旅行的艺术:Ⅵ 壮阔-3

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我们因一些风景而引发的情思，很少能用三言两语就形容出来：好比在初秋的黄昏看着天色渐渐暗去，或者在一片空旷的平地上看到一池静谧的湖水，我们往往要用一大堆拗口的词藻来描绘我们的情感。

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.

不过，到了18世纪初，终于出现了一个词，它能够清晰地反映出我们对悬崖峭壁、山川冰河，以及辽阔夜空和巨石林立的沙漠的特别感受。这个词就是“壮阔”（sublime），在这些景观面前，我们完全可以体会到这样的感受，而且一提到“壮阔”，别人也可以理解是什么样的风景。

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.

这个词源自公元200年左右，希腊作家隆吉努斯的一篇论文《论壮阔》。这篇文章后来被人遗忘，直到1712年重新翻译成英语，才重燃起评论家对它的强烈兴趣。虽然各家对这个词的分析不尽相同，但是基本共识非常明确，那就是把一系列似乎毫不相关的景致，依据它们的雄壮、空旷或险峻等特征，归纳成同一类，并指出这些景致能引起共鸣，让人产生一种美好而充满道德感的感受。景观的价值不再单纯依赖于正式的审美准则（比如颜色是否协调、线条是否匀称），也非基于经济或实用的考量，而是看它是否能引发壮阔的感觉。

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.

约瑟·艾迪生 [5] 在《论想象的愉悦》一文中写道，面对“一片广阔郊野、广垠荒芜的大沙漠、悬崖峭壁和浩瀚江河”，总会感觉到一种“美好的宁静和惊异”。希尔德布兰·雅各布也在《壮阔之观如何提升心灵》一文中，列出了能够引发这种感受的景致，它们包括：大海（不论平静还是波涛汹涌）、落日、悬崖、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.

旅人纷纷前去探密。1739年，诗人托马斯·格雷 [6] 到阿尔卑斯山远足，他是几个有意识地追求壮阔景致的先锋之一。他写道：“在登上大夏特鲁兹修道院的短途上，无需走上十步，就有令人叹为观止之处。这里没有悬崖峭壁，没有惊涛骇浪，却处处孕育着神圣而充满诗意的气息。”

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.'