What reading slowly taught me about writing
精读教会我写作
00:04
A long time ago, there lived a Giant, a Selfish Giant, whose stunning garden was the most beautiful in all the land. One evening, this Giant came home and found all these children playing in his garden, and he became enraged. "My own garden is my own garden!" the Giant said. And he built this high wall around it.
00:04
在很久很久以前，有一个巨人，一个拥有世界上最美花园的自私巨人。一天晚上，巨人回到家里发现孩子们在他花园里嬉闹玩耍，他很生气。“我的花园只属于我！”巨人说道。于是他在花园周围立起了高墙。
00:29
faster怎么读?
The author Oscar Wilde wrote the story of "The Selfish Giant" in 1888. Almost a hundred years later, that Giant moved into my Brooklyn childhood and never left. I was raised in a religious family, and I grew up reading both the Bible and the Quran. The hours of reading, both religious and recreational, far outnumbered the hours of television-watching. Now, on any given day, you could find my siblings and I curled up in some part of our apartment reading, sometimes unhappily, because on summer days in New York City, the fire hydrant blasted, and to our immense jealousy, we could hear our friends down there playing in the gushing water, their absolute joy making its way up through our open windows. But I learned that the deeper I went into my books, the more time I took with each sentence, the less I heard the noise of the outside world. And so, unlike my siblings, who were racing through books, I read slowly -- very, very slowly.
这是奥斯卡·王尔德1888年写的《自私的巨人》里的内容。一百年后，这个“巨人”住进了我在布鲁克林时的儿童时光后就再没有离开过。我成长于一个宗教家庭，同时阅读了《圣经》和《》。我花在阅读以及理解宗教的时间，出于宗教和娱乐目的，比看电视的时间都多。无论何时，我和我的兄弟妹都蜷在公寓的一个小角落进行阅读，有时并不开心，因为
在夏天，纽约市的消防栓总会时不时地爆开，朋友们在楼下嬉戏玩耍的声音沿着打开的窗户传到我们这边，他们绝对的快乐让我们非常地嫉妒。但是后来我发现，当我越来越专注于我手上的书本，花在每个句子上的时间越来越多时，外界的声音就会越来越小。与其他快速读书的兄弟妹不同的是，我读得很慢，非常非常慢，
01:31
I was that child with her finger running beneath the words, until I was untaught to do this; told big kids don't use their fingers. In third grade, we were made to sit with our hands folded on our desk, unclasping them only to turn the pages, then returning them to that position. Our teacher wasn't being cruel. It was the 1970s, and her goal was to get us reading not just on grade level but far above it. And we were always being pushed to read faster. But in the quiet of my apartment, outside of my teacher's gaze, I let my finger run beneath those words. And that Selfish Giant again told me his story, how he had felt betrayed by the kids sneaking into his garden, how he had built this high wall, and it did keep the children out, but a grey winter fell over his garden and just stayed and stayed. Wit
h each rereading, I learned something new about the hard stones of the roads that the kids were forced to play on when they got expelled from the garden, about the gentleness of a small boy that appeared one day, and even about the Giant himself. Maybe his words weren't rageful after all. Maybe they were a plea for empathy, for understanding. "My own garden is my own garden."
01:31
我都是用手一个字一个字顺着读下去的，直到我被告知，大孩子在阅读时是不用手指的。在三年级的时候，我们规定要把双手叠放在课桌上，只有需要翻页时才能解除这个姿势，然后翻完之后就要立马恢复原状。我们的老师并不残忍。那时是20世纪70年代，老师的目标是让我们阅读超越本年级水平的书籍。于是我们常常被老师要求加快阅读速度。但是在老师触及不到的我住的公寓里的一个安静角落，我还是用手指着一个字一个字地读书。《自私的巨人》对我重述了他的故事，他是如何对这些偷溜进来的孩子感到不尊重的，他是如何建立起高高的围墙不让这些小孩子入内的，而是同时，他的院子也因此变得荒芜，这种情况也在一直持续下去。每读一遍这个故事，我都能发现一些新的东西比如当孩子们被禁止进入花园时，
他们是如何在碎石路上玩耍的，比如当某天那个小男孩出现时所展示的礼貌，甚至是巨人自己所展示出的那种温柔。也许他的言辞并不是那么愤怒。也许它们是一种对于同理心对于被理解的恳求。“我的花园只属于我。”
02:51
Years later, I would learn of a writer named John Gardner who referred to this as the "fictive dream," or the "dream of fiction," and I would realize that this was where I was inside that book, spending time with the characters and the world that the author had created and invited me into. As a child, I knew that stories were meant to be savored, that stories wanted to be slow, and that some author had spent months, maybe years, writing them. And my job as the reader -- especially as the reader who wanted to one day become a writer -- was to respect that narrative.
多年之后，我认识一位名为约翰·加德纳的作者，他把这种感觉称为“小说般的梦”，或者是“关于小说的梦”。这样的形容让我发现我在书中就在这样的状态，受邀与书中的角一起生活在作者所创造的世界中。当我还是一个孩子的时候，我就知道故事是需要品味的，阅读故事需
要慢，一些作者花了好几个月也许好几年才书写完这些故事。而我作为一名读者——尤其是还怀揣着一个作家梦的读者——是去尊重那些故事。
03:24
Long before there was cable or the internet or even the telephone, there were people sharing ideas and information and memory through story. It's one of our earliest forms of connective technology. It was the story of something better down the Nile that sent the Egyptians moving along it, the story of a better way to preserve the dead that brought King Tut's remains into the 21st century. And more than two million years ago, when the first humans began making tools from stone, someone must have said, "What if?" And someone else remembered the story. And whether they told it through words or gestures or drawings, it was passed down; remembered: hit a hammer and hear its story.

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