ThePleasureoflearning翻译earnest
学习的乐趣
Gilbert Highet
在越来越多学校设立的今天，学习已成了一种义务。是应该做的，说严重点，是必须做的，靠固定的课时和严格的纪律来维持，这是很糟糕的。学生们对这些必修课嗤之以鼻，并竭尽全力抗拒它们。这种态度可能伴随一生。对于太多的人来说，学习似乎是自己的意愿屈服于外界的指引，是一种奴役。
This is a mistake. Learning is a natural pleasure, inborn and instinctive, one of the essential pleasures of the human race. Watch a small child, at an age too young to have had any mental habits implanted by training. Some delightful films made by the late Dr. Arnold Gesell of Yale University show little creatures who can barely talk investigating problems with all the zeal and excitement of explorers, making discoveries with the passion and absorption of dedicated scientists. At the end of each successful investigation, there comes over each tiny face an expression of pure heart-felt pleasure.
这种观点是错的。学习是一种享受，是与生俱来的本能，是人类最基本的享受。看看那些尚未接在训练中获取任何心理定势的幼儿。已故耶鲁大学博士阿诺德.吉赛尔（Arnold Gesell）摄制了一组有趣的影片，它们显示：尚无语言能力的幼儿如探险家一样热切、兴奋地研究问题，如科学家一般热情、专注地寻求发现。一旦探究成功，孩子们的小脸上就呈现出满心欢喜的表情。
But if the pleasure of learning is universal, why are there so many dull, incurious people in the world? It is because they were made dull, by bad teaching, by isolation, by surrender to routine; sometimes, too, by the pressure of hard work and poverty; or by the toxin of riches, with all their ephemeral and trivial delights. With luck, resolution and guidance, however, the human mind can survive not only poverty but even wealth.
但是，如果说学习的乐趣是带有普遍性的，那为什么还有那么多人麻木迟钝、对任何东西都不抱好奇心？这是因为，他们接受了糟糕的教育、处在孤陋寡闻的状态、向一成不变的日常生活妥协了，也许还为劳役和贫穷所困，或在金钱的毒害下耽于声，因此变得既麻木又迟钝。然而，只要有适当的机会、坚定的决心和明确的方向，作为人之本性的学习的乐趣完全可以保持下来，而不管生活富足与否。
This pleasure is not confined to learning from textbooks, which are too often tedious. But it does include learning from books. Sometimes, when I stand in a big library like the Library of Congress, or Butler Library at Columbia, and gaze round me at the millions of books, I feel a sober, earnest delight hard to convey except by a metaphor. These are not lumps of lifeless paper, but minds alive on the shelves. From each of them goes out its own voice, as inaudible as the streams of sound conveyed by electric waves beyond the range of our
hearing; and just as the touch of button on our stereo will fill the room with music, so by opening one of these volumes, one can call into range a voice far distant in time and space, and hear it speaking, mind to mind, heart to heart.
学习的乐趣并不仅仅来自书本，读书常是枯燥的活。但学习应当包括读书。当我站在一个大图书馆里，比如美国国会图书馆或哥伦比亚大学巴特勒图书馆（Butler Library at Columbia），环视周围的几百万册藏书时，心头会涌上一种神圣而强烈的欣喜感，这种感情只能用比喻来表达。这些书并非毫无生气的字纸堆，而是活在架上的心灵。它们有自己的话语，如同电波传送的声音那样不为人所觉；只要打开一本书，就如按下音响设备的电钮能让音乐充满房间那样，你能听见从遥远时空传来的话语，让那颗心灵对着你娓娓道来。
But, far beyond books, learning means keeping the mind open and active to receive all kinds of experience. One of the best-informed men I ever knew was a cowboy who rarely read a newspaper and never a book but who had ridden many thousands of miles through one of the western states. He knew his state as thoroughly as a surgeon knows the human body. He loved it, and understood it. Not a mountain, not a canyon which had not much to tell him; not a change in the weather that he could not interpret. And so, among the pleasures of learning, we should include travel: travel with an open mind, an alert eye and a wish to understand other peoples, other places, rather than looking in them for a mirror image of oneself.
除了读书以外，学习还包括保持心灵的开放与活跃，让它能接受各种经验。我认识一名极为博识的牛仔，他很少看报，也从不读书，但已在西部的一个州骑马穿行了数千英里。他极为熟悉自己所在的州，如同外科医生极为熟悉人体一般。他爱那个州，并真正了解她。对于他来说，那儿每座山脉、每道峡谷都有许多可谈，而任何细小的天气变化都休想逃过他的感知。所以，学习的乐趣应当包括旅行——带着开放的心态、敏锐的眼睛和渴望了解他人或异地的心情上路，而不是指望从他人或异地中到自己的影子。
Learning also means learning to practice, or at least to appreciate, an art. Every new art you learn appears like a new window on the universe; it is like acquiring a new sense. Crafts, too, are well worth exploring. A friend of mine took up book-binding because his doctor ordered him to do something that would give him relaxation and activity without tension. It was a difficult challenge at first, but he gradually learned to square off the paper and boards, sew the pages, fasten on the backstrip, and maintain precision and neatness throughtout.
学习的概念还应当包含对艺术的学习，至少是对艺术欣赏的学习。你所学的每门新艺术都是一扇通往世界的新窗口，它能带给你新的感受。工艺品同样也是值得我们去探索的。我的一位朋友之所以从事装订工作，是因为他的医生建议他要多活动来放松他紧张的情绪。刚开始这的确是一个坚难的挑战，可是慢慢的，他学会了怎么把纸和木板弄得方方正正的，学会了缝制书页，还学会了怎样固定书脊布条以及怎么精确整洁的把全部的过程都做好。
As for reading books, this contains two different delights. One is the pleasure of apprehending the unexpected, such as when one meets a new author who has a new visio
n of the world. The other pleasure is of deepening one's knowledge of a special field. One might enjoy reading about the Civil War, and then be drawn to a particularly moving part of it-the underground railway, say, which carried escaping slaves northward to freedom. One would then be impelled to visit the chief way stations along the route, reconstructing the lives of those resolute organizers and thankful fugitives.
而读书包含两种不同的乐趣。一种是邂逅新知，比如从陌生作者那儿获得对于世界的新看法。另一种是加深自己在特定领域内的知识。你要是爱读关于南北战争的书，那么你可能受到吸引去游览当时的某些地方——比如地下铁路，它们曾将逃亡的黑奴们输送到自由的北方。你甚至还会有兴趣看看这条铁路上的主要车站，探究那些坚毅的组织者和心存感激的逃亡者的生活。
Learning extends our lives (as Ptolemy said) into new dimensions. It is cumulative. Instead of diminishing in time, like health and strength, its returns go on increasing, 正如托勒密所言，学习能帮我们把生命扩展到新的维度。这种扩展效应可以累积。它不会象健康或气力那样随时光流逝而消亡，其回报历久弥厚，只要……

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