悠游度过一天的24小时：第五章 网球与不朽的灵魂

CHAPTER V Tennis And The Immortal Soul

第五章 网球与不朽的灵魂

You get into the morning train with your newspaper, and you calmly and majestically give yourself up to your newspaper. You do not hurry. You know you have at least half an hour of security in front of you. As your glance lingers idly at the advertisements of shipping and of songs on the outer pages, your air is the air of a leisured man, wealthy in time, of a man from some planet where there are a hundred and twenty-four hours a day instead of twenty-four. I am an impassioned reader of newspapers. I read five English and two French dailies, and the news-agents alone know how many weeklies, regularly. I am obliged to mention this personal fact lest I should be accused of a prejudice against newspapers when I say that I object to the reading of newspapers in the morning train. Newspapers are produced with rapidity, to be read with rapidity. There is no place in my daily programme for newspapers. I read them as I may in odd moments. But I do read them. The idea of devoting to them thirty or forty consecutive minutes of wonderful solitude (for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males) is to me repugnant. I cannot possibly allow you to scatter priceless pearls of time with such Oriental lavishness. You are not the Shah of time. Let me respectfully remind you that you have no more time than I have. No newspaper reading in trains! I have already "put by" about three-quarters of an hour for use.

你拿着报纸，登上早晨的列车，心平气静、泰然自若地读起报来。你一点也不着急，知道自己至少可以这样安安稳稳地呆半个小时。你的目光在报纸外页那些送货和歌曲广告中晃悠，俨然一副逍遥自在的神态，仿佛时间绰绰有余，好似你所在的星球，一天不是24小时，而是124小时。我酷爱读报，每天读五份英文日报、两份法文日报，至于我平常阅读的周报的数量，也只有报纸经销商知道了。我不得不提及这一个人爱好，是为了防备有人指责我反对早上坐车时读报是对报纸有偏见。报纸匆促地刊印，人们匆促地阅读。我的日程表里，没有专门的读报时间。我利用短暂的闲暇读报，但我确实也读报。而连续花三四十分钟独处的美妙时光读报（因为除了呆在满车厢安静、内敛、抽烟的男子中间以外，很难在其他场合得以彻底地沉浸于自我），这种想法让我受不了。我不能允许你这般浪费时间这无价之宝，就像奢侈的东方财主在肆意挥霍。你不是主宰时间的帝王。让我虔敬地提醒你，你拥有的时间并不比我多。不要在列车上读报！这样我又“储存”了45分钟可利用的时间。

Now you reach your office. And I abandon you there till six o'clock. I am aware that you have nominally an hour (often in reality an hour and a half) in the midst of the day, less than half of which time is given to eating. But I will leave you all that to spend as you choose. You may read your newspapers then.

此时你已到办公室。下午6点前，我都不管你。我知道午间通常有一个小时休息时间（事实上往往是一个半小时），午餐用不了其中一半的时间。我可以让你自由安排那段时间，你还可以在那时读报。

I meet you again as you emerge from your office. You are pale and tired. At any rate, your wife says you are pale, and you give her to understand that you are tired. During the journey home you have been gradually working up the tired feeling. The tired feeling hangs heavy over the mighty suburbs of London like a virtuous and melancholy cloud, particularly in winter. You don't eat immediately on your arrival home. But in about an hour or so you feel as if you could sit up and take a little nourishment. And you do. Then you smoke, seriously; you see friends; you potter; you play cards; you flirt with a book; you note that old age is creeping on; you take a stroll; you caress the piano.... By Jove! a quarter past eleven. You then devote quite forty minutes to thinking about going to bed; and it is conceivable that you are acquainted with a genuinely good whisky. At last you go to bed, exhausted by the day's work. Six hours, probably more, have gone since you left the office— gone like a dream, gone like magic, unaccountably gone!

你从办公室出来，我就又和你在一起了。你脸色苍白、疲惫不堪。不管怎样，你妻子说你气色不佳，你也的确给她这种感觉。回家路上，倦意越来越浓。疲倦就像那笼罩着伦敦郊外上空的沉沉阴霾，尤其是在冬天。你到家后并不立即用餐。过了差不多半小时，你觉得该坐起来吸收点营养了，你才吃东西。接着认真地抽起烟来、会见朋友、悠哉游哉、打牌、翻翻书、意识到年龄不饶人、散散步、摸摸钢琴……天哪！转眼就是11点一刻。接下来足足40分钟时间你在想是否该上床睡觉；可以想象你经常喝上好的威士忌。最后，累了一天的你终于上床睡觉了。从你离开办公室算起，六小时，也可能更多的时间就如梦一般神奇地消失了，说不清楚怎样就那么消失了。

That is a fair sample case. But you say: "It's all very well for you to talk. A man is tired. A man must see his friends. He can't always be on the stretch." Just so. But when you arrange to go to the theatre (especially with a pretty woman) what happens? You rush to the suburbs; you spare no toil to make yourself glorious in fine raiment; you rush back to town in another train; you keep yourself on the stretch for four hours, if not five; you take her home; you take yourself home. You don't spend three-quarters of an hour in "thinking about" going to bed. You go. Friends and fatigue have equally been forgotten, and the evening has seemed so exquisitely long (or perhaps too short)! And do you remember that time when you were persuaded to sing in the chorus of the amateur operatic society, and slaved two hours every other night for three months? Can you deny that when you have something definite to look forward to at eventide, something that is to employ all your energy—the thought of that something gives a glow and a more intense vitality to the whole day?

这是一个很典型的例子。但你说：“随你怎么说，但我确实疲惫了，也必须见朋友，不能总是把弦绷得紧紧的。”言之有理。然而假如你去剧院看戏（特别是同漂亮女人一道），情况会怎样呢？你匆忙赶去郊区，费尽周折翻腾出漂亮的衣服，把自己打扮得光鲜体面，又乘下一辆车赶回城里；这样纵使不是五个小时，也至少有四个小时你的精神都很紧张；你把她送回家，然后自己才回家，你不会花45分钟时间去“考虑”该不该睡觉，就立刻上床了。朋友和疲惫都被抛诸脑后，那个夜晚对你来说是多么漫长（或特别短暂）！可曾记得你在别人的劝说下参加业余剧团大合唱，三个月里隔天的晚上都艰苦训练两小时的日子？黄昏时分有所期盼，要全副精力地去做事——想到这就令你整天的生活焕然生辉，活力倍增，你能否认这一点吗？

What I suggest is that at six o'clock you look facts in the face and admit that you are not tired (because you are not, you know), and that you arrange your evening so that it is not cut in the middle by a meal. By so doing you will have a clear expanse of at least three hours. I do not suggest that you should employ three hours every night of your life in using up your mental energy. But I do suggest that you might, for a commencement, employ an hour and a half every other evening in some important and consecutive cultivation of the mind. You will still be left with three evenings for friends, bridge, tennis, domestic scenes, odd reading, pipes, gardening, pottering, and prize competitions. You will still have the terrific wealth of forty-four hours between 2 p.m. Saturday and 10 a.m. Monday. If you persevere you will soon want to pass four evenings, and perhaps five, in some sustained endeavour to be genuinely alive. And you will fall out of that habit of muttering to yourself at 11.15 p.m., "Time to be thinking about going to bed." The man who begins to go to bed forty minutes before he opens his bedroom door is bored; that is to say, he is not living.

我想对你提的建议是，在每天下午6点正视事实、承认自己并不疲倦（因为，你知道自己确实不疲倦），安排好晚间生活，中途不要让晚餐打断。这样一来，你就至少连续拥有三个小时的时间，我不是说你一辈子都应该用每晚三个小时耗尽所有脑力。但我确实建议，作为开端，你可以每隔一天晚上用一个半小时做一些重要的、能不断提升心智的事情。你还有三个晚上可以会朋友、玩桥牌、打网球、料理家事、随便翻翻书、吸几口烟、种植花木、溜达或参加有奖竞赛。你仍然拥有从周六下午2点到下周一早上10点之间44个小时的时间，这是一笔绝佳的财富。如果你坚持不懈，很快你就会乐意投入四个甚至五个晚上做那项需要持续投入精力的事情，过真正充实的生活。这样你就会戒掉以前的习惯——往往在晚上11点15分时喃喃自语：“该考虑睡觉了。”在推开卧室门之前40分钟就打算睡觉的人肯定是无聊至极，换句话说，他根本没有在生活。

But remember, at the star t, those ninety nocturnal minutes thrice a week must be the most important minutes in the ten thousand and eighty. They must be sacred, quite as sacred as a dramatic rehearsal or a tennis match. Instead of saying, "Sorry I can't see you, old chap, but I have to run off to the tennis club," you must say, "... but I have to work." This, I admit, is intensely difficult to say. Tennis is so much more urgent than the immortal soul.

但是要记住，开始时，一周三个晚上，每晚90分钟的时间是三天10,080分钟里最为重要的。那段时间必须是神圣的，就跟戏剧彩排或网球比赛一样神圣。不要说：“对不起，老伙计，我不能见你，我得赶紧去网球俱乐部了”；你应当说：“……不过我得工作了。”我承认，说出这话异常困难。与追求不朽的灵魂相比，打网球要急迫得多。