Part of a Man's Life: Books Unread　人生必经之途：未读之书

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2019年05月30日

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Part of a Man's Life: Books Unread

人生必经之途：未读之书

Thomas Wentworth Higginson

托马斯·温特沃斯·希金森

作者简介

托马斯·温特沃斯·希金森（Thomas Wentworth Higginson，1823—1911），美国教士、作家、激进的废奴主义者。他在19世纪四五十年代的废奴运动中非常活跃，在南北战争中为南军立下不少战功。内战结束后，他一直撰文维护黑人和妇女的权利，终其一生从未曾停下手中的笔。

希金森的作品文笔优雅，词情恳切，富有人文气息，充满对自然的向往。美国著名女诗人埃米莉·狄更生（Emily Dickinson）对希金森极为仰慕，曾去信恳求希金森担任其导师，并自称“您的学生”。两人一度保持通信，交流彼此对文学的看法。狄更生去世后，希金森等人整理出版的诗集引起世人关注，奠定了狄更生在美国文坛的地位。

希金森经常在《大西洋月刊》（Atlantic Monthly）上发表文章，狄更生最初就是通过此刊物与其相识的。本文首次发表于1904年《大西洋月刊》，对“梦中翻阅未读之书”的描写尤为精彩。读罢此文，你或许能够理解狄更生何以对其仰慕不已。

“No longer delude thyself; for thou wilt never read thine own memoranda, nor the recorded deeds of old Romans and Greeks, and those passages in books which thou hast been reserving for thine old age.”

In the gradual growth of every student's library, he may—or—may not continue to admit literary friends and advisers; but he will be sure, sooner or later, to send for a man with a tool-chest. Sooner or later, every nook and corner will be filled with books, every window will be more or less darkened, and added shelves must be devised. He may find it hard to achieve just the arrangement he wants, but he will find it hardest of all to meet squarely that inevitable inquiry of the puzzled carpenter as he looks about him, “Have you really read all these books?”The expected answer is, “To be sure, how can you doubt it?”Yet if you asked him in turn, “Have you actually used every tool in your tool-chest?”you would very likely be told, “Not one half as yet, at least this season; I have the others by me, to use as I need them.”Now if this reply can be fairly made in a simple, well-defined, distinctly limited occupation like that of a joiner, how much more inevitable it is in a pursuit which covers the whole range of thought and all the facts in the universe. The library is the author's tool-chest. He must at least learn, as he grows older, to take what he wants and to leave the rest.

This never was more tersely expressed than by Margaret Fuller when she says, “A man who means to think and write a great deal must, after six and twenty, learn to read with his fingers.”A few men of leisure may satisfy themselves by reading over and over a single book and ignoring all others, like that English scholar who read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey every year in the original, devoting a week to each canto, and reserving the minor poems for his summer vacation. Nay, there are books in the English language so vast that the ordinary reader recoils before their text and their footnotes.

Of course, the books which go most thoroughly unread are those which certainly are books, but of which we explore the backs only, as in fine old European libraries; books as sacredly preserved as was once that library at Blenheim—now long since dispersed—in which, when I idly asked the custodian whether she did not find it a great deal of trouble to keep them dusted, she answered with surprise, “No, sir, the doors have not been unlocked for ten years.”It is so in some departments of even American libraries.

Matthew Arnold once replied to a critic who accused him of a lack of learning that the charge was true, but that he often wished he had still less of that possession, so hard did he find it to carry lightly what he knew. The only knowledge that involves no burden lies, it may be justly claimed, in the books that are left unread. I mean those which remain undisturbed, long and perhaps forever, on a student's bookshelves; books for which he possibly economized, and to obtain which he went without his dinner; books on whose backs his eyes have rested a thousand times, tenderly and almost lovingly, until he has perhaps forgotten the very language in which they are written. He has never read them, yet during these years there has never been a day when he would have sold them; they are a part of his youth. In dreams he turns to them; in dreams he reads Hebrew again; he knows what a Differential Equation is; “how happy could he be with either.”He awakens, and whole shelves of his library are, as it were, like fair maidens who smiled on him in their youth but once, and then passed away. Under different circumstances, who knows but one of them might have been his? As it is, they have grown old apart from him; yet for him they retain their charms.

Books which we have first read in odd places always retain their charm, whether read or neglected. Thus Hazlitt always remembered that it was on the 10th of April, 1798, that he “set down to a volume of the New Eloise at the Inn at Llangollen over a bottle of sherry and a cold chicken.”In the same way I remember how Professor Longfellow in college recommended to us, for forming a good French style, to read Balzac's Peau de Chagrin; and yet it was a dozen years later before I found it in a country inn, on a lecture trip, and sat up half the night to read it. It may be, on the other hand, that such haphazard meetings with books sometimes present them under conditions hopelessly unfavorable, as when I encountered Whitman's Leaves of Grass for the first time on my first voyage in an Azorian barque; and it inspires to this day a slight sense of nausea, which it might, after all, have inspired equally on land.

Wordsworth says in his Personal Talk, “Dreams, books are each a world.”And the books unread mingle with the dreams and unite the charm of both. This applies especially, I think, to books of travel: we buy them, finding their attractions strong, but somehow we do not read them over and over, unless they prove to be such books as those of Urquhart—the Pillars of Hercules especially, where the wealth of learning and originality is so great that we seem in a different region of the globe on every page. One of the most poetic things about Whittier's temperament lay in this fact, that he felt most eager to visit each foreign country before he had read any book about it. After reading, the dream was half fulfilled, and he turned to something else, so that he died without visiting any foreign country. But the very possession of such books, and their presence on the shelves, carries one to the Arctic regions or to the Indian Ocean.

“After all,”as the brilliant and melancholy Rufus Choate said, “a book is the only immortality”and sometimes when a book is attacked and even denounced, its destiny of fame is only confirmed. Thus the vivacious and cheery Pope, Pio Nono, when asked by a too daring author to help on his latest publication, suggested that he could only aid it by putting it in the Index Expurgatorius. Yet if a book is to be left unread at last, the fault must ultimately rest on the author, even as the brilliant Lady Eastlake complained, when she wrote of modern English novelists, “Things are written now to be read once, and no more; that is, they are read as often as they deserve. A book in old times took five years to write and was read five hundred times by five hundred people. Now it is written in three months, and read once by five hundred thousand people. That's the proper proportion.”

“别再自欺欺人；因为你将再也无法阅读自己的备忘录、希腊罗马的先贤著作，或是为晚年预留的书中段落。”1

随着藏书日益增多，学者或许不承认文学是良师益友，但他迟早会需要找个木匠。迟早有一天，屋里每个角落都会被书占据，每扇窗户或多或少都会被书遮挡，有必要新添几个书架。他会发现，要把书收拾成理想的样子实在不易，但要回答木匠的提问更加困难。困惑的木匠四处张望一番后，不免要提出这样的问题：“你真的读过所有这些书？”他预计得到的答案是：“那当然，你难道还怀疑吗？”但如果你反问他：“你真的用过工具箱里的每件工具？”他很可能这么说：“一半都没用过呢，至少这个季节是这样。我还带着别的工具，需要的时候用得着。”如果我的回答也像木匠的一样简单、定义清晰、限定明确，那么“打破沙锅问到底”将更加不可避免。书房正是作家的工具箱。随着年龄的增长，他至少应该学会取舍。

对此，没有人比玛格丽特·富勒2表达得更加简明扼要。她说：“欲成为思想家之人，6岁后需学会‘动手’读书；欲成为作家之人，20岁后也需如此。”有些闲人满足于反复阅读同一本书，而忽视其他所有书。比如，某位英国学者每年都读一遍荷马的《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》3原本。他每周读一篇长诗，短诗则留到暑假读。然而，英文书籍如此浩瀚无垠，普通读者还没看到正文和脚注，就已经望而却步了。

当然，还有些书根本没人读。它们确确实实是书，但就像在很好的欧洲旧式图书馆里一样，人们只查看它们的书脊。这些书曾被郑重其事地保存在布伦海姆图书馆4里，不过如今早已散落八方。我曾顺口问过布伦海姆的书库保管员，让那些书保持清洁是不是很麻烦，她一脸惊讶地答道：“不麻烦，先生，书库大门已经10年没开过了。”美国图书馆的某些部门也是如此。

有位评论家曾指责马修·阿诺德5知识不够丰富。阿诺德回应说，这个说法完全正确，但他还常常希望能再少点，因为知识让人不堪重负，携现有知识已难轻装上阵。你或许可以理直气壮地宣称，唯一不会成为负担的知识只存在于没有读过的书里。我指的是学者书架上那些久被遗忘、或许将永被遗忘的书。为了那些书，他或许节俭度日；为了那些书，他或许不吃晚饭便跑去买；买回书之后，他曾带着爱意和柔情，千万次扫视它们的书脊，直到可能忘却它们是用何种语言写成。他从没读过那些书，但多年来从未动过卖书的念头；它们是他青春的一部分。在梦里，他会翻开那些书；在梦里，他又会读希伯来文了，也知道微分方程是什么了；“只会其中之一他也会开心！”他醒来，满架藏书依然如故，恰如青春少女对他嫣然一笑，然后便飘然而去。如果一切重来，梦中场景或能成真？现实中，书已老朽，离他远去；但对他而言，书的魅力犹存。

在非同寻常的情形下第一次读的书，无论你是读完了还是半途而废，它的魅力都将永存。哈兹利特6总是忆起1798年4月10日，他“坐在兰戈伦一间小酒馆里，就着一瓶雪利酒和一个鸡肉冷盘读《新爱洛伊丝》7。”我则以同样的方式忆起，大学里朗费罗教授推荐我们读巴尔扎克的《驴皮记》8，以便培养良好的法式格调；而直到十几年后，我在一次演说之旅中，在乡间客栈发现了这本书，才拿来熬夜苦读。有些时候，人和书的邂逅也会发生在不太理想的情况下。比如我初次遇见惠特曼的《草叶集》9时，正好赶上头一回坐亚速尔帆船出海。直至今日，翻开《草叶集》还会让我有点头晕目眩，即使在陆地上也一样。

华兹华斯在他的《私语》10中写道：“梦与书，各是一个世界。”未读之书与梦境交会，两者的魅力融于一体。我想，这句话尤其适合游记：我们买下游记，觉得它们极具吸引力，但我们不会一遍又一遍地阅读，除非是厄克赫特11的作品，尤其是像《赫拉克勒斯之柱》12这样知识丰富的原创作品，每一页都能让你驰骋于地球上不同的角落。惠蒂埃13的气质中最富诗意之处是，他在读关于某国的作品之前，极度渴望前往该国一游，但读完书后，梦想实现了一半，他就转头迷上了别国。因此直至去世，他从未踏出国门一步。但拥有这些游记，把它们搁在架上展示，足以让你的想象飞向南极或是印度洋。

正如才华横溢而忧郁深沉的鲁弗斯·乔特14所说，“毕竟，书是唯一不朽之物”。有时，人们抨击甚至谴责某书，只会让它一举成名。因此，当一位大胆的作家请教皇皮奥·诺诺15帮忙宣传新书时，这位诙谐的教皇表示，他只能帮忙将此书列入教廷禁书目录。但如果一本书最后无人阅读，作者本人应该对此负责。才华横溢的伊斯特莱克夫人16在描述英国现代小说家时，曾这样抱怨过：“如今的书写来只为让人读一遍，无需多读；也就是说，它们只配让人读一遍。过去一本书写好需要5年，会被500人读500遍；如今一本书写好只需3个月，会被50万人读一遍。这个比例很恰当。”

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1．节选自《沉思录》，古罗马皇帝马可·奥勒留·安东尼·奥古斯都的哲理闲思录。该书记录了作者对人生哲理的感悟，是古罗马斯多葛派哲学的里程碑。

2．萨拉·玛格丽特·富勒（Sarah Margaret Fuller，1810—1850），美国著名记者、评论家、作家。

3．史诗《伊利亚特》和《奥德赛》均以特洛伊战争为背景，相传为古希腊吟游诗人荷马所著。

4．布伦海姆图书馆，坐落于布伦海姆宫，藏书约1万册。

5．马修·阿诺德（Matthew Arnold，1822—1888），英国诗人、文艺评论家，牛津大学教授。

6．威廉·哈兹利特（William Hazlitt，1778—1830），英语随笔首屈一指的大家，英语文学批评的大家。

7．《新爱洛伊丝》，法国文学家让·雅克·卢梭的爱情小说，其中包含了卢梭的教育观点、文艺观点以及社会平等的思想。

8．《驴皮记》，法国文学家奥诺雷·德·巴尔扎克的第一部长篇哲理小说。

9．《草叶集》，美国著名诗人沃尔特·惠特曼的代表作。

10．《私语》是英国诗人威廉·华兹华斯的一首关于孤独的诗歌。

11．托马斯·厄克赫特（Thomas Urquhart，1611—1660），英国作家、翻译家。