让我学会阅读的地方 译者： 大漠神骏 原作者：Salvatore Scibona 发表时间：2011-07-29
I did my best to flunk out of high school. I failed English literature, American literature, Spanish, precalculus, chemistry, physics. Once, in a fit of melancholic vanity, I burned my report card in the sink of the KFC where I worked scraping carbonized grease from the pressure cookers. I loved that job the way a dog loves a carcass in a ditch. I came home stinking of it. It was a prudent first career in that I wanted with certainty only one thing, to get out of Ohio, and the Colonel might hire me anywhere in the world. The starting wage was $3.85 an hour. I was saving for the future.
在被中学开除这件事上我可谓竭尽所能。 我挂掉的课程包括英国文学、美国文学、西班牙语、微积分预备课、化学、物理学。一次，当我在打工的肯德基餐厅中清理压力锅内碳化油时，在忧郁的虚荣情绪下，我在水池里烧掉了成绩单。我像狗爱沟渠中的尸骸一样热爱那份工作。我带着它的气味回家。那是一份拮据工作，我唯一肯定的只有一件事：离开俄亥俄州，在世界任何地方都可能有经纪人雇佣我。起薪是3.85美元/小时。我是在未雨绸缪。
But wasn’t it far-fetched, this notion of a future, when I could hardly get through eleventh grade? I always showed up at that job; why couldn’t I show up at the desk in my room and write a C-minus summary of the life of Woodrow Wilson? The television stayed on day and night, singing like a Siren in the crowded house. “Come sit by me and die a little,” it said.
但对于我这样尚未读完11年级的人，说到未来不是有点牵强吗？我总是去那里打工，但为何我不能坐在自己屋中的书桌前写一份关于伍德罗·威尔逊（Woodrow Wilson）生平的C-水平的总结呢？在拥挤的餐厅中，电视机昼夜不断地播放如海中女妖般的歌声。歌中唱到：“坐下来陪着我，一起黯然神伤。”
I didn’t know what I was doing or what I believed in, except the United States of America and the Cleveland Browns. Sometimes, to break my addiction to the tube, I spent the night in a derelict shed with mushrooms growing from the rafter boards. Back-yard rehab. I used to read in there, or, anyway, swing my eyes over the pages of library books: “Out of Africa” (the girl I was in love with loved the movie); Donald Trump’s autobiography; Kierkegaard; “Leaves of Grass”; a book about how to make a robot from an eight-track player. As long as nobody had assigned the book, I could stick with it. I didn’t know what I was reading. I didn’t really know how to read. Reading messed with my brain in an unaccountable way. It made me happy; or something. I copied out the first paragraph of Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” on my bedroom’s dormer wall. The book was a present from an ace teacher, a literary evangelist in classy shoes, who also flunked me, of course, with good reason. Even to myself I was a lost cause.
除了美利坚合众国和克里夫兰布朗队（译者注：橄榄球队名）外，我不知道我在做什么或信仰什么。有时，为了摆脱电视瘾，我会在一个荒废的、椽板上长着蘑菇的小屋中过夜。 我曾在修复的后院中读书，或者说扫视来自图书馆书籍的页面。《走出非洲》（我爱的女孩喜欢这部电影）、《唐纳德·特朗普自传》、《克尔凯郭尔》、《草叶集》、一本关于如何用8轨录音机制造机器人的书。只要图书馆没人分配这些书，我就可以一直保留它们。我不知道我在读什么，也不懂如何阅读。阅读以一种莫名其妙的方式弄乱了我的大脑。它让我感到快乐或其他什么。我在天窗墙上抄写了安妮·迪拉德的《一个美国童年》的第一段文字。这本书是一位信奉文字福音主义的王牌教师送给我的礼物，也即那个有充足理给使我不及格的人。甚至我自己也认为，我那是白费力。
Early senior year, a girl in homeroom passed me a brochure that a college had sent her. The college’s curriculum was an outrage. No electives. Not a single book in the seminar list by a living author. However, no tests. No grades, unless you asked to see them. No textbooks—I was confused. In place of an astronomy manual, you would read Copernicus. No books about Aristotle, just Aristotle. Like, you would read book-books. The Great Books, so called, though I had never heard of most of them. It was akin to taking holy orders, but the school—St. John’s College—had been secular for three hundred years. In place of praying, you read. My loneliness was toxic; the future was coleslaw, mop water; the college stood on a desert mountain slope in Santa Fe, New Mexico, fifteen hundred miles from home; I could never get into such a school; my parents couldn’t pay a dollar. And I loved this whole perverse and beautiful idea. I would scrap everything (or so I usefully believed) and go to that place and ask them to let me in. It felt like a vocation. It was a vocation.
刚上高年级时，大教室中的一个女孩递给我一本某大学寄给她的手册。那所大学的课程表很疯狂：没有任何选修课！课程列表中没有任何一本书的作者还活着！但是，没有考试，没有评分，除非你提出对此申请。没有课本-我很困惑。你将阅读哥白尼的作品，而不是天文学手册。没有关于亚里士多德的书，只有亚里士多德自己的书。所谓伟大的经典，尽管大部分我从未听说，是那些做牧师职位之类。不过，那所名为圣约翰学院的学校已经世俗化300年了。 你将用阅读来代替祷告。我的孤独是有害的，未来是凉拌卷心菜和拖地水。这家学院位于1500英里外新墨西哥州圣达菲的一处荒山上。我不可能进入这样一所学校。我的父母付不起一分钱。但我喜欢一个反常而美妙的想法：变卖一切去那个地方恳求他们让我入学。这像是天命。这确实是天命。
Reader, I married it.
读者们，我真的这么做了。
The summer before I started, the dean had the arriving students read the Iliad and memorize the Greek alphabet. A year before, I had not known that ancient Greek still existed. I had assumed that all we knew of the Greeks was hearsay. The other students came from Louisiana, Alaska, Malaysia. I could not recognize any of the splintery plant life here. After Greek, we would learn to read French. A teacher, a soft-spoken giant from Colorado in a yarmulke and a worn wool jacket, pointed to a figure in a differential equation from Newton’s “Principia” and said, “This is where our upper-middle-class prejudices about time and space begin to break down.”
夏天，教务长要求到达的学生阅读《伊里亚特》并记忆希腊字母表。一年前，我根本不知道古希腊语仍存在。我曾认为我们所知的关于希腊的一切都不过是传说。其他学生来自路易斯安娜州、阿拉斯加州、马来西亚。 此外我没有发现这里有任何细碎的植物生命。学完希腊语后，我们将学习法语。一位来自科罗拉多州、头戴圆顶小帽、身穿旧羊毛衫的高大老师指着牛顿《数学原理》中某微分方程中的一个数字说道：“这就是我们中上阶层的人对时间和空间的偏见开始崩塌之处。”
Loans. Grants from the college and the government. Jobs from asbestos remover to library clerk. I carried bricks and mortar to rooftops during the summers, but if I hadn’t made time to read the night before, my legs wore out by noon. Even my body needed to read.
资助来自贷款、学院和政府提供的助学金、还有从石棉清除员到图书馆职员的各式工作。在几个夏天里，我曾向屋顶搬运砖块和灰浆。但如果前一天我未曾花时间读书，我的腿到中午时就会疲惫不堪。看来，我的身体需要阅读。
By senior year at St. John’s, we were reading Einstein in math, Darwin in lab, Baudelaire in French tutorial, Hegel in seminar. Seminar met twice a week for four years: eight o’clock to ten at night or later, all students addressed by surname. On weekends, I hung out with my friends. The surprise, the wild luck: I had friends. One sat in my room with a beer and “The Phenomenology of Spirit,” reading out a sentence at a time and stopping to ask, “All right, what did that mean?” The gravity of the whole thing would have been laughable if it hadn’t been so much fun, and if it hadn’t been such a gift to find my tribe.
到了圣乔治学院的高年级时，我们在数学课中阅读爱因斯坦，实验课中阅读达尔文，法语教学课中阅读波德莱尔，研讨课中阅读黑格尔。四年里每周2次研讨课，时间从晚上8点到10点或更晚。所有学生按姓氏字母顺序发表演讲。在周末，我与朋友们闲逛。 我有了朋友，这是意想不到的幸运。其中有一位曾拿着啤酒和《精神现象学》坐在我的房间里，一次朗读一句，然后停下来问，“好，这是什么含义？” 如果这一切未曾如此有趣，或如果未曾有找到我归属的圈子的幸运，那么，整件事的严肃性都将是可笑的。
In retrospect, I was a sad little boy and a standard-issue, shiftless, egotistical, dejected teen-ager. Everything was going to hell, and then these strangers let me come to their school and showed me how to read. All things considered, every year since has been a more intense and enigmatic joy.
回顾往事，我曾是一个悲哀的小男孩，一个无能的、任性的、沮丧的标准问题少年。一切都一团糟。但当那些素不相识的人让我入学并向我展示如何阅读之后，全面来看，每一年我都拥有了更强烈和更神秘的快乐。
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