旅行的艺术:对旅行的期待-6

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在岛上的第一天早上，我醒得很早。披上酒店提供的睡袍，我走到阳台上。东方出现了第一线曙光，天色是浅淡的灰蓝。一晚喧嚣过后，一切的生灵，甚至于风都似乎在沉睡，是在图书馆里的那种寂静。酒店房间往外，绵亘着的，是宽阔的海滩。视野里首先出现的是一些椰子树，而后是宽阔的沙滩和无垠的大海。我越过阳台的低栏杆，穿行在沙滩上。大自然在这里充分展示她的柔情。似乎是要着意补偿她在别的地方的粗鲁狂暴，大自然在这里留下了一个小小的马蹄形海湾，并决意在且只在这里展呈她的慷慨和仁爱。椰子树提供阴凉和奶汁，沙滩上布满贝壳，沙子细腻润滑，是骄阳下饱满成熟的麦穗般金黄的颜色，还有那空气，即便在树阴下，也暖润十足，全然不同于北欧空气中的热度，脆弱不常，甚至在盛夏，空气中的温暖也总可能消失，取而代之的是其固执和特有的寒意。

Awakening early on that first morning, I slipped on a dressing gown provided by the hotel and went out on to the veranda. In the dawn light the sky was a pale grey-blue and, after the rustlings of the night before, all the creatures and even the wind seemed in deep sleep. It was as quiet as a library. Beyond the hotel room stretched a wide beach which was covered at first with coconut trees and then sloped unhindered towards the sea. I climbed over the veranda's low railing and walked across the sand. Nature was at her most benevolent. It was as if, in creating this small horseshoe bay, she had chosen to atone for her ill-temper in other regions and decided for once to display only her munificence. The trees provided shade and milk, the floor of the sea was lined with shells, the sand was powdery and the colour of sun-ripened wheat, and the air-even in the shade-had an enveloping, profound warmth to it so unlike the fragility of northern European heat, always prone to cede, even in midsummer, to a more assertive, proprietary chill.

在海边，我找了一把躺椅躺下。耳旁涛声絮语，像是一个友善的巨怪小心地从高脚酒杯里汲水时发出的声音。几只早起的海鸟带着黎明时的兴奋，在海空中疾飞。身后，从树的间隔看去，是度假房的椰纤屋顶。而呈现在眼前的是平缓的海滩，舒展着温柔的曲线，一直延伸到海湾尽头，再往后则是热带林木葱茏的群山。视野里的第一排椰子树朝着蔚蓝的大海不规则地倾斜，似乎故意伸长脖子，以更佳的角度迎向太阳，此情此景，正是我在画册上看到的情形。

I found a deck chair at the edge of the sea. I could hear small lapping sounds beside me, as if a kindly monster was taking discreet sips of water from a large goblet. A few birds were waking up and beginning to career through the air in matinal excitement. Behind me, the raffia roofs of the hotel bungalows were visible through gaps in the trees. Before me was a view that I recognized from the brochure: the beach stretched away in a gentle curve towards the tip of the bay, behind it were junglecovered hills, and the first row of coconut trees inclined irregularly towards the turquoise sea, as though some of them were craning their necks to catch a better angle of the sun.

然而，上面的描述并没有真切地体现我在那天早上的心境，因为我当时的心情不仅困惑，而且沮丧，全然没有当时的“此情此景”可能传寓的轻松。我也许注意到了几只海鸟带着黎明时的兴奋在海空中疾飞，但我当时的注意力为别的一些事件所分散，它们同“此情此景”既不相关也不协调，其中有在飞行途中开始发作的喉痛，担心同事可能没收到我将外出的通知，两个太阳穴发胀，以及越来越强烈的便意等等。直到那时，我才第一次意识到一个先前被忽视的重大事实：在不经意中，我已经到了这个岛上。

Yet this description only imperfectly reflects what occurred within me that morning, for my attention was in truth far more fractured and confused than the foregoing paragraphs suggest. I may have noticed a few birds careering through the air in matinal excitement, but my awareness of them was weakened by a number of other, incongruous and unrelated elements, among these, a sore throat that I had developed during the flight, a worry at not having informed a colleague that I would be away, a pressure across both temples and a rising need to visit the bathroom. A momentous but until then overlooked fact was making its first appearance: that I had inadvertently brought myself with me to the island.

我们专注于一个地方的图片和文字描述时，往往容易忘记自我。在家时，我的眼睛反复盯住巴巴多斯岛的每一张摄影图片，并没有想到眼睛其实是和身体，以及在旅行中相伴相随的我们的心智密不可分的；而且在很多情形下，由于它们的在场，我们眼之所见便部分、甚至全部地失去了意义。在家中，我可以专注于酒店房间、海滩或天空的图片而忽略跟它们密切相关的复杂环境，而这些图片所反映的只不过是更宽广、更繁杂的生活的一小部分。

It is easy to forget ourselves when we contemplate pictorial and verbal descriptions of places. At home, as my eyes had panned over photographs of Barbados, there were no reminders that those eyes were intimately tied to a body and mind which would travel with me wherever I went and that might, over time, assert their presence in ways that would threaten or even negate the purpose of what the eyes had come there to see. At home, I could concentrate on pictures of a hotel room, a beach or a sky and ignore the complex creature in which this observation was taking place and for whom this was only a small part of a larger, more multifaceted task of living.

我的身体和心灵是难缠的旅伴，难以欣赏这趟旅行之美。身体觉得在岛上难以入眠，抱怨天气太热、抱怨这里的苍蝇以及酒店里难以下咽的饭菜；心智呢，则感到焦虑、厌倦，还有无名的伤感，以及经济上的恐慌。

My body and mind were to prove temperamental accomplices in the mission of appreciating my destination. The body found it hard to sleep, it complained of heat, flies and difficulties digesting hotel meals. The mind meanwhile revealed a commitment to anxiety, boredom, free-floating sadness and financial alarm.

我们曾期望持久的满足感，但实际情形并非如此，处在一个地方所得的幸福感和同一个地方联系在一起的幸福感似乎一定只能是短暂的。对于敏感的心智而言，这种幸福感显然是一种偶然的现象——只是在那么一个短暂的时刻，我们将过去和未来的一些美好的思绪凝合在一起，所有焦虑顿然释解；我们沉浸于周围世界，真切地感受它们。遗憾的是，这种状况很少能持续10分钟，在我们的意识里，新的焦虑总在生成，一如爱尔兰岛西岸的寒湿气流，每隔几天总要登岛一次。过去的胜利不再辉煌，将来的情形显得复杂不定，影响到眼前的美景，它们也变得像总在我们周围的其他景观一样，让人视而不见。

It seems that, unlike the continuous, enduring contentment that we anticipate, happiness with, and in, a place must be a brief and, at least to the conscious mind, apparently haphazard phenomenon: an interval in which we achieve receptivity to the world around us, in which positive thoughts of past and future coagulate and anxieties are allayed. But the condition rarely endures for longer than ten minutes. New patterns of anxiety inevitably form on the horizon of consciousness, like the weather fronts that mass themselves every few days off the western coast of Ireland. The past victory no longer seems so impressive, the future acquires complications and the beautiful view becomes as invisible as anything which is always around.

我开始发现了一种我所未曾料想到的事实：那个呆在家里郁郁寡欢的我和现在这个正在巴巴多斯岛的我之间是连续的，并无二致；而与这种连续性相对应的是风景和气候上的非连续性——在岛上，甚至这里的空气似乎都是用一种甜润的、全然不同的物质生成的。

I was to discover an unexpected continuity between the melancholic self I had been at home and the person I was to be on the island, a continuity quite at odds with the radical discontinuity in the landscape and climate, where the very air seemed to be made of a different and sweeter substance.

第一天的上午10点左右，我和M躺在我们的沙滩小屋外的躺椅上。海湾的上空飘着一片似带羞涩的云朵。M戴上耳机，开始细读埃米尔·涂尔干的《论自杀》。我则环顾四周。对旁观者而言，“我”就在我躺着的地方。但实际上，“我”，这里指的是思绪中的我，已确切地离开了躯体，正焦虑着未来，特别是担心午餐费用是否已含在房费之内。两小时后，我们坐在酒店餐厅一角的餐桌旁享用着木瓜（午餐和当地消费税都包含在房费之内），那个曾离开躺椅上我的躯体的“我”又开始游离身外了，而且离开了巴巴多斯岛，到了一个在接下来的一年里我将要面对的问题工程的现场。

At mid-morning on that first day, M and I sat on deck chairs outside our beach hut. A single cloud hung shyly above the bay. M put on her headphones and began annotating Emile Durkheim's On Suicide . I looked around me. It would have seemed to observers that I was where I lay. But 'I'-that is, the conscious part of my self-had in truth abandoned the physical envelope in which it dwelt in order to worry about the future, or more specifically about the issue of whether lunches would be included in the price of the room. Two hours later, seated at a corner table in the hotel restaurant with a papaya (lunch and local taxes included), the I that had left my body on the deck chair now made another migration, quitting the island altogether, to visit a troubling project scheduled for the following year.

似乎早在几个世纪前，对于那些一直担忧未来事态的人们来说，其身上便有了一种非常重要的进化优势。这些先辈们也许未曾很好地享受他们的经历，但至少他们生存下来了，并塑就了他们后人的性格。反观他们的兄弟，那些当初纵情和只关注当下处境的人，却落得惨死野牛角下的下场。

It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants; while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood in, had met violent ends on the horns of unforeseen bison.

遗憾的是，我们很难回想起我们对未来近乎永恒的焦虑，因为当我们从一个地方旅行归来，最先从记忆中消失的便很可能是我们在刚刚过去的时间里对“将来”（即现在）是如何的焦虑，以及我们的思绪曾如何频繁地游离于旅行地之外。对一个地方的记忆图景和对它的期待图景中都有一种纯正性：是这一地方本身让自己凸现出来。

It is unfortunately hard to recall our quasi-permanent concern with the future, for on our return from a place, perhaps the first thing to disappear from memory is just how much of the past we spent dwelling on what was to come; how much of it, that is, we spent somewhere other than where we were. There is a purity both in the remembered and in the anticipated visions of a place: it is the place itself that is allowed to stand out.

如果在家里我还对巴巴多斯岛念念不忘，那也许是因为我从未认真仔细且长时间地阅览巴巴多斯岛的图片。假使我在桌上摆一张巴巴多斯岛的图片，强迫自己盯着它看上25分钟，我的心智和身体也自然会游移，为许多外在于巴巴多斯岛的焦虑所纠缠；我也许会因此更真切地体验到我们所身处的地方对我们心智的旅行的影响是如何之小。

If fidelity to a place had seemed possible from home, it was perhaps because I had never tried to stare at a picture of Barbados for any length of time. Had I laid one on a table and forced myself to look at it exclusively for twenty-five minutes, my mind and body would naturally have migrated towards a range of extrinsic concerns, and I might thereby have gained a more accurate sense of how little the place in which I stood had the power to influence what travelled through my mind.

这里出现了另一矛盾情形，只有当我们不必亲临某地去面对额外的挑战，我们方能最自如地置身其中，对此，德埃桑迪斯一定会感同身受。

In another paradox that Des Esseintes would have appreciated, it seems we may best be able to inhabit a place when we are not faced with the additional challenge of having to be there.