野生问题第11章 像艺术家那样生活

野生问题第11章 Live Like an Artist

威廉·福克纳(William Faulkner)曾把写书描述为“在脑海中塑造人物”。 William Faulkner once described writing a book as getting “the character in your mind. 一旦他在你心中，他是对的，他是真实的，那么他就会自己动手。 Once he is in your mind, and he is right, and he’s true, then he does the work himself. 你所要做的就是跟在他后面小跑，记下他所做的和所说的。” All you need to do then is to trot along behind him and put down what he does and what he says.” 与一些小说家不同的是，福克纳声称，在他开始写这本书的时候，他并不知道它的结果会如何。 Unlike some novelists, Faulkner was claiming he didn’t know how his book was going to turn out when he started. 他创造的人物和他所处的环境都有了自己的生命。 The characters he created and the situations he put them in took on a life of their own. 这个过程有一个有机的方面，它打破了我们通常认为的天才工作的方式，执行一个辉煌的计划来实现愿景。 There was an organic aspect to the process that defied the usual way we think of a genius at work, executing a brilliant plan to realize the vision. 愿景伴随着作品而出现。 The vision emerges alongside the work. 它不是预制的。 It isn’t prefabricated. 有些人很幸运(也许这是一种诅咒)拥有预制的职业或预制的生活。 Some people have the good luck (or maybe it’s a curse) to have a prefab career or a prefab life. 他们知道自己想要什么，或者至少他们认为自己知道。 They know what they want or at least they think they do. 比如说，他们想成为一名医生。 They want to be a doctor, say. 他们在大学里读医学预科; They’re premed in college; 他们努力学习，取得好成绩，被一所受人尊敬的医学院录取，获得体面的住院医师资格，并以医生的身份度过一生。 they work hard and get good grades, are accepted at a respected medical school, secure a decent residency, and spend their life as a doctor. 这种专注的计划有很多可说的。 There’s a lot to be said for that kind of focused plan. 这可能意味着一份令人难以置信的职业，无论是经济上还是心理上。 It can mean an incredibly rewarding career, both financially and psychologically. 但我们大多数人都没有一个预先安排好的事业或生活。 But most of us don’t have a prefab career or life. 我们不知道自己想要什么。 We don’t know what we want. 我们发现自己身在罗马，几乎不知道什么才是最适合我们的。 We find ourselves in Rome, with little or no idea of what exactly is best for us to do. 我们想要什么，我们喜欢什么，什么赋予了我们的生活意义，这些都来自于我们所做的选择，而这些选择的出现伴随着我们的选择，以及我们从这些选择中学习到的东西，并相应地调整我们的行为。 What we want, what we enjoy, what gives our lives meaning, emerges from the choices we make, and that emergence takes place alongside the choices and what we learn from living with those choices, adjusting what we do accordingly. 我们不是坐在沙发上研究，也不是通过查书或咨询专家，而是从实际的日常经验中找到自己想要的东西。 We figure out what we want not from studying it from our armchair or by looking it up in a book or consulting experts but from actual day-to-day experience. 直到我们有了那种日复一日的经历，直到我们感受到了披上某种特定身份的感觉，我们才有了通常意义上的目标。 And until we have that day-to-day experience, and until we feel what it’s like to put on a particular identity, we don’t have a goal in the usual sense of that word. 我们可能会尝试以一个人知道自己想成为一名医生，然后采取所有步骤使情节朝着他们计划的方向发展的方式来构思我们的叙事。 We may try to craft our narrative the way a person knows that they want to be a doctor and then takes all the steps to make the plot turn out the way they planned. 但对我们大多数人来说，剧情并不是完全在我们的控制之下。 But for most of us, the plot isn’t totally under our control. 故事有自己的发展方向。 The narrative takes its own course. 有意想不到的情节转折; There are unexpected plot twists; 角色从剧本中退出，而其他角色则出人意料地出现。 characters drop out of the script and others show up unexpectedly. 像艺术家一样生活是一种不错的方式来思考如何面对一个棘手的问题。【点题。随机应变、顺其自然、先干再看、非线性代数】 Living like an artist is not a bad way to think about how to face a wild problem. villanelle是一种法语诗歌形式，由五个三行诗节和一个最后的四行诗组成，第一个诗节的第一行和第三行在接下来的诗节中交替重复。 A villanelle is a French verse form consisting of five three-line stanzas and a final quatrain, with the first and third lines of the first stanza repeating alternately in the following stanzas. 伊丽莎白·毕肖普的诗《一种艺术》被广泛认为是有史以来最好的维拉尼尔诗之一。 Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art” is widely considered one of the finest villanelles ever written. 一位诗人Sharon Bryan认为，它是“形式和内容的完美结合”，如果villanelle是一名运动员，它的球衣号码就应该退役，因为没有什么能超越Bishop的成就。 One poet, Sharon Bryan, argues that it is a “perfect mesh of form and content” and that if the villanelle were an athlete, it should have its jersey number retired because nothing could top Bishop’s achievement. 然而，它花了17次(!)稿才达到这样的完美。 Yet it took seventeen (!) drafts to produce that perfection. 这首诗是在创作过程中产生的。 The poem emerged through the process of creation. 在她的博客Bluedragonfly10上，一位名叫贝丝(Beth)的作家表示，这首诗本身就对毕晓普的结构提出了要求，尤其是在第二稿中，第一句“失去的艺术不难掌握”第一次出现并被重复，这表明villanelle可能会出现。 A writer who goes simply by Beth at her blog, Bluedragonfly10, suggests that the poem itself made demands on Bishop on how it would be structured, particularly when already in draft number two the opening line, “the art of losing isn’t hard to master,” appears for the first time and gets repeated, suggesting a villanelle might be coming.

事实上，这首诗在诞生之初就成为了villanelle，这让我相信一首诗有一种形式，它被称为。 The fact that the poem became a villanelle so soon in its birth makes me believe that a poem has a form it is called to. 这首诗想成为villanelle。 This poem wanted to be a villanelle. 诗歌欢迎某些形式，不喜欢其他形式。 A poem welcomes certain forms and dislikes others. 这意味着一首诗有它自己的生命，它自己的思想，它自己的声音，它自己的好恶，就像一个人一样。 This means that a poem has a life of its own, its own mind, its own voice, its own likes and dislikes just like a person does. 这意味着所有的艺术都是如此。 And that means all art does. 艺术希望以一种欢迎其存在的所有可能性的方式被创造出来。 Art wants to be created in a way that welcomes in all the possibilities of its existence. 一首诗怎么能“想要”什么东西或拥有自己的生命? How can a poem “want” something or have a life of its own? 诗人就不能想写什么就写什么吗? Can’t the poet write whatever she wants? 她当然可以。 Of course she can. 但在某种程度上，这首诗是活的。 But at some point, the poem is alive. 如果不从头开始，某些变化将不再可能。 Certain changes are no longer possible without starting from scratch. 其他的变化是偶然出现的，感觉正确，并被保留。 Other changes show up serendipitously, feel right, and are kept. 我们能这样思考我们的人生故事吗? Can we think about the story of our life in this way? 我们能不能把我们的生活想象成一种我们所创造的东西，它的结果并不完全、有时甚至根本不在我们的控制之下? Can we think of our lives as something we craft with an understanding that the result is not completely and sometimes hardly at all under our control? 我们认为那些不在我们控制之下的事情是失控的，就像一些疯狂的游乐园，我们不知道下一个转弯会发生什么。 We think of things that are not under our control as out of control, like some crazy amusement park ride where we have no idea of what’s coming around the next turn. 但是认识到你无法控制并不意味着你根本无法控制或没有计划。 But recognizing that you are not in control doesn’t mean there’s no control at all or zero planning. 这意味着相信这个机会，在你经历的过程中，根据你学到的新信息来调整计划或旅程。 It means trusting the opportunity to adjust the plan or journey to the new information that you learn as you go through the experience. 就像在罗马度过一个星期，没有旅游指南。 It’s like a week in Rome without a guidebook. 就像你在结冰的路上打滑一样。 It’s like when you go into a skid on an icy road. 你的自然反应是重新控制汽车，把方向盘转回你想去的地方，或者猛踩刹车。 Your natural reaction is to reclaim control of the car and turn the wheel back toward where you want to go or hit the brakes hard. 但这些行为通常会使打滑变得更糟。 But those actions usually make the skid worse. 有时候，最好是把你的脚从油门上移开，让汽车自己重新站稳。 Sometimes it’s better to simply take your foot off the gas and let the car regain its footing on its own. 像艺术家一样生活意味着要对世界和自己保持开放的心态。 Living like an artist means being open to discovery about the world and about yourself. 正如教育家Lorne Buchman在他的书《Make to Know》中所探索的那样，诗人、雕塑家、小说家和作曲家在制作过程中了解他们正在制作的东西。 As educator Lorne Buchman explores in his book Make to Know, poets, sculptors, novelists, and composers learn about what they are crafting in the process of crafting it. 他们不会从算法开始，除非你认为“移除所有不是大卫的大理石”是米开朗基罗的算法。 They don’t start with an algorithm unless you consider “remove all the marble that isn’t David” an algorithm for Michelangelo. 或者“选一个正确的音符，在之前的音符之后”，就像贝多芬所做的那样。 Or “pick the right note that belongs after the ones that came before” as Beethoven seems to have proceeded. 艺术家通常不知道他们要创作什么。 Artists often have no idea what they’re going to create. 他们创作艺术是为了知道自己在计划什么。 They make art in order to know what they are planning. 布赫曼引用毕加索的话:“要想知道你要画什么，你必须开始画。” Buchman quotes Picasso: “To know what you’re going to draw, you have to begin drawing.” 伊丽莎白·毕晓普在说的过程中发现了她想说的东西。 Elizabeth Bishop discovered what she wanted to say in the process of saying it. 人生也是如此。 So it is with life. 像艺术家一样生活的一个实际方面与可选择性有关。 One practical aspect of living like an artist ties in with optionality. 我听过的最好的建议之一就是说“不”的重要性。 One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever heard is the importance of saying no. 如果你不小心，你会发现自己陷入了太多的承诺，浪费时间在琐碎的事情上，无法实现你最关心的事情。 If you’re not careful, you’ll find yourself bogged down by too many commitments, wasting time on trivial tasks and failing to achieve what you care most about. 你将无法实现你的计划——你总是偏离目标。 You won’t be able to realize your plans—you’re always getting sidetracked. 这也是最糟糕的建议之一——如果你总是或太频繁地说“不”，你就会失去与你愿意认识的人联系的机会，失去发现一些特别的东西，甚至是珍贵的东西的机会。【要说不但又不能总说不。善于说不。】 It’s also one of the worst pieces of advice—if you always or too often say no, you’ll miss a chance to connect with someone you will be glad to know, to discover something special or, even better, something precious. 你会减少生活中的意外发现。 You’ll reduce the amount of serendipity in your life. 利用可选性意味着对那些显然不值得做的事情说“是”，但有机会扩展你的视野、你的经验和你的人脉。【tradeoff权衡、取舍，要甘于忍受才能收获】 Taking advantage of optionality means saying yes to things that are not obviously worth doing but have the chance to expand your horizons, your experiences, your connections. 通过这样做，你不仅会了解机会，还会了解你自己——你喜欢什么，你觉得什么有意义。 And by doing so you will learn not just about opportunities but about yourself—what you like and what you find meaningful. 我可能不典型。 I may not be typical. 如果你想成为一名医生，你通常需要一个计划和一种从这里到达那里的方法。 If you want to be a doctor, you usually do need a plan and a way to get there from here. 有一个计划是可以的，甚至可能比“OK”更多。 It’s OK to have a plan, maybe even a lot more than OK. 困难的部分是当事情不顺利或者你发现你的计划不适合你的时候，知道什么时候放弃计划。 The hard part is knowing when to give up on the plan when things go sideways or you discover your plan isn’t the right one for you. 这也是一门艺术。 This is also an art. 有些人会告诉你:永远不要放弃你的梦想! Some people will tell you: Never give up on your dreams! 坚持下去! Persevere! 但事实上你会发现有些梦想是不现实的。 But in fact you will discover that some dreams are unrealistic. 有些梦想最终变成了噩梦，你应该远离。 Some dreams turn out to be nightmares that you should walk away from. 知道什么时候叠牌，什么时候拿牌是一门艺术，在扑克中是可以量化的，但在生活中却不是。 To know when to fold ’em and when to hold ’em is an art that is quantifiable in poker but not in life. 最好了解你是谁——你的优势和局限——然后尽你所能做出每个决定。 Better to learn who you are—your strengths and limitations—and make each decision as best you can. 在这种情况下，有一个规则——“永远坚持”，或者“太难了就放弃”——会把你引入歧途。 Here is a case where having a rule—“always persevere,” or “quit when it gets too hard”—will lead you astray. 在生活中，知道什么时候该坚持，什么时候该放弃，是一门需要培养的手艺。 In life, knowing when to persevere and when to quit is a craft to cultivate.

我最自豪的成就大多来自于对一些乍一看不符合我的性格或我原有计划的事情说“是”。 Most of my proudest accomplishments came from saying yes to things that at first glance didn’t seem to fit into who I was or my preexisting plan. 当我获得博士学位时，我并没有打算成为一名播客——当时互联网还不存在。 I didn’t plan on being a podcaster when I got my PhD—the internet didn’t exist. 当电影制作人约翰·帕波拉(John Papola)突然给我发邮件，说他想和我合作一个项目，因为他喜欢我的播客时，我想我们会一起制作某种视频，但我们都没有想到会制作两个说唱视频。 When the filmmaker John Papola emailed me out of the blue and said he wanted to work with me on a project because he liked my podcast, I thought we’d make some kind of video together but neither of us expected to create two rap videos. 我生命中最难忘的一些对话都是在我只是在那里倾听的时候发生的，当我能够把自己看作故事的主角之外的东西的时候。 Some of the most unforgettable conversations I’ve had in my life came when I was just there to listen, when I was able to see myself as something other than the star of the story. 我没有计划要在谈话中完成什么，我只是在场，当一个陌生人向我敞开心扉，讲述她生活中的悲剧。 I didn’t have a plan on what I was going to accomplish in the conversation, I was just present when a stranger opened her heart to me about a tragedy in her life. 这种情况并不经常发生，但这是一种强大而宝贵的技能，一种不加评判地活在当下的能力。 It doesn’t happen often, but it’s a powerful and precious skill, the ability to be present without judgment. 与其以一个基本的交易计划开始对话，我能从中得到什么? Instead of entering a conversation with a fundamentally transactional plan—What can I get out of this?-“故事之星”的心态，像艺术家一样处理对话。 —the “star of the story” mindset, approach conversations more like an artist. 避免设定目标。 Avoid having a set of goals. 与其计划掌控对话，不如让它自己走。 Rather than planning on steering the conversation, let it take its own path. 最好的谈话总是朝着意想不到的方向发展，最终以亲密、启示或教育的方式结束。 The best conversations go in unexpected directions and end up in places of intimacy, revelation, or education. 谈话就像一件艺术品，有自己的生命。 The conversation, like a work of art, takes on a life of its own. 你放弃了一些控制，作为回报，你的心扉就敞开了。 You give up some control and in return the heart opens. 像艺术家一样生活并不意味着你从不计划，也不意味着你坐在那里等着生活为你倾倒。 Living like an artist doesn’t mean you never plan or that you sit around and wait for life to sweep you off your feet. 这意味着要欣赏你如何与你的经历互动，它有自己的生命。 It means appreciating that how you interact with your experiences has a life of its own. 我们都知道，我们不能像最好的旅游指南那样规划我们的生活。 We all know that we can’t really plan our life the way a tourist with the best guidebooks plans an itinerary. 如果我们这样想，我们不得不承认，我们生活在一个火车不准点运行，有时根本不运行的王国——在这个王国里，火车经常在计划外停靠，经常脱轨，尽管我们尽了最大的努力，但它们还是在做自己的事情。 If we think of it that way, we have to concede that we live in a kingdom where the trains don’t run on time and sometimes don’t run at all—a place where the trains make unscheduled stops and often go off the rails and do their own thing despite our best efforts. 但重点不是“准备好惊讶”。 But the point isn’t “prepared to be surprised.” 当然，我们所爱的人去世了，我们没有得到我们认为可以唾手可得的工作，我们的提议被拒绝了。 Of course loved ones die, we don’t get the job we thought was going to be ours for the taking, our proposal gets rejected. 陌生人会变成好朋友。 Strangers turn into good friends. 有时我们的船会靠岸。 Sometimes our ship comes in. 生活充满了惊喜——没有什么新鲜的。 Life is full of surprises—nothing new there. 我想说的是我们该如何面对那些惊喜、挫折、意想不到的礼物，那些从天而降、令我们神魂颠倒的事情。 What I’m talking about is how we might confront those surprises, setbacks, unexpected gifts, the things that fall into our lap, the things that sweep us off our feet. 艺术家思考生活的另一种方式来自写作。 Another way to think about life as an artist comes from the act of writing. 从理论上讲，精心构思每一个句子是可能的，最好的作家是那些耐心地找到合适的词，然后把一个句子又一个句子编织成一张美丽的网的人。 In theory, it’s possible to carefully craft each sentence, and the best writer is the one who patiently finds just the right word and spins sentence after sentence in a beautiful web. 例如，我曾经认为福楼拜就是这样写作的——他的初稿基本上就是他的终稿。 I once thought that was the way Flaubert wrote, for example—that his first draft was basically his final draft. 但事实并非如此。 But it’s not true. 福楼拜是个坚持不懈的修改者，一稿又一稿，直到他满意为止。 Flaubert was a relentless reviser, doing draft after draft until he was satisfied. 当科幻小说作家奥森·斯科特·卡德教授创意写作时，他让学生们互相反馈他们的草稿。 When science fiction author Orson Scott Card teaches creative writing, he has the students give one another feedback on their drafts. 但他不是根据学生的期末论文来评分，而是根据他们给同学的反馈质量来评分。 But instead of grading the students based on their final essays, he grades them on the quality of the feedback they gave their classmates. 他的见解是，要想成为一名伟大的作家，就必须成为一名伟大的编辑——学会修改是写作的关键。 His insight was that becoming a great writer requires becoming a great editor—learning to revise is essential to writing well. 生活也是如此。 That’s true of life, too. 不要担心初稿。 Don’t worry about the rough draft. 只要你能够杀死你的宝贝，并利用可选性，你就会茁壮成长。 As long as you’re able to kill your darlings and take advantage of optionality, you will thrive. 最后一种利用像艺术家一样生活的方法是将自己视为艺术品，经济学家詹姆斯·布坎南(James Buchanan)在第9章中提出的“人工制品人”，即将自己视为人工制品。 The last way to exploit the idea of living like an artist is to see yourself as the work of art, the economist James Buchanan’s “artifactual man” from chapter 9, the idea of seeing yourself as an artifact. 想象你像一个艺术家一样生活，你和你的生活就是艺术。 Imagine living like an artist where you and your life are the art. 这意味着什么? What would that mean? 这意味着你把自己看作是待塑造的粘土，待雕刻的大理石。 It would mean you see yourself as the clay to be molded, the marble to be sculpted. 这意味着把你自己和你的生活看作是一个正在进行中的工作。 It means to see yourself and your life as a work in progress.

生活就像一本书，你同时在写和读。 Life is like a book that you are writing and reading at the same time. 你可能对结果有个计划。 You might have a plan for how it turns out. 但要成为一本好书，它需要你在阅读过程中细细品味、咀嚼和消化，就像你读过的一本书改变了你的生活一样。 But for it to be a great book, it needs to be savored and chewed and digested along the way, like a book you read that changes your life. 你得准备好剧情反转，也许有两三个。 And you have to prepare for a plot twist and maybe two or three. 你可能会想象你可以写一本书、一首诗或你的生活，并让它按照你计划的方式出现。 You might imagine you can script a book or a poem or your life and have it come out the way you plan. 你甚至可以编写脚本并执行计划。 You might even be able to write that script and execute that plan. 但本书前半部分的教训是，当你十几岁或二十多岁时，你想读的书，随着年龄的增长，可能不再是最适合你的书。 But the lesson of the first half of this book is that the book you want to inhabit when you’re a teenager or in your twenties may not be the best book for you as you get older. 你需要让这本书对你有自己的影响。 You need to let the book have its own way with you. 这种观点需要一定程度的自我意识，而这种自我意识通常伴随着年龄和经验的增长。 This perspective requires a level of self-awareness that usually comes with age and experience. 它需要我之前写过的某种程度的抱负——至少从总体上考虑你想要成为什么，即使你不知道你正在努力追求的东西的确切形状或轮廓。 It requires a level of aspiration I wrote about earlier—of thinking about what you want to become at least in general, even if you don’t know the precise shape or outline of what you are striving toward. 这可能仅仅是“更好”——成为一个比去年更好的人。 It might simply be “better”—to be a better person this year than last year. 艺术家带着一整套技能来到这个世界上。 The artist comes into the world with a set of skills. 我们都需要。 We all do. 我们如何使用这些技能? How are we to use those skills? 我们要用这些技能来塑造什么呢? What are we to fashion from those skills? 我们怎样才能提高这些技能，从而在生活中创造出更好的艺术呢? How can we enhance those skills so as to make even better art out of our lives? 我们如何利用我们所处的土壤并将其改造成美丽的东西，一件艺术品? How do we take the soil we find ourselves in and transform what we begin with to make it into something beautiful, a work of art? 电影《巴贝特的盛宴》讲述了一位不太可能的艺术家的故事——她是一对未婚姐妹的女仆，在一个狭小而日益萎缩的宗教社区里努力保持父亲的遗产。 The movie Babette’s Feast is the story of an unlikely artist—a maid to a pair of unmarried sisters striving to keep their father’s legacy alive in a tiny and dwindling religious community. 女佣巴贝特有了一笔意外之财，她决定给她的雇主和他们可怜的羊群一个难忘的夜晚——一顿非凡的艺术和工艺的晚餐。 Babette, the maid, has a windfall and decides to give her employers and their meager flock a night to remember—a meal of extraordinary artistry and craft. 其中一个人物，在体验了巴贝特的创作后，评论道:“艺术家的内心发出了一个长长的呼唤，穿过整个世界——请允许我尽我最大的努力。” One of the characters, after experiencing Babette’s creations, remarks: “Through all the world there goes one long cry from the heart of the artist—give me leave to do my utmost.” 这并不是一种看待生活和我们内心渴望告诉我们的事情的坏方法。 It is not a bad way to think of life and what our hearts long to tell us. 我们拥有技能:有些是天生的，有些是通过努力获得的。 We have skills: some given to us, some we earn through effort. 我们应该最大限度地利用这些天赋和分配给我们的宝贵时间。 We should use those gifts and the precious time allotted to us to the utmost. 挑战在于，我们常常认为竭尽全力就是全速奔向目标。 The challenge is that we too often think that doing one’s utmost is about racing around at full speed toward a goal. 有一个故事是这样讲的:别尔迪切夫的拉比利瓦伊·伊茨查克(Levi Yitzchak)遇到一个正在奔跑的人，疯狂地向前冲去。 A story is told of Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev coming upon a man running, frantically rushing forward. 你这么急着去哪儿? Where are you headed in such a hurry? 拉比问。 the rabbi asked. 我在追求我的生计! I’m chasing my livelihood! 那人回答说。 the man answered. 也许它就在你身后，拉比说，而你正在远离它。 Maybe it is behind you, the rabbi said, and you’re heading away from it. 实际上有一些很好的旅行指南可以帮助你计划去罗马的旅行。 There are actually some fine guidebooks to help you plan your trip to Rome. 你可以制定一个紧凑、精确的行程，把整个旅行都编排好，看看你提前决定的是最好的。 You can build a tight, precise itinerary, the whole trip choreographed to see what you decide in advance is the best. 另一种类型的游客会留出时间，看看发生了什么，什么吸引了自己的眼球。 A different type of tourist leaves time to see what happens, what catches one’s fancy. 街上有个男高音唱着普契尼的《今夜无人入睡》倾吐心声 There’s a tenor on the street pouring his heart out singing Puccini’s “Nessun dorma.” 一些游客在梵蒂冈停留的时间比他们预期的要长。 Some tourists stay longer at the Vatican than they expected. 他们在台伯河上的那座桥上徘徊，试图想象人们在那个地方站了多久。 They linger on that bridge over the Tiber and try to imagine how long people have stood at that spot.