【Native Speaker每日综合训练】 【39-D】 一周精选 - Privacy

AceJ

本期选文来自本期选文来自 枣糕兔 的39-09越障部分，刚看完第一段的时候，我以为这篇文章就是会从常见的角度分析一下在当今社会隐私是多么的重要，不注意的话会有多么悲惨之类的，再往下看我知道我错了，这是一篇我自己都没有看懂的文章，难的不是词句（这向来都不是难点，因为我们有无数的字典，词典可以查阅），而是全文的行文思路和达洛维夫人这部小说的文学背景。但我依旧坚持拿这篇文章做为本周的精选，因为探讨和温故正是每周精选的出发点。

特别提示：本期精选的解析中多有不足，其中一段我更是无法理解，一来多多包涵，二欢迎大家多多指出并补充。



另外从本期开始，内容不再设置隐藏，所以特别建议大家先点击原文链接回顾一下，可细看，可粗看，再回到本贴，这样效果会有所保证

原文链接：http://forum.chasedream.com/thread-912477-1-1.html




Virginia Woolf’s Idea of Privacy

在开始本篇文章之前，有些背景知识咱是一定要了解的，否则对整个文章的理解都是无本之木啦。
弗吉尼亚·伍尔芙（Virginia Woolf，1882年1月25日－1941年3月28日）。英国女作家，被誉为20世纪最伟大的小说家之一，是英国文坛的前卫开拓者之一，现代主义文学与女性主义潮流的先锋。两次世界大战期间，她是伦敦文学界的核心人物，同时也是布卢姆茨伯里派（Bloomsbury Group）的成员之一。最知名的小说包括《达洛维夫人》（Mrs. Dalloway）、《到灯塔去》（To the Lighthouse）、《雅各的房间》（Jakob's Room）。她大大地革新了英语语言。她在小说中尝试意识流的写作方法（本文中涉及的达洛维夫人就是意识流写法），试图去描绘在人们心底里的潜意识。她和当时的詹姆斯·乔伊斯，还有法国的普鲁斯特等创作意识流文学作品的作家一起，把意识流文学推向世界，极大地影响了世界范围内传统的写作手法，他们的出现成为了传统文学和现代文学的一个分水岭。爱德华·摩根·福斯特称她将英语“朝着光明的方向推进了一小步”。她在文学上的成就和创新性至今仍然产生著影响。

《达洛维夫人》，伍尔芙通过达洛维夫人的人生经历，向我们展示了达洛维夫人在不断抗争与妥协中前行的人生。抗争是对现实的反抗，妥协是对生活无奈的选择。空虚无聊的生活使达洛维夫人变得世故，战争的残酷引起了这位平庸的小妇人对生与死的思考，即使这样，她每天的生活，甚至整个人，也是没有精神支柱的，始终迷失在物质富有与精神空虚的迷宫里。作为女权主义重要人物的伍尔芙，在小说中通过一系列的事例说明，妇女要想精神和物质上的独立，必须要有经济上的独立。只有经济上独立后，才能主宰自己的思想和情感，才能掌控自己飘摇不定的人生。同时故事围绕达洛维夫人筹备一个上流社会派对而展开。读者视角穿梭时间跨度，并穿插于主人公的思维与现实之间，通过对达洛维夫人一天中生活细节的描述，来塑造她一生的经历以及一战前后整个英国社会

These days, when we use the word “privacy,” it usually has a political meaning. We’re concerned with other people and how they might affect us. We think about how they could use information about us for their own ends, or interfere with decisions that are rightfully ours. We’re mindful of the lines that divide public life from private life. We have what you might call a citizen’s sense of privacy.

That’s an important way to think about privacy, obviously. But there are other ways. One of them is expressed very beautifully in “Mrs. Dalloway,” in a famous scene early in the book. It’s a flashback, from when Clarissa was a teen-ager. One night, she goes out for a walk with some friends: two annoying boys, Peter Walsh and Joseph Breitkopf, and a girl, Sally Seton. Sally is sexy, smart, Bohemian—possessed of “a sort of abandonment, as if she could say anything, do anything.” The boys drift ahead, lost in a boring conversation about Wagner, while the girls are left behind. “Then came the most exquisite moment of her whole life passing a stone urn with flowers in it.” Sally picks a flower from the urn and kisses Clarissa on the lips:

The whole world might have turned upside down! The others disappeared; there she was alone with Sally. And she felt that she had been given a present, wrapped up, and told just to keep it, not to look at it—a diamond, something infinitely precious, wrapped up, which, as they walked (up and down, up and down), she uncovered, or the radiance burnt through, the revelation, the religious feeling!

Woolf often conceives of life this way: as a gift that you’ve been given, which you must hold onto and treasure but never open. Opening it would dispel the atmosphere, ruin the radiance—and the radiance of life is what makes it worth living. It’s hard to say just what holding onto life without looking at it might mean; that’s one of the puzzles of her books. But it has something to do with preserving life’s mystery; with leaving certain things undescribed, unspecified, and unknown; with savoring certain emotions, such as curiosity, surprise, desire, and anticipation. It depends on an intensified sense of life’s preciousness and fragility, and on a Heisenberg-like notion that, when it comes to our most abstract and spiritual intuitions, looking too closely changes what we feel. It has to do, in other words, with a kind of inner privacy, by means of which you shield yourself not just from others’ prying eyes, but from your own. Call it an artist’s sense of privacy.

文章第一部分，1-4段，介绍了Woolf通过达洛维夫人中的描述，阐述了自己对于隐私的理解。
第一段，开门见山，我们是如何理解“隐私”这个词的，一般会与政治挂钩，会考虑别人如何利用自己的隐私等等，较好理解
第二段至第四段则是文章的核心思想的表达，第一段所描述的理解固然是重要的，但对于“隐私”我们也可以有别的见解。其中之一就是Woolf女士在《达洛维夫人》一段著名场景描述中优雅的体现出来。这是一段回忆，Clarissa（就是嫁人前的达洛维夫人）少女时期，跟一群小伙伴出去散步，人物包括Clarissa的真爱 Peter Walsh和其仰慕好友Sally Seton。（另一个忽略不计就好）两个基友自顾自讨论着Wagner，而此时Sally忽然从石翁中摘了一朵鲜花吻了Clarissa. 接下来是原文的摘录，不愧是1925年出产的意识流小说啊，我只能勉强先撸出字面意思：整个世界神魂颠倒啦，好像只有自己和Sally。Clarissa感觉到这就像是收到一份包装精美的礼物，但是只能保管，不能打开，不论这里面是多么珍贵的东西。你都不能打开。
这就是Woolf认知生命的方式：生命就像你收到的一份礼物，你必须细心呵护，但绝不能打开。打开它会摧毁生命的光辉，而这正是其意义所在（请原谅我水平有限，实在不知道如何更好的翻译了）。这些与本文的主题隐私有什么关系呢，作者做出了解释：离得太近会改变我们的感受。这是一种内在的隐私，你不仅会将这部分与窥探者隔离，也会与你自己隔离。这就是艺术家的隐私观。

Many people accept the idea that each of us has a certain resolute innerness—a kernel of selfhood that we can’t share with others. (Levin, at the end of “Anna Karenina,” calls it his “holy of holies,” and says that, no matter how close he grows to the people around him, there will always be “the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife.”) What interested Woolf was the way that we become aware of that innerness. We come to know it best, she thought, when we’re forced, at moments of exposure, to shield it against the outside world.

There can be something enjoyable, even revelatory about that feeling of self-protection, which is why we seek out circumstances in which we can feel more acutely the contrast between the outside world and our inner selves. Woolf was fascinated by city life—by the feeling of solitude-on-display that the sidewalk encourages, and by the way that “street haunting,” as she called it, allows you to lose and then find yourself in the rhythm of urban novelty and familiarity. She was drawn to the figure of the hostess: the woman-to-be-looked-at, standing at the top of the stairs, friendly to everyone, who grows only more mysterious with her visibility. (One of the pleasures of throwing a party, Woolf showed, is that it allows you to surprise yourself: surrounded by your friends, the center of attention, you feel your separateness from the social world you have convened.) She showed how parents, friends, lovers, and spouses can become more unknowable over time, not less—there is a core to their personhood that never gives itself up. Even as they put their lives on display, she thought, artists thrive when they maintain a final redoubt of privacy—a wellspring that remains unpolluted by the world outside. “A thing there was that mattered; a thing, wreathed about with chatter, defaced, obscured in her own life, let drop every day in corruption, lies, chatter,” Clarissa thinks, at the end of “Mrs. Dalloway.” Of course, it’s the chatter—the party—that helps her know that she has something to lose in the first place.

文章的第二部分，5-6段，在提出了Woolf所认为的隐私观之后，进一步阐述，大多数人认为每一个人都有自己的内在的隐私，有人称之为holy of holies，无论多近，都会存在。而Woolf感兴趣的是人们发现这一事实的过程：想要充分的了解自己的隐私，往往都是在被逼迫保护它不被外界发现的时候。
当然，即便是泄漏了那种自我保护，这种感觉有时也会是愉悦的。这就是为什么我们要追寻一个可以体现内心与外界强烈反差的场景。
请原谅我后面的部分我不知道如何去解释，因为我自己也看不懂。当然不是字面，而是看不懂这些文字如何体现作者的论点。跪求大神出手指点，感激不尽。

There are costs and benefits to maintaining this kind of inner privacy. About halfway through “Mrs. Dalloway,” Clarissa’s husband, Richard, decides that, during his lunch hour, he’ll buy roses for Clarissa; his plan is to walk home, hand them to her, and say, “I love you.” It’s an unusually romantic thing for him to do, but, for whatever reason, he’s overcome with the realization that it’s “a miracle he should have married Clarissa.” Richard strides into the drawing room, gives her the flowers, but then finds himself unable to say the words. He is elated, overflowing with love: “Happiness is this, is this,” he thinks. A wave of feeling is cresting inside him. But, despite his feelings, he can only speak about trivial things: lunch, that night’s party, and their daughter’s tutor. Finally, he stands up to go. Clarissa watches him. “He stood for a moment as if he were about to say something,” Woolf writes, “and she wondered what? Why? There were the roses.” As Richard takes his leave, Clarissa thinks:

There is a dignity in people; a solitude; even between husband and wife a gulf; and that one must respect … for one would not part with it oneself, or take it, against his will, from one’s husband, without losing one’s independence, one’s self-respect—something, after all, priceless.

It’s typical of Woolf to take a romantic scene and make it steely—that’s the price, you might say, of inner privacy. Marriage, love, and intimacy only take you so far; at the end of that path, you fall back on the austere, solitary dignity of the inner life. And yet Clarissa prefers austerity to intimacy. She thinks, from time to time, about Peter Walsh, who was in love with her, and whom she might have married instead of Richard. Peter was thoughtful, intellectual, romantic, passionate. He loved to talk, and took her thoughts seriously. He was determined to know her, soul-to-soul. To people who hold intimacy to be the highest good in a relationship, that’s a desirable thing. “But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable,” Clarissa thinks. Years later, sitting in the park, she is still rehearsing, in her mind, the arguments she and Peter once had: “Suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?” Richard gives her privacy, and, therefore, inner solitude; he lets her soul remain her own. Of course, he never says “I love you.” Meanwhile, Peter thinks, of Clarissa, that there has always been “this coldness, this woodenness, something very profound in her … an impenetrability. Yet Heaven knows he loved her.” (The case of Septimus Smith, which makes up roughly half of “Mrs. Dalloway,” shows the saddest consequence of inner privacy: hurt to his core, Septimus remains beyond the reach of even those who would help him.)

第三部分，7-9段。第一段的第一句话非常清晰明了的告诉了我们这一部分以及第四部分的内容：维护这种内在隐私的坏处和好处。这一部分先说了坏处，前两段描述了小说中段的场景，Clarissa的老公Richard Dalloway给Clarissa送玫瑰花，可是又无法营造出真正的浪漫，除了他自己喜悦之情溢于言表之外，和Clarissa谈的也尽是一些生活琐事。接下来又是原文的引述：大致意思应该是即使是夫妻间，也有各自的人格和隐私，是相互独立的，要学会互相尊重。（不对的话请大家指正）
这种将一个浪漫场景steely正是Woolf的典型表现。婚姻，爱情，亲密行为也只能帮你到这了，最终你还是会陷入到孤独的自尊中。尽管Clarissa还是会没日没夜的想念Richard，觉得这才是她的真爱。但她也害怕Richard的无视隐私，要求什么都分享的特点，这点也是无法忍受的。
这里我加入一下自己的理解：隐私的坏处就是你喜欢的人，没有隐私意识。有这种意识的人，不是你喜欢的人，最终你嫁给了后者。（￥……%*（%& 有人能帮我吗？？？）

At the same time, the benefits of remaining “impenetrable” can be profound. Clarissa, famously, buys the flowers herself, and that allows her to enjoy the coolness, stillness, and beauty of the flower shop; the same, Woolf suggests, happens in Clarissa’s inner life, where her heightened feelings are allowed to stay pure, untouched. Even Peter, with time, comes to regard himself in this way: “The compensation of growing old,” he thinks, is that “the passions remain as strong as ever, but one has gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence,—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it around, slowly, in the light.” By learning to leave your inner life alone, you learn to cultivate and appreciate it.

And you gain another, strangely spiritual power: the power to regard yourself abstractly. Instead of getting lost in the details of your life, you hold onto the feelings, the patterns, the tones. You learn to treasure those aspects of life without communicating them, and without ruining them, for yourself, by analyzing them too much. Woolf suggests that those treasured feelings might be the source of charisma: when Peter, seeing Clarissa at her party, asks himself, “What is this terror? what is this ecstasy? … What is it that fills me with extraordinary excitement?,” the answer might be that it’s Clarissa’s radiance, never seen directly, but burning through. Clarissa, meanwhile, lets her spiritual intuitions lift her a little above the moment. Wandering through her lamp-lit garden, she sees her party guests: “She didn’t know their names, but friends she knew they were, friends without names, songs without words, always the best.” That’s the power of artist’s privacy. It preserves the melodies otherwise drowned out by words, stories, information.

第四部分，10-11段，好处还是多多滴。就像Clarissa给自己买花一样，Woolf认为，Clarissa的内心也因为保护而显得纯净。即便是Peter也慢慢悟出成长的补偿就是保持激情的同时，获得新的对生存的power的理解。知道了要让你的内心独立后，你学会了培育和感激它（实在尼玛太抽象了，再次求高人解答啊）
同时你又获得了另一种陌生的精神力量：概括的评价自己的能力。没有迷失在生活的细节中，你掌控着感觉，行为模式和态度。你学会了保护这些而不去打扰或者破坏他们。Woolf认为这种感觉就是魅力的来源。



本期精选就到这里啦，坦白讲，这篇文章所谈的主题比较抽象，而引用的内容本身又是意识流文学，尽管字面意思和语句都不难，但读完之后的感觉就像隔了一层纱，理解的非常不透彻。希望大家能够多多探讨，特别期待理解比较深刻的高手指点一二。

happyxgb

放慢速度后理解力加强了很多，非常喜欢意识流的文学作品。我觉得W大概想表达一种，（用电影的手法来讲）就是主角在人群中间，周围世界所有的声音都混为一谈，听不清巨细，连自己都是画面的一部分，心的眼睛高高在上俯视这一切，世界变得无比的宽广，这样不可言说的感觉是灵感的源泉。
而另一种感觉大概是，无声的陪伴吧。就静静在旁边，两个人已有默契，不需要讲话就很美。

Going

呵呵，感觉是文学的意会游戏，看了好几遍，说说自己的理解，或者个人猜想哈，我也不是很懂，供大家讨论：每个人的内心都有一个小角落，存放着自己的隐私，艺术隐私。这个内心深处的隐私，应该被珍藏，而不应该被挖掘，因为越是神秘，越有一种说不出的诱惑力和强大的力量。保留内心的隐私有好有坏，本文的女主人公感觉更加喜欢它的好，让女主人公可以享受独处，不被外界各种纷繁复杂所湮没，保持自己的独立（过多的信息反而容易让人迷失自己）

junjunejune

。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。。
好抽象。

疏离无罪

这篇真的是所有词句都看懂了，但是完全不能理解。。文学这东西真的太高大上了，而且还是意识流，给跪了

charming9386

当时看的。。没看懂 谢谢分享

ffffionabear

谢谢AceJ桑！！！作为不是文学挂少女的人看完当时就斯巴达了~~

CatherineTSIM

关于这篇文章就是眼睛都看花的了的节奏！
我和楼主的理解有出入，我自己看的时候觉得不是“Richard的无视隐私，要求什么都分享的特点，这点也是无法忍受的。”这个让她无法忍受的人应该是Peter。
以下摘录自文章：
“But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable,” Clarissa thinks. Years later, sitting in the park, she is still rehearsing, in her mind, the arguments she and Peter once had: “Suddenly it would come over her, If he were with me now what would he say?” Richard gives her privacy, and, therefore, inner solitude
楼主觉得呢？可以一起探讨哦~

小火山

谢谢楼主！有了楼主的分析后，清晰了好多呢！

psychoarya

thx a lot!!

公元前334

好像在读菜谱的感觉，每个字都认识就是不知道做出来的菜长什么样子。。。

这种形式的精华分析很好，提升理解深度。

wn0858

第二遍读了以后觉得稍微清楚点了，加上楼主的讲解~发现了很多没读出来的东西~PS。。最后一段的几句话还真是喜欢呢~