旅行的艺术:Ⅵ 壮阔-4

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黎明时分的西奈南部，给人的感觉是怎样的？4亿年前形成的幽谷、2300米高的花岗石山，以及陡峭谷壁上千年的侵蚀造就了它。人在这些壮阔景观面前，就像迟来的尘埃。与这般壮丽景致的交会，令人欣喜、陶醉，也让人在面对宇宙的力量、更迭和浩瀚时，深感人类的脆弱与渺小。

The southern Sinai at dawn. What then is this feeling? It is generated by a valley created 400 million years ago, by a granite mountain 2,300 metres high and by the erosion of millennia marked on the walls of a succession of steep canyons. Beside all three man seems merely dust postponed: the sublime as an encounter, pleasurable, intoxicating even, with human weakness in the face of the strength, age and size of the universe.

我的背包里有一把手电筒、一顶太阳帽和一部伯克 [7] 的著作。伯克24岁时，放弃在伦敦的法律研究之后，就写了《关于壮阔和美丽理念之源的哲学探究》。他直截了当地表示：景致之壮阔和脆弱的感觉有关。很多景致是美丽的，例如：春天的草原、柔美的山谷、橡树和河畔小花（尤其是雏菊），不过这些景致并不壮阔。“壮阔和美丽常被人混淆，”他抱怨道，“两者所指相差很远，有时性质可说是南辕北辙。”对于那些从丘园瞭望泰晤士河，然后惊叹泰晤士河是何等壮阔的人，这位年轻的哲学家显露出了一丝的不耐烦。一种景致只有让人感受到力量，一种大过人类、甚至是威胁到人类的力量，才能称之为壮阔。壮阔之地具体表现了人类意志所不能左右的力量。他用耕牛和野牛作比较来说明这个道理：“耕牛力气很大，但是它是温驯的，任劳任怨，不构成任何威胁，因此耕牛并不会给人以雄伟的感觉。野牛的力气也很大，但是这种力气属于另外一种，往往是非常具有破坏性……因此野牛给人的感觉是雄伟无比的，壮阔的感觉也是如此。”

In my backpack, I am carrying a torch, a sunhat and Edmund Burke. At the age of twenty-four, after giving up his legal studies in London, Burke composed A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. He was categorical: sublimity had to do with a feeling of weakness. Many landscapes were beautiful. Meadows in spring, soft valleys, oak trees, banks of flowers (daisies especially). But they were not sublime. 'The ideas of the sublime and beautiful are frequently confounded,' he complained, 'both are indiscriminately applied to things greatly differing and sometimes of natures directly opposite'-a trace of irritation in the young philosopher with those who might have gasped at the Thames from Kew and called that sublime. A landscape could arouse the sublime only when it suggested power, power greater than that of humans and threatening to them. Sublime places embodied a defiance to our will. Burke illustrated the argument with an analogy about oxen and bulls: 'An ox is a creature of vast strength; but he is an innocent creature, extremely serviceable, and not at all dangerous; for which reason the idea of an ox is by no means grand. A bull is strong too; but his strength is of another kind; often very destructive … the idea of a bull is therefore great, and it has frequently a place in sublime descriptions, and elevating comparisons.'

世界上有“耕牛般”的景致，没有杀伤力，“一点也不危险”，并顺从人类的意志。伯克年少时就曾经到过这么一个地方，也就是基尔代尔郡巴丽多村里的一所贵格会寄宿学校。这个地方位于都柏林西南30英里处，有大片的农田、果园、树篱、河流和花园。世界上也有一些“野牛般”的景致。伯克列举了这些景致的特征：庞大、空旷、晦暗，而且这些景致因具有一致而延绵不绝的特质，看起来无穷无尽。西奈沙漠就是其中之一。

There were ox-like landscapes: innocent and 'not at all dangerous', pliable to the human will. Burke had spent his youth in one, at a Quaker boarding school in the village of Ballitore in County Kildare, thirty miles south-west of Dublin, a landscape of farms, orchards, hedges, rivers and gardens. Then there were bulllike landscapes. Burke enumerated their features: vast, empty, often dark and apparently infinite, because of the uniformity and succession of their elements. The Sinai was among them.