[2008.11.15] A book of silence 静默之书

A book of silence
静默之书        
Out of this world
超凡入圣

Nov 13th 2008
2008年11月13日
From The Economist print edition
据《经济学人》印刷版


The transcendental effects of silence
静默的超验性效能



SARA MAITLAND’S book is not about peace and quiet. It is about silence as a practice, a discipline, a way of life. A cottage in the country will not do. It is more a matter of desert caves and open oceans, or, in her case, wild Scottish moorland. It’s the real deal.
莎拉•曼特兰的书书中谈到的静默，是一种行为，一种准则，一种生活方式，而不是单纯的安宁与平和。村庄里一间农舍并不顶事。它更可能指的是大漠洞穴，辽阔的海洋，或者，按她的说法，苏格兰荒野地。在这里，它是件更实在的事情。

How Ms Maitland gets to that point is a long story; a hunt for greater solitude and further remoteness along the length of Britain, with a detour to the Sinai desert, which she describes with a disarming sense of being thought mad. Her friends tell her she is, and she realises that the modern world has little room for serious silence seekers. It is not just that blasting radios, mobile phones, traffic and aeroplanes can be a source of despair. It is also the assumption that communication and relationships are central to all human life. Ms Maitland knows this because she has been there. Brought up in a large, articulate family, she was nourished on argument. Her politics, her feminism and her religion all fed on talk. In such a context, silence becomes an absence, a mark of intellectual abdication, a rejection of humanity.
曼特兰如何走到这里也是说来话长。为了追寻更荒僻的幽静及更杳远的隐蔽，她足迹踏遍英伦大陆，也曾绕道至西柰沙漠［注］。这一切，她都近似疯狂的随意讲述 着。朋友告诉她，她是疯了。而她也正意识到现代社会并没有空间留给严肃的静默追寻者们。震耳的无线电，移动电话，交通及飞机。但让人绝望的却不仅于此。还 有人认为交流联系就是人类生活的核心。曼特兰了解这一点，因为她曾经就在那样的环境里。成长于一个人人能言善道的大家庭，她是在争论中汲取了营养。她对政 治、性别、宗教的观点，都在谈话中得到滋育。在这样的环境下，沉默已经缺失。它成为智力减退的一个标志，对人性的一种否定。

Ms Maitland is a Roman Catholic convert and she is frank about her desire “to explore my own spirituality and deepen my growing sense of the reality of God”. But “A Book of Silence” is not primarily a work of theology. What interests the author is silence itself, wherever it leads. In the face of hostility and suspicion she wants to rehabilitate it, to discover its history, to call on witnesses from every tradition and every kind of circumstance—from early Christian hermits to the Romantic poets to single-handed sailors and mountaineers. It is both an analytical, theoretical fascination and a personal one, her reading and her experience locked together, each testing and illuminating the other.
曼特兰信仰罗马天主教。她也坦承有关“探索自身灵性及不断加深对于上帝存在性感知”的渴望。但是，《沉默之书》并不主要是神学作品。作者感兴趣的是沉默本 身，不论这个话题会引向哪里。在那些反对和怀疑的人面前，她想要为静默正名，求根溯源，从每个传统及各种状况下搜罗证言——从早期基督隐士到浪漫派诗人， 再到单枪匹马的水手和登山人。这不仅是解析，理论上的吸引力，也融合了作者的个性，蕴含着她的阅读与经历。两者之间相互检验，相互阐释。

So what is silence like? Ms Maitland does not pull her punches. At various times she has heard choirs singing in Latin from the bedroom. She has been spooked and sapped of energy. She has lost track of time, felt her identity dissolving, lost her inhibitions, forgotten to wash. She is not alone in this. Some of it appears in the literature on sensory deprivation. But it also appears in the literature of transcendence.
静默到底是什么？曼特兰在解释这一点上可谓不遗余力。好几次，她听到卧室里响起拉丁语的合唱。为此，她受到惊吓，也感到筋疲力尽。她失去了时间的轨道，感 到个体正在消溶，丧失了自控能力，忘记了梳洗。但是，并不只她一人是这样。这些在有关知觉剥夺的文学作品里出现过。但也在超验性文学里出现。

Transcendent silence comes in many colours—and little of it is exactly silent. Lindisfarne, the Holy Island, shrieks with birds; the moors and mountains howl with wind and rain. Only the desert achieves it, but at a price. It was there, reading the sayings of the desert fathers and Athanasius’s “Life of St Anthony”, that Ms Maitland found herself most strangely moved. The hermits’ fierce self-abnegation, their holy self-emptying seemed to her thrilling. She wanted to be like them; she was transported. And yet. Readers will know Ms Maitland as a novelist and short-story writer. The silence of the desert has its uses for the mystic, but what she experienced as a writer was that it destroys not only the sense of self, but also the foundation of narrative art—a sense of time and memory.
超验性静默的表现是多样的——而其中很少是完全静默的。林迪斯圣岛，与鸟类一起尖叫；荒原，山地与风雨一起呼啸。只有沙漠才有真正的静默，但却也有条件。 就在那里，曼特兰读着沙漠教父们的语录和圣师亚达纳削的《圣安东尼传》，她发现自己不可思议地被感动了。隐士们强烈的自我克制和他们神圣的自我倾空都令她 振奋。她希望像他们一样；她心驰神往。然而，曼特兰毕竟是个小说家和短篇故事作家。沙漠的静默自有其神秘主义的价值，但曼特兰作为一个作家真正所经历的却 是沙漠不仅摧毁了她的自我意识，也摧毁了叙事艺术的基础——时间和记忆的意识。

In the end, it was on the moors of Galloway, her birthplace, and in the spirit of the Romantic poets that Ms Maitland was able to unite transcendence with a heightened rather than a diminished sense of individuality. She walked the hills like Dorothy Wordsworth and, like William Wordsworth, paddled a boat among the reflections of the stars, the dragonflies “coming up from the depths to meet the real dragonflies as they skim down onto the surface, which is the skin between the two worlds of air and water”.
最后，还是在她的出生地加洛威荒原以及浪漫派诗人的精神下，曼特兰才得以将将超验性与自我意识的升华而不是消减相融合。她像华兹华斯及妹妹桃乐斯一样，在 山岭中散步，在星辰的映照下划桨。蜻蜓“从深处上来会同那真实的蜻蜓。它们正低掠至表面而过。而那表面，正是水和空气这两个世界之间的皮肤”。

There are several such passages of vivid recollection: the sudden feeling once, on some mountainside, of being physically connected to everything; waking on a night of swarming stars; watching the desert dawn; being transfixed by Mark Rothko’s paintings: “dense pools of silent energy”. One could wish for more. If there is one criticism of this book, it is that there is an occasional sense of strain, of intellectual contrivance. Ms Maitland’s own experience is sometimes drowned in commentary, as though she were unsure of her audience. She can afford to relax. Many of her readers, religious or not, will be more than halfway with her.
好几段这样的文字都是在描写如此栩栩如生的回忆：一次在山边，突然感到自己的身体与所有的一切都联系在一起；在满天星斗的夜晚醒来；欣赏沙漠的破晓；被马 克•罗斯科的画作击中内心深处：“沉默之能汇集的深池”。这些都让人百读不厌。如果要说批评的话，就是文中偶然闪现的紧张感，理智分析的后果。曼特兰自己 的经历有时会淹没在评论中，好像她对读者并没有多少信心。其实她完全可以放松下来。很多她的读者，虔诚或非虔诚，都不会中途弃她而去。


注：《圣经》出埃及记中摩西带领以色列人离开埃及时所走过的沙漠