鳳來峰
試在網絡虛擬世界裏留下一片真誠.
Rhapsody in Realism
By DAVID BROOKS June 26, 2014
A few years ago, I came across an article on a blog that appealed tremendously. It was on a subject that obviously I have a lot to learn about. But it was actually the tone and underlying worldview that was so instructive, not just the substance.
The article was called “15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years” by Lydia Netzer. The first piece of advice was “Go to bed mad.” Normally couples are told to resolve each dispute before they call it a night. But Netzer writes that sometimes you need to just go to bed. It won’t do any good to stay up late when you’re tired and petulant: “In the morning, eat some pancakes. Everything will seem better, I swear.”
Another piece of advice is to brag about your spouse in public and let them overhear you bragging.
Later, she tells wives that they should make a husband pact with their friends. “The husband pact says this: I promise to listen to you complain about your husband even in the most dire terms, without it affecting my good opinion of him. I will agree with your harshest criticism, accept your gloomiest predictions. I will nod and furrow my brow and sigh when you describe him as a hideous ogre. Then when your fight is over and love shines again like a beautiful sunbeam in your life, I promise to forget everything you said and regard him as the most charming of princes once more.”
Most advice, whether on love or business or politics, is based on the premise that we can just will ourselves into being rational and good and that the correct path to happiness is a straight line. These writers, in the “Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” school, are essentially telling you to turn yourself into a superstar by discipline and then everything will be swell.
But Netzer’s piece is nicely based on the premise that we are crooked timber. We are, to varying degrees, foolish, weak, and often just plain inexplicable — and always will be. As Kant put it: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing was ever made.”
People with a crooked timber mentality tend to see life as full of ironies. Intellectual life is ironic because really smart people often do the dumbest things precisely because they are carried away by their own brilliance. Politics is ironic because powerful people make themselves vulnerable because they think they can achieve more than they can. Marriage is ironic because you are trying to build a pure relationship out of people who are ramshackle and messy. There’s an awesome incongruity between the purity you glimpse in the love and the fact that he leaves used tissues around the house and it drives you crazy.
People with a crooked timber mentality try to find comedy in the mixture of high and low. There’s something fervent in Netzer’s belief in marital loyalty: “You and your spouse are a team of two. It is you against the world. No one else is allowed on the team, and no one else will ever understand the team’s rules.” Yet the piece is written with a wry appreciation of human foibles. If you have to complain about your husband’s latest outrage to somebody’s mother, she writes, complain to his mother, not to yours. “His mother will forgive him. Yours never will.”
People with a crooked timber mentality try to adopt an attitude of bemused affection. A person with this attitude finds the annoying endearing and the silly adorable. Such a person tries to remember that we each seem more virtuous from our own vantage point than from anybody else’s.
People with a crooked timber mentality are anti-perfectionist. When two people are working together there are bound to be different views, and sometimes you can’t find a solution so you have to settle for an arrangement. You have to design structures that have a lot of give, for when people screw up. You have to satisfice, which is Herbert Simon’s term for any option that is not optimal but happens to work well enough.
Great and small enterprises often have two births: first in purity, then in maturity. The idealism of the Declaration of Independence gave way to the cold-eyed balances of the Constitution. Love starts in passion and ends in car pools.
The beauty of the first birth comes from the lofty hopes, but the beauty of the second birth comes when people begin to love frailty. (Have you noticed that people from ugly places love their cities more tenaciously than people from beautiful cities?)
The mature people one meets often have this crooked timber view, having learned from experience the intransigence of imperfection and how to make a friend of every stupid stumble. As Thornton Wilder once put it, “In love’s service only wounded soldiers can serve.”
（我把中文的譯文貼上，我覺得英文原文讀起來更簡潔，幽默，意味深長，作者畢竟是個政治社會的精英學者，共和黨人。也許有網友更願意看一下中文。補貼在下。BYMYHEATRT）
幾年前，我在一個博客上讀到了一篇引人入勝的文章，文章講的顯然也是一個我了解並不多的話題。但頗具參考意義的實際上是其語氣和底層的世界觀，而不僅僅是內容本身。
這篇文章題為“婚姻持續15年的15個方法”(15 Ways to Stay Married for 15 Years)， 作者是莉迪亞·內澤(Lydia Netzer)。第一則建議是“生著氣睡覺”，通常人們給夫婦提出的建議都是，睡覺之前要解決所有的爭論。但是內澤寫道，有時候還是要直接睡覺，人又累又 惱怒時，熬到很晚都不睡是一點用都沒有的。“早上吃幾片薄烤餅，所有事看起來都會好很多。我發誓。”
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Josh Haner/The New York Times
戴維·布魯克斯
另一則建議是，在眾人麵前誇耀你的伴侶，而且讓對方無意間聽到你的誇耀。
之後，她告誡妻子們，應當與閨蜜訂下一個“丈夫規約”。 “丈夫規約要這麽寫：我承諾傾聽你抱怨你的丈夫，即使是用最狠毒的措辭，但這並不會影響我對他的良好評價。我認同你最尖刻的批評、接受你最灰暗的預測，在 你形容他是醜陋的怪物時，我會點頭、皺眉、歎氣。等到爭吵結束，愛又像美麗的陽光一樣在你生活中閃耀時，我承諾會忘記你說過的所有話，再一次把他當做最有 魅力的王子。”
無論是對於愛情、生意，還是政治，多數的建議都是基於這樣 一個前提：我們可以強令自己變得理性、正麵，而且通往幸福的正確道路是一條直線。那些屬於《高效能人士的七個習慣》(Seven Habits of Highly Effective People)學派的作家們，實質上是在告訴你，通過自律把自己變成超級巨星，所有事就都能有很棒的結果。
然而內澤的文章卻方便地基於這樣一個前提：我們都是彎曲的木材。我們在不同程度上是愚蠢的、軟弱的，而且經常完全無法解釋——我們一直都會這樣。就像康德所說的那樣：“以人性這種彎曲的木材，根本做不出什麽直的東西。”
持這種彎木心態的人，常常會觀察到生活中滿是反諷。知識界 的生活滿是反諷，因為很聰明的人常常會做最蠢的事情，原因恰恰是他們因才智而無法自持。政治充滿反諷，因為有權力的人以為自己能取得超出自身能力的功績， 進而招致災禍。婚姻也滿是反諷，因為你要嚐試與一個草率脆弱、邋遢淩亂的人，建立一段純粹的關係。你會麵對驚人的反差：一麵是在愛情中窺見的一鱗半爪的純 粹，另一麵則是他會在家裏亂放用過的紙巾，簡直能把你逼瘋。
持彎木心態的人，會試著在五味雜陳的起起落落之間，尋找喜 劇般的情節。內澤對婚姻的忠誠，持有一種狂熱的信念：“你和你的伴侶，兩人是一個團隊。你們合力對抗全世界。不能允許其他任何人進入這個團隊，其他任何人 永遠都不能理解這個團隊的規則。”然而這篇文章也令人哭笑不得地承認了人的荒唐。如果你必須要對某人的母親，抱怨丈夫最近犯下的大錯，她寫道，那就向他的 母親抱怨，而不是你的母親。“他的母親會原諒他。你的卻永遠不會。”
持彎木心態的人，會努力采取一種愉悅而喜愛的態度。有這種態度的人會發覺，惱人的事討人喜歡，笨拙的事惹人憐愛。這樣的人會努力記住，我們每個人站在自己的角度看到的自己，總會比站在他人的視角顯得更崇高。
持彎木心態的人是反對完美主義的。兩個人協同努力時，總會 有不同的觀點，有時候你找不到解決的辦法，隻能退而求其次地接受某種安排。必須要設計一種包含足夠多讓步的結構，來承受人們把事情搞砸的時刻。必須要將就 地接受(satisfice)——司馬賀(Herbert Simon)用這個詞來表示任何一種並非最優，但效果恰巧足夠好的選項。
事業無論大小，往往都要經曆兩次新生：第一次帶來純粹，第二次帶來成熟。《獨立宣言》(Declaration of Independence)的理想主義，後來讓位於《憲法》中冷靜的製衡。愛開始時是激情，到後來就成了拚車。
第一次新生之所以美好，是因為崇高的願望，但第二次新生之所以美好，是因為人們開始喜愛脆弱。（你有沒有注意到，與來自美麗城市的人相比，來自醜陋地方的人，對家鄉城市的愛更不屈不撓？）
我們遇到的那些成熟的人，常常持有這種彎木心態，因為他們已經從經驗中了解到，不完美有多麽頑固，以及怎樣與每一個愚蠢的過失為友。就像桑頓·懷爾德(Thornton Wilder)說過的，“隻有負過情傷的士兵才能去服愛的兵役。”
翻譯：王童鶴
相信他們並不完滿， 但是成熟到可以擔當對方。 真是可愛：)