E10 英国女作家 Sylvia Townsend Warner ：感知生活中的

E10 英国女作家 Sylvia Townsend Warner ：感知生活中的小确幸

课程导读

有时候带给我们幸福感的不是一件件的物品，而是感知力、丰富的想象力和创造力。英国作家 Sylvia Townsend Warner 在收到一个空火柴盒的小礼物时，并没有觉得奇怪，而是由此展开了天马行空的想象，一个空火柴盒引发了怎样的联想呢？快来读一读这位古灵精怪的作家的小确幸（信）吧！

▍背景介绍：

Sylvia Townsend Warner （1893 – 1978） ，英国小说家和诗人，长期给 The New Yorker 供稿，她的第一本小说也是最有名的小说 Lolly Willowes 在当时红极一时，被认为是早期女权主义的经典作品。与她古灵精怪的文风一样，她的书信也轻松可爱，充满想象力。

英文原文

Sylvia Townsend Warner

Dearest Alyse,

Usually one begins a thank-letter by some graceless comparison, by saying, I have never been given such a very scarlet muffler, or, This is the largest horse I have ever been sent for Christmas. But your matchbox is a nonpareil, for never in my life have I been given a matchbox. Stamps, yes, drawing-pins, yes, balls of string, yes, yes, menacingly too often; but never a matchbox. Now that it has happened I ask myself why it has never happened before.

They are such charming things, neat as wrens, and what a deal of ingenuity and human artfulness has gone into their construction; for if they were like the ordinary box with a lid they would not be one half so convenient. This one though is especially neat, charming, and ingenious, and the tray slides in and out as though Chippendale had made it.

But what I like best of all about my matchbox is that it is an empty one. I have often thought how much I should enjoy being given an empty house in Norway, what pleasure it would be to walk into those bare wood-smelling chambers, walls, floor, ceiling, all wood, which is after all the natural shelter of man, or at any rate the most congenial.

And when I opened your matchbox which is now my matchbox and saw that beautiful clean sweet-smelling empty rectangular expanse it was exactly as though my house in Norway had come true; with the added advantage of being just the right size to carry in my hand. I shut my imagination up in it instantly, and it is still sitting there, listening to the wind in the firewood outside.

Sitting there in a couple of days time I shall hear the Lutheran bell calling me to go and sing Lutheran hymns while the pastor's wife gazes abstractedly at her husband in a bower of evergreen while she wonders if she remembered to put pepper in the goose-stuffing; but I shan't go, I shall be far too happy sitting in my house that Alyse gave me for Christmas.

Oh, I must tell you I have finished my book—begun in 1941 and a hundred times imperiled but finished at last. So I can give an undivided mind to enjoying my matchbox.

P.S. There is still so much to say...carried away by my delight in form and texture I forgot to praise the picture on the back. I have never seen such an agreeable likeness of a hedgehog, and the volcano in the background is magnificent.