旅行的艺术:对旅行的期待-5

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德埃桑迪斯曾试图到英国旅行，在这之前的许多年，他还想过到另一个国家旅行，这个国家就是荷兰。在动身前，他把荷兰想象成特尼尔斯[5] 、扬·斯丁 [6] 、伦勃朗 [7] 、奥斯塔德 [8] 的画作所描绘的地方。他期待那里有简单的家族生活，同时不乏肆意的狂欢；有宁静的小庭院，地上铺的是砖石，还可以看见脸色苍白的女仆倒牛奶。因此，他到哈勒姆和阿姆斯特丹旅行了一趟，结果当然是大失所望。尽管如此，那些画作并没有骗人，荷兰人的生活确有其简单和狂欢的一面，也有铺着砖石的漂亮庭院，能看到一些女佣在倒牛奶，然而，这些珍宝都混杂在一大堆乏味的日常影像中（如餐馆、办公楼、毫无特色的房屋、少有生机的田野等），只不过荷兰的画家们从不在他们的作品中展现这些普通的事物而已。旅行时，置身于真实的荷兰，我们的体验也因此奇怪而平淡，全然不及在罗浮宫的荷兰画作展厅里浏览一个下午来得兴奋，因为在这几间展室里，收藏有荷兰和荷兰人生活中最美好的方面。

There was one other country that, many years before his intended trip to England, Des Esseintes had wanted to see: Holland. He had imagined the place to resemble the paintings of Teniers and Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ostade; he had anticipated patriarchal simplicity and riotous joviality; quiet small brick courtyards and pale-faced maids pouring milk. And so he had journeyed to Haarlem and Amsterdam-and been greatly disappointed. It was not that the paintings had lied, there had been some simplicity and joviality, some nice brick courtyards and a few serving women pouring milk, but these gems were blended in a stew of ordinary images (restaurants, offices, uniform houses and featureless fields) which these Dutch artists had never painted and which made the experience of travelling in the country strangely diluted compared with an afternoon in the Dutch galleries of the Louvre, where the essence of Dutch beauty found itself collected in just a few rooms.

雅各布·冯·雷斯达尔：《阿尔克马尔风景》，1670—1675年

有些荒谬的是，旅程结束后，德埃桑迪斯发现在博物馆里欣赏荷兰画作更能让他体验到他所热爱的荷兰文化的方方面面，而这种体验，是他带着16件行李和两个仆从到荷兰旅行时所没有的。

Des Esseintes ended up in the paradoxical position of feeling more in Holland-that is, more intensely in contact with the elements he loved in Dutch culture-when looking at selected images of Holland in a museum than when travelling with sixteen pieces of luggage and two servants through the country itself.