旅行的藝術(shù):對旅行的期待-6

6

6

在島上的第一天早上，我醒得很早。披上酒店提供的睡袍，我走到陽臺上。東方出現(xiàn)了第一線曙光，天色是淺淡的灰藍。一晚喧囂過后，一切的生靈，甚至于風(fēng)都似乎在沉睡，是在圖書館里的那種寂靜。酒店房間往外，綿亙著的，是寬闊的海灘。視野里首先出現(xiàn)的是一些椰子樹，而后是寬闊的沙灘和無垠的大海。我越過陽臺的低欄桿，穿行在沙灘上。大自然在這里充分展示她的柔情。似乎是要著意補償她在別的地方的粗魯狂暴，大自然在這里留下了一個小小的馬蹄形海灣，并決意在且只在這里展呈她的慷慨和仁愛。椰子樹提供陰涼和奶汁，沙灘上布滿貝殼，沙子細膩潤滑，是驕陽下飽滿成熟的麥穗般金黃的顏色，還有那空氣，即便在樹陰下，也暖潤十足，全然不同于北歐空氣中的熱度，脆弱不常，甚至在盛夏，空氣中的溫暖也總可能消失，取而代之的是其固執(zhí)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.

在海邊，我找了一把躺椅躺下。耳旁濤聲絮語，像是一個友善的巨怪小心地從高腳酒杯里汲水時發(fā)出的聲音。幾只早起的海鳥帶著黎明時的興奮，在?？罩屑诧w。身后，從樹的間隔看去，是度假房的椰纖屋頂。而呈現(xiàn)在眼前的是平緩的海灘，舒展著溫柔的曲線，一直延伸到海灣盡頭，再往后則是熱帶林木蔥蘢的群山。視野里的第一排椰子樹朝著蔚藍的大海不規(guī)則地傾斜，似乎故意伸長脖子，以更佳的角度迎向太陽，此情此景，正是我在畫冊上看到的情形。

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，上面的描述并沒有真切地體現(xiàn)我在那天早上的心境，因為我當時的心情不僅困惑，而且沮喪，全然沒有當時的“此情此景”可能傳寓的輕松。我也許注意到了幾只海鳥帶著黎明時的興奮在?？罩屑诧w，但我當時的注意力為別的一些事件所分散，它們同“此情此景”既不相關(guān)也不協(xié)調(diào)，其中有在飛行途中開始發(fā)作的喉痛，擔(dān)心同事可能沒收到我將外出的通知，兩個太陽穴發(fā)脹，以及越來越強烈的便意等等。直到那時，我才第一次意識到一個先前被忽視的重大事實：在不經(jīng)意中，我已經(jīng)到了這個島上。

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.

我們專注于一個地方的圖片和文字描述時，往往容易忘記自我。在家時，我的眼睛反復(fù)盯住巴巴多斯島的每一張攝影圖片，并沒有想到眼睛其實是和身體，以及在旅行中相伴相隨的我們的心智密不可分的；而且在很多情形下，由于它們的在場，我們眼之所見便部分、甚至全部地失去了意義。在家中，我可以專注于酒店房間、海灘或天空的圖片而忽略跟它們密切相關(guān)的復(fù)雜環(huán)境，而這些圖片所反映的只不過是更寬廣、更繁雜的生活的一小部分。

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.

我的身體和心靈是難纏的旅伴，難以欣賞這趟旅行之美。身體覺得在島上難以入眠，抱怨天氣太熱、抱怨這里的蒼蠅以及酒店里難以下咽的飯菜；心智呢，則感到焦慮、厭倦，還有無名的傷感，以及經(jīng)濟上的恐慌。

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.

我們曾期望持久的滿足感，但實際情形并非如此，處在一個地方所得的幸福感和同一個地方聯(lián)系在一起的幸福感似乎一定只能是短暫的。對于敏感的心智而言，這種幸福感顯然是一種偶然的現(xiàn)象——只是在那么一個短暫的時刻，我們將過去和未來的一些美好的思緒凝合在一起，所有焦慮頓然釋解；我們沉浸于周圍世界，真切地感受它們。遺憾的是，這種狀況很少能持續(xù)10分鐘，在我們的意識里，新的焦慮總在生成，一如愛爾蘭島西岸的寒濕氣流，每隔幾天總要登島一次。過去的勝利不再輝煌，將來的情形顯得復(fù)雜不定，影響到眼前的美景，它們也變得像總在我們周圍的其他景觀一樣，讓人視而不見。

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.

我開始發(fā)現(xiàn)了一種我所未曾料想到的事實：那個呆在家里郁郁寡歡的我和現(xiàn)在這個正在巴巴多斯島的我之間是連續(xù)的，并無二致；而與這種連續(xù)性相對應(yīng)的是風(fēng)景和氣候上的非連續(xù)性——在島上，甚至這里的空氣似乎都是用一種甜潤的、全然不同的物質(zhì)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點左右，我和M躺在我們的沙灘小屋外的躺椅上。海灣的上空飄著一片似帶羞澀的云朵。M戴上耳機，開始細讀埃米爾·涂爾干的《論自殺》。我則環(huán)顧四周。對旁觀者而言，“我”就在我躺著的地方。但實際上，“我”，這里指的是思緒中的我，已確切地離開了軀體，正焦慮著未來，特別是擔(dān)心午餐費用是否已含在房費之內(nèi)。兩小時后，我們坐在酒店餐廳一角的餐桌旁享用著木瓜（午餐和當?shù)叵M稅都包含在房費之內(nèi)），那個曾離開躺椅上我的軀體的“我”又開始游離身外了，而且離開了巴巴多斯島，到了一個在接下來的一年里我將要面對的問題工程的現(xiàn)場。

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.

似乎早在幾個世紀前，對于那些一直擔(dān)憂未來事態(tài)的人們來說，其身上便有了一種非常重要的進化優(yōu)勢。這些先輩們也許未曾很好地享受他們的經(jīng)歷，但至少他們生存下來了，并塑就了他們后人的性格。反觀他們的兄弟，那些當初縱情和只關(guān)注當下處境的人，卻落得慘死野牛角下的下場。

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.

遺憾的是，我們很難回想起我們對未來近乎永恒的焦慮，因為當我們從一個地方旅行歸來，最先從記憶中消失的便很可能是我們在剛剛過去的時間里對“將來”（即現(xiàn)在）是如何的焦慮，以及我們的思緒曾如何頻繁地游離于旅行地之外。對一個地方的記憶圖景和對它的期待圖景中都有一種純正性：是這一地方本身讓自己凸現(xiàn)出來。

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.

如果在家里我還對巴巴多斯島念念不忘，那也許是因為我從未認真仔細且長時間地閱覽巴巴多斯島的圖片。假使我在桌上擺一張巴巴多斯島的圖片，強迫自己盯著它看上25分鐘，我的心智和身體也自然會游移，為許多外在于巴巴多斯島的焦慮所糾纏；我也許會因此更真切地體驗到我們所身處的地方對我們心智的旅行的影響是如何之小。

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.

這里出現(xiàn)了另一矛盾情形，只有當我們不必親臨某地去面對額外的挑戰(zhàn)，我們方能最自如地置身其中，對此，德埃桑迪斯一定會感同身受。

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.