译成了现代语言，除非你认为我们的文明本身就是一份副本。荷马的著作没有被译成英文，埃斯库罗斯和维吉尔也没有——那是多么精炼优美的作品，美得一如黎明。至于后世作家，即使被我们称为才华横溢，也极少能写出像古代作家那样复杂精致、完美无缺的豪迈杰作。只有不知道它们的人，才会叫人忘记它们。如果我们拥有学问和天赋，能够接近和欣赏它们，便会迅速忘记那些人的话。当那些被称为“经典”的圣物持续增多，当那些更加古老、更不为人所知的各民族经文不断累积，当梵蒂冈堆满了吠陀经、阿维斯陀经、《圣经》以及荷马、但丁、莎士比亚的作品，当未来的岁月在世界的讲坛上堆满自己的纪念品，那个时代将是多么富庶。借着这样的书堆，我们或许有希望攀上天堂。
人类从未阅读过伟大诗人的作品，因为只有伟大诗人能够理解它们。人类阅读这些诗篇就像大多数人解读星空，最多是星象学意义上的观察，而不是天文学意义上的研究。大多数人学习阅读是为了寻个小方便，就像他们学算术是为了记账和免得做买卖受骗；但他们并不清楚或根本不知道，阅读是一种崇高的智力锻炼。从高级的层面看，阅读不是一种奢侈的享受，使我们高贵的能力沉沉睡去；相反，我们要踮起足尖以集中注意力，将最警觉、最清醒的时刻献给阅读。
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1．德尔斐，希腊太阳神阿波罗的神殿所在地。古人有重大疑难问题时会到此占卜，请求神冥指点前程迷津。
2．多多那，希腊众神之神宙斯的神谕圣殿所在地。
