3.Thinking as a Hobby(1958)

Passage Three

William Golding (1911-1993) was a British writer who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and who is known especially for his novel Lord of the Flies.    The intrinsic cruelty of man is at the heart of many of Golding’s novels.     He often presents isolated individuals or small groups in extreme situations dealing with man in his basic condition stripped of trappings, creating the quality of a fable.     His novels are remarkable for their strikingly varied settings.

威廉·戈尔丁(1911-1993)是1983年获得诺贝尔文学奖的英国作家，以小说《蝇王》而闻名。人类内在的残忍是戈尔丁许多小说的核心。他经常在极端的情况下呈现孤立的个人或小群体，处理人类在他的基本条件下剥去了陷阱，创造了一个寓言的质量。他的小说以其引人注目的不同背景而著称。

Thinking as a Hobby

William Golding

【1】While I was still a boy, I came to the conclusion that there were three grades of thinking, and that I myself could not think at all. It was the headmaster of my grammar school who first brought the subject of thinking before me. He had some statuettes in his study. They stood on a high cupboard behind his desk. One was a lady wearing nothing but a bath towel.

【2】She seemed frozen in an eternal panic lest the bath towel slip down any farther, and since she had no arms, she was in an unfortunate position to pull the towel up again. Next to her, crouched the statuette of a leopard, ready to spring down at the top drawer of a filing cabinet. Beyond the leopard was a naked, muscular gentleman, who sat, looking down, with his chin on his fist and his elbow on his knee. He seemed utterly miserable.

【3】Some time later, I learned about these statuettes. The headmaster had placed them where they would face delinquent children, because they symbolized to him the whole of life. The naked lady was Venus. She was Love. She was not worried about the towel. She was just busy being beautiful. The leopard was Nature, and he was being natural. The muscular gentleman was not miserable. He was Rodin's Thinker, an image of pure thought.

【4】I had better explain that I was a frequent visitor to the headmaster's study, because of the latest thing I had done or left undone. As we now say, I was not integrated. I was, if anything, disintegrated. Whenever I found myself in a penal position before the headmaster's desk, I would sink my head and writhe one shoe over the other. The headmaster would look at me and say, "What are we going to do with you?"

【5】Well, what were they going to do with me? I would writhe my shoe some more and stare down at the worn rug. "Look up, boy! Can't you look up?" Then I would look up at the cupboard, where the naked lady was frozen in her panic and the muscular gentleman contemplated the hindquarters of the leopard in endless gloom. I had nothing to say to the headmaster. His spectacles caught the light so that you could see nothing human behind them. There was no possibility of communication.

【6】"Don't you ever think at all?" No, I didn't think, wasn't thinking, couldn't think—was simply waiting in anguish for the interview to stop. "Then you'd better learn—hadn't you?" On one occasion the headmaster leaped to his feet, reached up and put Rodin's masterpiece on the desk before me. "That's what a man looks like when he's really thinking."

【7】Clearly, there was something missing in me. Nature had endowed the rest of the human race with a sixth sense and left me out. But like someone born deaf, but bitterly determined to find out about sound, I began to watch my teachers to find out about thought.

【8】There was Mr.Houghton. He was always telling me to think. With a modest satisfaction, he would tell me that he had thought a bit himself. Then why did he spend so much time drinking? Or was there more sense in drinking than there appeared to be? But if not, and if drinking were in fact ruinous to health—and Mr.Houghton was ruined, there was no doubt about that—why was he always talking about the clean life and the virtues of fresh air?

【9】Sometimes, exalted by his own oratory, he would leap from his desk and hustle us outside into a hideous wind. "Now, boys! Deep breaths! Feel it right down inside you—huge draughts of God's good air!" He would stand before us, put his hands on his waist and take a tremendous breath. You could hear the wind, trapped in his chest and struggling with all the unnatural impediments. His body would reel with shock and his face go white at the unaccustomed visitation. He would stagger back to his desk and collapse there, useless for the rest of the morning.

【10】Mr.Houghton was given to high-minded monologues about the good life,  full of 'duty.' Yet in the middle of these monologues, if a girl passed the window, his neck would turn of itself and he would watch her out of sight. In this instance, he seemed to me ruled not by thought but by an invisible and irresistible spring in his neck. His neck was an object of great interest to me.

【11】Normally, it bulged a bit over his collar. But Mr.Houghton had fought in the First World War alongside Americans and French, and had come to a settled detestation of both countries. If either happened to be prominent in current affairs, no argument could make Mr.Houghton think well of it. He would bang the desk, his neck would bulge still further and go red. "You can say what you like," he would cry, "but I've thought about this—and I know what I think!"

【12】Mr.Houghton thought with his neck. This was my introduction to the nature of what is commonly called thought. Through him, I discovered that thought is often full of unconscious prejudice, ignorance, and hypocrisy. It will lecture on disinterested purity while its neck is being remorselessly twisted toward a skirt. Technically, it is about as proficient as most businessmen's golf, as honest as most politicians' intentions, or as coherent as most books that get written. It is what I came to call grade-three thinking, though more properly, it is feeling, rather than thought.

【13】True, often there is a kind of innocence in prejudices, but in those days, I viewed grade-three thinking with contempt and mockery. I delighted to confront a pious lady who hated the Germans with the proposition that we should love our enemies. She taught me a great truth in dealing with grade-three thinkers; because of her, I no longer dismiss lightly a mental process which for nine tenths of the population is the nearest they will ever get to thought. They have immense solidarity.

【14】We had better respect them, for we are outnumbered and surrounded. A crowd of grade-three thinkers, all shouting the same thing, all warming their hands at the fire of their own prejudices, will not thank you for pointing out the contradictions in their beliefs. Man enjoys agreement as cows will graze all the same way on the side of a hill.

【15】Grade-two thinking is the detection of contradictions. Grade-two thinkers do not stampede easily, though often they fall into the other fault and lag behind. Grade-two thinking is a withdrawal, with eyes and ears open. It destroys without having the power to create. It set me watching the crowds cheering His Majesty the King and asking myself what all the fuss was about, without giving me anything positive to put in the place of that heady patriotism.

【16】But there were compensations. To hear people justify their habit of hunting foxes by claiming that the foxes liked it. To hear our Prime Minister talk about the great benefit we conferred on India by jailing people like Nehru and Gandhi. To hear American politicians talk about peace and refuse to join the League of Nations. Yes, there were moments of delight.

【17】But I was growing toward adolescence and had to admit that Mr.Houghton was not the only one with an irresistible spring in his neck. I, too, felt the compulsive hand of nature and began to find that pointing out contradiction could be costly as well as fun. There was Ruth, for example, a serious and attractive girl. I was an atheist at the time.

【18】And she was a Methodist. But, alas, instead of relying on the Holy Spirit to convert me, Ruth was foolish enough to open her pretty mouth in argument. She claimed that the Bible was literally inspired. I countered by saying that the Catholics believed in the literal inspiration of Saint Jerome's Vulgate, and the two books were different.

【19】At last, she remarked that there were an awful lot of Methodists, and they couldn't be wrong, could they—not all those millions? That was too easy, said I restively (for the nearer you were to Ruth, the nicer she was to be near to) since there were more Roman Catholics than Methodists anyway, and they couldn't be wrong, could they—not all those hundreds of millions?

【20】An awful flicker of doubt appeared in her eyes. I slid my arm around her waist and murmured that if we were counting heads, the Buddhists were the boys for my money. She fled. The combination of my arm and those countless Buddhists was too much for her.

【21】That night, her father visited my father and left, red-cheeked and indignant. I was given the third degree to find out what had happened. I lost Ruth and gained an undeserved reputation as a potential libertine.

【22】Grade-two thinking, though it filled life with fun and excitement, did not make for content. To find out the deficiencies of our elders satisfies the young ego but does not make for personal security. It took the swimmer some distance from the shore and left him there, out of his depth. A typical grade-two thinker will say, "What is truth?" There is still a higher grade of thought which says, "What is truth?" and sets out to find it.

【23】But these grade-one thinkers were few and far between. They did not visit my grammar school in the flesh, though they were there in books. I aspired to them, because I now saw my hobby as an unsatisfactory thing if it went no further. If you set out to climb a mountain, however high you climb, you have failed if you cannot reach the top.

【24】I therefore decided that I would be a grade-one thinker. I was irreverent at the best of times. Political and religious systems, social customs, loyalties, and traditions—they all came tumbling down like so many rotten apples off a tree. I came up in the end with what must always remain the justification for grade-one thinking.

【25】I devised a coherent system for living. It was a moral system, which was wholly logical. Of course, as I readily admitted, conversion of the world to my way of thinking might be difficult, since my system did away with a number of trifles, such as big business, centralized government, armies, marriage...

【26】It was Ruth all over again. I had some very good friends who stood by me, and still do. But my acquaintances vanished, taking the girls with them. Young people seemed oddly contented with the world as it was. A young navy officer got as red-necked as Mr.Houghton when I proposed a world without any battleships in it.

Had the game gone too far? In those prewar days, I stood to lose a great deal for the sake of a hobby.

【27】Now you are expecting me to describe how I saw the folly of my ways and came back to the warm nest, where prejudices are called loyalties, pointless actions are turned into customs by repetition, and we are content to say we think when all we do is feel.

But you would be wrong. I dropped my hobby and turned professional.

第三课

把思考当成一种爱好

威廉•戈尔丁

【1】当我还是个孩子的时候，我就得出了思维有三个等级的结论，而我自己根本不会思考。是我的文法学校的校长第一次把思考这门课带到我面前。他的书房里有一些小雕像。他们站在他桌子后面的一个高高的柜子上。其中一位女士只穿了一条浴巾。

【2】她似乎在永远的恐慌中僵住了，生怕浴巾再滑下去，由于她没有胳膊，她很不幸地又把浴巾拉了起来。在她的旁边，蹲着一只豹子的小雕像，准备跳到文件柜的最上面的抽屉里。在那只豹子的后面，有一个全身赤裸、肌肉发达的绅士，他坐在那里，用拳头托着下巴，胳膊肘支在膝盖上，俯视着下面。他似乎非常痛苦。

【3】过了一段时间，我才知道了这些小雕像。校长把它们放在他们面对不良少年的地方，因为对他来说，它们象征着生命的全部。裸女是维纳斯。她是爱神。她并不担心毛巾的事。她只是忙着打扮自己。豹子代表自然，他表现得很自然。这位肌肉发达的绅士并不痛苦。他是罗丹的思想者，一个纯粹思想的形象。

【4】我最好解释一下，我是校长书房的常客，因为我最近做了或没做的事情。就像我们现在说的，我没有融入社会。如果说有什么不同的话，那就是我已经崩溃了。每当我发现自己站在校长的讲台前受罚时，我就会低下头，一只鞋在另一只鞋上扭来扭去。校长会看着我说:“我们该拿你怎么办?”

【5】那么，他们要拿我怎么办呢?我会把鞋扭得更紧一些，然后低头盯着破旧的地毯。“抬头看，孩子!”你不能抬头看看吗?”然后我抬头看了看碗柜，那里的裸女在恐慌中僵住了，肌肉发达的绅士在无尽的忧郁中凝视着豹子的后腿。我对校长无话可说。他的眼镜透光，所以你看不见眼镜后面有什么人。没有沟通的可能。

【6】“你从来不思考吗?”不，我没想过，没想过，也没想过，我只是痛苦地等着面试结束。“那你最好学一学，是不是?”有一次，校长跳起来，伸手把罗丹的杰作放在我面前的桌子上。“这就是一个人真正在思考的样子。”

【7】显然，我身上缺少了什么。大自然赋予其他人第六感，却把我排除在外。但是，就像一个天生失聪但又下定决心要了解声音的人一样，我开始观察我的老师，以了解思想。

【8】有霍顿先生。他总是让我好好想想。他会带着一种适度的满足感告诉我，他自己也想过一点。那他为什么花那么多时间喝酒?还是说喝酒比表面上看起来更有意义?但如果不是这样的话，如果饮酒确实会损害健康，霍顿先生被毁了，这是毫无疑问的，那他为什么总是谈论干净的生活和新鲜空气的好处呢?

【9】有时，他因自己的雄辩而得意忘形，他会从桌子上跳起来，把我们赶到外面刮着可怕的风。“现在,孩子们!深呼吸!感受它就在你内心深处，那是上帝的好空气的巨大气流!”他会站在我们面前，双手叉腰，深深地吸一口气。你可以听到风的声音，风被困在他的胸膛里，与所有不自然的障碍作斗争。这种不寻常的来访使他震惊得浑身发抖，脸色也变白了。他会摇摇晃晃地回到办公桌前，瘫在那里，整个上午都毫无用处。

【10】霍顿先生喜欢高谈阔论地讲述美好的生活，充满了“责任”。然而，在这些独白的中间，如果一个女孩经过窗户，他的脖子就会转动，他会看着她消失在视线之外。在这种情况下，在我看来，他似乎不是被思想所支配，而是被脖子上一股看不见的、不可抗拒的力量所支配。他的脖子引起了我极大的兴趣。

【11】正常情况下，它在他的衣领上稍微凸起一些。但霍顿曾在第一次世界大战中与美国人和法国人并肩作战，对这两个国家都产生了根深蒂固的厌恶。如果他们中的任何一个恰好在时事中占有重要地位，霍顿先生是不会对他们有好感的。他会撞桌子，他的脖子会胀得更大，涨得通红。“你爱怎么说就怎么说，”他哭着说，“但我已经想过了，我知道我在想什么!”

【12】霍顿先生用脖子想。这是我对通常被称为思想的本质的介绍。通过他，我发现思想往往充满了无意识的偏见、无知和虚伪。当它的脖子被无情地扭到裙子上时，它会讲无私的纯洁。从技术上讲，它就像大多数商人的高尔夫球一样熟练，像大多数政治家的意图一样诚实，或者像大多数写出来的书一样连贯。这就是我所说的第三级思考，虽然更恰当地说，这是感觉，而不是思考。

【13】的确，偏见中往往有一种天真，但在那些日子里，我以蔑视和嘲弄的眼光看待三级思维。我很高兴与一位憎恨德国人的虔诚女士对峙，她说我们应该爱我们的敌人。在与第三级思考者打交道时，她教会了我一个伟大的真理;因为有了她，我再也不会轻易忽视对十分之九的人来说最接近思考的心理过程了。他们团结一致。

【14】我们最好尊重他们，因为我们寡不敌众，又被包围了。一群第三等级的思想家，他们都在喊着同样的东西，都在自己的偏见之火上取暖，他们不会感谢你指出他们信仰中的矛盾。人喜欢一致，就像牛总是在山的一边吃草一样。

【15】第二级思维是发现矛盾。第二级思考者虽然经常陷入另一种错误而落在后面，但他们不会轻易匆忙行动。第二级思考是一种回避，睁大眼睛，竖起耳朵。它毁灭，却没有创造的力量。它让我看着人群为国王陛下欢呼，我问自己这一切都是为了什么，却没有给我任何积极的东西来代替令人兴奋的爱国主义。

【16】但也有补偿。听人们为自己猎捕狐狸的习惯辩护，声称狐狸喜欢这样做。听我们的总理谈论我们通过监禁尼赫鲁和甘地等人给印度带来的巨大利益。听美国政客大谈和平，拒绝加入国际联盟。是的，也有快乐的时刻。

【17】但我已接近青春期，不得不承认霍顿先生并不是唯一一个脖子上有不可抗拒的弹簧的人。我也感受到了大自然的强迫之手，并开始发现指出矛盾可能代价高昂，但也很有趣。比如露丝，一个严肃而迷人的女孩。我当时是个无神论者。

【18】她是卫理公会教徒。但是，可惜的是，露丝没有依靠圣灵来改变我的信仰，而是愚蠢地张开她美丽的嘴来争辩。她声称《圣经》是字面上的默示。我反驳说，天主教徒相信圣杰罗姆的《圣经》的字面灵感，这两本书是不同的。

【19】最后，她说，卫理公会教徒的人数多得可怕，他们不可能是错的，不是吗?“那太容易了，”我不安地说(因为你离露丝越近，她就越好)，因为反正罗马天主教徒比卫理公会教徒多，他们不可能是错的，不是吗，那几亿人不是吗?

【20】她眼中闪过一丝可怕的怀疑。我用胳膊搂住她的腰，低声说，如果我们要数人头的话，我认为佛教徒才是最合适的。她逃跑了。我的手臂和无数佛教徒的结合让她难以承受。

【21】那天晚上，她父亲来看我父亲，离开时满脸通红，愤愤不平。我被严刑逼供，要弄清楚发生了什么事。我失去了露丝，得到了一个不应得的名声:一个潜在的浪荡子。

【22】第二级思考虽然使生活充满了乐趣和刺激，但并不能使人满足。找出长辈的缺点满足了年轻的自我，但并不能给个人带来安全感。它带着游泳者离开了海岸一段距离，把他留在了那里，超出了他的深度。典型的第二级思考者会说:“什么是真理?”还有一种更高层次的思想会问:“什么是真理?”并着手去寻找真理。

【23】但这些一流的思想家寥寥无几。他们没有亲自到我的文法学校来参观，虽然他们在书中出现过。我渴望得到这些东西，因为我现在认为，如果我的爱好得不到进一步发展，那就不能令人满意了。如果你出发去爬一座山，不管你爬得多高，如果你不能到达山顶，你就失败了。

【24】因此，我决定做一个一级思考者。我在最得意的时候也不尊敬别人。政治和宗教制度、社会习俗、忠诚和传统，它们都像树上的烂苹果一样倒下了。最后，我得出了一个必须永远保留为一级思维的理由。

【25】我设计了一个连贯的生活体系。这是一种道德体系，完全合乎逻辑。当然，正如我欣然承认的那样，让世界接受我的思维方式可能是困难的，因为我的体系废除了许多琐事，比如大企业、中央集权政府、军队、婚姻……

【26】这又是露丝的经历。我有一些非常要好的朋友，他们一直支持我，现在仍然支持我。但我认识的人都消失了，带走了女孩们。奇怪的是，年轻人似乎满足于这个世界的现状。当我提出一个没有战舰的世界时，一位年轻的海军军官和霍顿先生一样脸红脖子粗。

战争是不是太过火了?在战前的日子里，为了一项爱好，我失去了很多东西。

【27】现在你正期待我描述我是如何认识到自己的愚蠢之处，并回到温暖的窝里，在那里，偏见被称为忠诚，毫无意义的行为因重复而变成习惯，我们满足于说我们思考，而我们所做的只是感觉。

但你错了。我放弃了我的爱好，变成了专业人士。