儒琴英语咀嚼阿兰·德波顿的《旅行的艺术》(The Art of Travel) 英语用词。阿兰·德波顿(Alain de Botton)是一位出生于瑞士的英国哲学家和作家。他写的散文式的书被称为“日常生活哲学”。他的作品涉及爱情、旅行、建筑和文学，包括小说《爱情笔记》（1993）、《爱上浪漫》（1994）、《亲吻与诉说》（1995）及散文作品《拥抱逝水年华》（1997 ）、《哲学的慰藉》（2000）、《旅行的艺术》（2002）、《写给无神论者》（2012）。他的书在30个国家畅销。
Departure : II On Travelling Places 2
出发：第2章: 旅行中的特定场所 第2节
第2节
Charles Baudelaire was born in Paris in 1821. From an early age, he felt uncomfortable at home. His father died when he was five, and a year later his mother married a man her son disliked. He was sent to a succession of boarding schools from which he was repeatedly expelled for insubordination. In adulthood, he could find no place in bourgeois society. He quarrelled with his mother and stepfather, wore theatrical black capes and hung reproductions of Delacroix’s Hamlet lithographs around his bedroom. In his diary, he complained of suffering from ‘that appalling disease: the Horror of Home’ and from a ‘feeling of loneliness, from earliest childhood. Despite the family – and with school friends especially – a feeling of being destined to an eternally solitary life’.
He dreamt of leaving France for somewhere else, somewhere far away, on another continent, with no reminders of ‘the everyday’ – a term of horror for the poet; somewhere with warmer weather; a place, in the words of the legendary couplet from L’Invitation au voyage, where everything would be ‘ordre et beauté/Luxe, calme et volupté’. But he was aware of the difficulties. He had once left the leaden skies of northern France and returned dejected. He had set off on a journey to India. Three months into the sea crossing, the ship had run into a storm and had stopped in Mauritius for repairs. It was the lush, palm-fringed island that Baudelaire had dreamt of. But he could not shake off a feeling of lethargy and sadness and suspected that India would be no better. Despite efforts by the captain to persuade him otherwise, he insisted on sailing back to France.
The result was a lifelong ambivalence towards travel. In Le Voyage, he sarcastically imagined the accounts of travellers returned from afar:
We saw stars
And waves; we saw sand too;
And, despite many crises and unforeseen disasters
We were often bored, just as we are here.
And yet he remained sympathetic to the wish to travel and observed its tenacious hold on him. No sooner had he returned to Paris from his Mauritian trip than he began to dream once again of going somewhere else, noting: ‘Life is a hospital in which every patient is obsessed with changing beds. This one wants to suffer in front of the radiator, and that one thinks he’d get better if he was by the window.’ He was, nevertheless, unashamed to count himself among the patients: ‘It always seems to me that I’ll be well where I am not and this question of moving is one that I’m forever entertaining with my soul.’ Sometimes Baudelaire dreamt of going to Lisbon. It would be warm there and he would, like a lizard, gain strength from stretching himself out in the sun. It was a city of water, marble and light, conducive to thought and calm. But almost from the moment he conceived of this Portuguese fantasy, he would start to wonder if he might not be happier in Holland. Then again, why not Java or else the Baltic or even the North Pole, where he could bathe in shadows and watch comets fly across the Arctic skies? The destination was not really the point. The true desire was to get away, to go, as he concluded, ‘Anywhere! Anywhere! So long as it is out of the world!’
Baudelaire honoured reveries of travel as a mark of those noble questing souls whom he described as ‘poets’, who could not be satisfied with the horizons of home even as they appreciated the limits of other lands, whose temperaments oscillated between hope and despair, childlike idealism and cynicism. It was the fate of poets, like Christian pilgrims, to live in a fallen world while refusing to surrender their vision of an alternative, less compromised realm.
Against such ideas, one detail stands out in Baudelaire’s biography: that he was, throughout his life, strongly drawn to harbours, docks, railway stations, trains, ships and hotel rooms; that he felt more at home in the transient places of travel than in his own dwelling. When he was oppressed by the atmosphere in Paris, when the world seemed ‘monotonous and small’, he would leave, ‘leave for leaving’s sake’, and travel to a harbour or train station, where he would inwardly exclaim:
Carriage, take me with you! Ship, steal me away from here!
Take me far, far away. Here the mud is made of our tears!
In an essay on the poet, T. S. Eliot proposed that Baudelaire had been the first nineteenth-century artist to give expression to the beauty of modern travelling places and machines. ‘Baudelaire … invented a new kind of romantic nostalgia,’ wrote Eliot, ‘the poésie des départs, the poésie des salles d’attente.’ And, one might add, the poésie des stations-service and the poésie des aéroports.
重点用词注解
Charles Baudelaire： 夏尔·波德莱尔。法国诗人，同时也是一位著名的散文家和艺术评论家。他的诗歌在韵律和节奏的处理上表现得非常出色，包含着一种继承自浪漫主义的异国情调，但却是基于对现实生活的观察
insubordination： defiance of authority; refusal to obey orders. 无视权威;拒绝服从命令
bourgeoisie： the social order that is dominated by the so-called middle class. 中产阶级
Delacroix：欧根·德拉克罗瓦（Eugène Delacroix, 1798一1863年），法国著名画家，浪漫主义画派的典型代表
Lithography: /ˈlɪθəˌgræfs/ 平版印刷
L‘Invitation au voyage: 《遨游》，波德莱尔一首很美的诗
Mauritius：毛里求斯，在印度洋西部
lethargy: /ˈleθ.ɚ.dʒi/, a lack of energy and enthusiasm.没精打采，懒散；无生气，呆滞
ambivalence/ambivalent: adjective /æmˈbɪv.ə.lənt/ having two opposing feelings at the same time （心情）矛盾的；模棱两可的，含糊不定的
T. S. Eliot : 托马斯·斯特尔那斯·艾略特(1888~1965)原籍美国,后加入英国国籍。是后期象征主义文学最大的代表,也是西方现代主义文学最有影响的诗人和评论家。