夏 日 的 謎 思

    在《華爾街日報》周末版上看到 The Myth of Summer 這篇文章時，覺得題目非常浪漫和詩意，就先入為主的認定這一定是一篇記述迷人夏天的優美散文。讀過之後才發現，作者筆下的夏天與我預期中的印象是完全不同的。

　

    Richard Ford 雖然在文中花了不少的筆墨描述緬因夏天的美麗和愜意 － 清涼的海風吹過寂靜的海灣，小鎮上緩慢悠閑的生活節奏，街上陌生人之間輕鬆溫馨的談話，夏季遠道而來海邊度假的遊客，在夏日的陽光下在海邊獨自垂釣，藍天下飛機拖著像雲帶一樣的尾煙悄悄的滑過，海邊人家迎接客人時傳來的歡聲笑語。。。。。但是，在他不疾不徐的筆調背後，Richard Ford 所描述的遠遠不是一個可以把人“迷死”（myth）的夏天。相反，他眼中的夏天充滿了謎思（myth），抑鬱和困惑。

　

    對於夏天的期盼，對於夏天到來之後稍縱即逝的憂慮，夏季花開花落帶來的傷感，由鄰居家裏房子擴建引起的一連串欲說還休的煩惱，看到郵局門前向陣亡士兵致意的下半旗聯想到令人厭惡的戰爭，遙遙無期弄得人心緒不寧的總統競選，以及對童年時代歡樂夏日的懷念。。。。。。等等，所有這些在作者的筆下都顯得如此的沉重，鬱悶和壓抑，成了一個個難以解開的心結。對於 Richard Ford 來說，好像明麗的夏日帶來的不是活力，激情和歡欣，不是擁抱夏天的渴望，而更多的是悸動，不安和倦怠，是一種難以言及的情感躁動與心靈掙紮。外界自然季節的交替和景物的變換，在他那裏喚起的是一種完全不同的心理感受。這種微妙細膩的感受是極其個體的，鮮活的和獨特的，因而是值得讀者珍視和玩味的。

　

    境由心生，心隨意動。人們對於外界的心理感受從來都不是簡單的像照鏡子似的直射反映。相反，它是一種通過 intellectual prism 折射的結果，是一種被人們心中已有的認知框架（文化背景，知識結構，政治與道德觀念，性格甚至某一特定條件下的心情）“過濾”過的主觀反映。無論是自然，社會，人生，概莫能外。正因為如此，在很多情況下，同樣的自然景觀和外界變化，在不同的人那裏所引起的是不同的感受，甚至同一個人麵對同一個景觀，在不同的心境下也會有迥然不同的感觸。

　

    如此，Richard Ford 在這裏所描述的是一個在某種程度上被“異化”了的夏天，當然，正像每個人心中都有一個自己的夏天一樣，這個被異化了的夏天隻是作為一種純粹自我的東西存在於他個人的心目中，而外界那個自在自為的客觀存在的夏天對他來說是不存在的。換句話說，他所看到的，隻是那個他作為一個單獨的個體才能夠感受到的夏天。由此出發，作者眼裏的夏天是一個讓人難以集中精力的季節，是一個缺乏歡樂的“膚淺季節”，是一個充滿了各種壓力讓人不能夠寬容的季節，並且暗示他甚至更喜歡“漫長和具有單調色彩的冬季”，因為冬天不會像夏天一樣讓他感到自己是一個宿命論者。

　

    與其說作者在這篇文章裏所要表達的是對於夏日的厭倦和焦慮，不如說他要表達的是一種揮之不去的懷舊情結和對於孩提時代夏天的深深的眷戀。異化是對正常狀態的否定，是對理想目標的偏離。對於作者來說，他之所以不喜歡夏天甚至表達了對夏天某種程度上的厭倦，隻是因為他心目中有一個完美理想的夏天：那是一個懶洋洋讓人昏昏欲睡可以忘掉一切的夏天，一個自己願意怎樣就怎樣充滿了歡樂的夏天，一個隻有在童年時代才會有的夏天，一個隨時間的流逝而消失卻永遠不會失而複得的夏天。。。。。。。

　

    中國古人有“智者樂山，仁者樂水”的說法，表明了不同的性格和文化背景決定了人們會對大自然的愛好作不同的取舍。除此以外，年齡會不會也是一個因素呢？讀完這篇文章後，我第一個莫明其妙的想法是，"How old is he?"

　

　

---

　

The Myth of Summer

June in Maine begins with noble ambitions and the promise of a summer idyll. But this is a shallow season, one that does not live up to its billing.

By RICHARD FORD
June 14, 2008; Page W1
Wall Street Journal

　

My neighbors are enlarging their guest house this summer. It sits quite close to our property line, so that from inside I can regularly hear the sounds of construction -- the whine of saws cutting flagstone, the clatter of lumber being unloaded, the pop of the nail guns, the low comforting music of a radio played softly in a pickup truck. All this is entirely agreeable with me. Here, on the coast of Maine, summer comes late and is quickly gone, and the few warm days and weeks we're allotted are as much the fix-up season as the longed-for time of childhood, the blissful season of indolence. I have my own sparse list of things to do -- storm windows to re-glaze, a porch step to patch, some fresh pea gravel for the drive. Nothing as grand as a new guest house, but I have yet to get much done.

　

Peter Marlow/Magnum Photos

Still, my wife and I have come to feel the need to install some foliage between ourselves and our neighbors. Their new cottage is somewhat larger than the old one. Their kids have kids now; more room's needed. It is not a bone of contention. However, what we can now see of their property presents a somewhat larger and imposing aspect, frames the landscape slightly differently. Some form of "protection planting" has seemed like the best idea -- though we truly need no protection from our neighbors. I suspect we are on different sides politically, but they have been our friends and should still be once the summer's over.

　

So, today, the local landscaping people -- Conley's -- have delivered onto our driveway what we feel will be enough new planting to produce the desired effects. A few shiny rhododendrons, six new hemlocks and a good-sized Norway spruce, all of which we have found strategic places for between our ground and theirs. We are all "on ledge" here, and much of what appears to be diggable soil is really only the soft duff of years' accumulation. Therefore planting something with the expectation that it will "take" and grow is largely a matter of luck, against which planning is not much good.

　

When I walk outside at 10 and into the bright, breezy sunshine (which in Maine always contains a bracing if occasionally ominous seam of chill), I find that the Conley's men -- two large, amiable, untalkative fellows in dirty T-shirts and work gloves -- have delivered the entire load of greenery to the gravel driveway, all the individual trees and bushes lying on their sides, their root balls swaddled in burlap, each item with a red-and-white SOLD tag attached to a limb to show that all here is now ours.

　

Only to my surprise -- dismay being too strong a word -- the big Norway spruce which has arrived is half again the size of the tree we have asked for. When I show it to my wife, who tends to trust that most things will work out well, she agrees with me, and in a jovial way tells the Conley's men who have struggled the tree to its current location a few feet from where we mean to site it, that this is a tree one could easily stand on the White House lawn at Christmas, and should be, she believes, replaced with something smaller.

　

We all four of us stand for a while then and look at the grand and bounteous spruce, resting on its side like a slumberous giant soon to awake and cause trouble. "It's lucky we noticed it now," my wife says, seeing the good side of things. The Conley's men are patient good men. One walks down toward the presumed ground where the tree would grow, on the side of a small woodsy hill sloping to our neighbors. He stands and deliberates a moment, looks back at the tree, then again at the ground. Then he nods. "It's pretty big," he says. "It would take a lot of loam for sure." "I think you're right," my wife says confidently. "Something smaller definitely would be better. I'm just happy we noticed it in time." "Yes," he says. His name, I believe, is Freeman. "Yes, it's lucky we caught it now. We'll just put it on the truck and take it back."

　

From where I stand I can see down through the trees and across the property line to our neighbors' new summer cottage, which is all but finished, with most of the work going on inside. The sounds of hammers and saws scarcely interrupt the quiet that the breeze has brought in from the south and off the bay that provides our house and our neighbors' house their lovely views. One man there, a young carpenter wearing a carpenter's apron and holding a claw hammer, has stopped to watch the goings-on here on our side. He waves his hammer at me in a gesture meant to be genial. I wave back. We all know what we know. I decide I might take a walk now, then later think about lunch.

　

SEASONAL VIEWS

　

The Wall Street Journal asked photographers to submit some of their favorite images of summer, along with a few words about them.

Stephen Shore
Yosemite National Park - 1979

My walk takes me down past the general store and past our local lobster shack to the Post Office. It is a small village we live in. Fewer than 400 most of the year. Though because it is a seaside town, there are more people now that it's summer. Their cars are on the road and in the grocery store lot. Massachusetts and New Jersey and Pennsylvania plates. They are not the best drivers in the world, or always friendly. But I welcome them. They are as much a part of things here as I am, and a democratic side of me thinks they should have their shot at a good life, too. As well, their presence means that our few restaurants -- dark through the snowy months -- are open now, their lights burning merrily into the summer evenings. Even the grocery stocks more fruit and better vegetables when the summer people arrive. Though it is worth noting that to live in a place where other people come just for pleasure has the odd effect of making me feel transient, while the visitors seem more fixed and permanent in their lives, coming as they do from more conventional homes far away. It is as if I am always waiting for them and am here at their discretion.

　

At the Post Office I see that the flag is out but seems to be at half mast. Possibly another Maine soldier has died -- in Iraq, or else Afghanistan. Two people are standing on the Post Office steps, talking quietly. When I pass them -- they are strangers to me -- I pick it up that they are not talking about the war or even the election, but about our chances to see 80 today, and the bad bridge traffic in Wiscassett, and how far north we really are here. Summer is, of course, the season at odds with seriousness (winter being gravity's more natural ally). And here in the breezy sunlight, the war and the endless dismaying election -- the one that must somehow save us all -- seem far away, almost illusory, like the clouds we stare at until we think they're mountains. Of course, the war pronounces on us all. Some precious glee we seek is absent, the season less substantial, less likeable. But for now it seems right enough to wear a campaign button, display a bumper sticker, to lower the flag in public places, and wait for the fall. To do more could make us all feel bad about everything.

　

　

Sylvia Plachy
New York - 1966

Romance was in the air that hot summer of 1966, when I looked out the window of our first apartment and watched for the promise of the future.

There is no mail for me, today -- only catalogs and a few bills -- and I leave them in the box for later. I speak to the postmistress about the increased clientele she's seeing for the summer, about the high-school kids graduating then scattering, and about motorcycles, an enthusiasm we share. We are both Harley riders. There is a rally next month to support a charity. I'm considering joining in -- though I haven't before -- which seems to please her. And then I start for home again.

　

Truthfully, I find summer a hard time to concentrate, and a hard season to concentrate on -- as if I were one of those flies that buzz around the warm sunlit windows in late August. I sense change in everything, long before the season's fully on us. Every flower I think will be gone by tomorrow. I note a dry yellowing in the pale birch leaves even as the sunlight's shot through them. The cold sea here offers only a small window for pleasurable swimming, but I most often miss it. My wife is amused by me and hints that I may be a fatalist in things, owing to a Presbyterian past. I remind her that I do not feel this way in the long monochrome winter, the standard-bearer season here, when all the pressure feels gone off and I can somehow relent. But now, when we revel that the summer light falls through the trees in a truly "different" way, and my wife keeps her hopeful account of each day's lengthening hours, I can only sense that this is a shallow season, one that does not live up to its billing, though perhaps I simply do not use it well. Still, I cannot help wondering: was there ever a summer that made us sleepy and forgetful and settled in the precise way we want and need? Only in childhood, possibly. Though childhood, I seem to recall, had its own concerns.

　

Sometimes, since distraction comes so easily, I go down to the dock, climb into my skiff and row a ways to where I know the stripers lie, off the granite point that frames our little harbor here. I take my rod and a pack of frozen mackerel, and I anchor there and fish. I am not in any way a boater, and the ocean in fact always scares me. But I have caught a fish here once -- years ago -- and could again, I choose to believe. Resting at anchor, however, is a good place just to be still and to do one thing and only one. And as I fish, I watch the sleek contrails of the passenger jets passing silently over on their way to Boston and New York. They come from Europe. I watch the ospreys who nest on Perch Island high atop their white spruce. Our sense of a plausible summer depends much on their diligent success at nest-building and procreation, and on their chicks fledging in late August. I watch a power boat bounce noisily across the bay, headed apparently nowhere. I watch a lobsterman working among his bright buoys in the distance. And I hear voices -- from the shore -- some laughter, guests arriving, car doors slamming. "We thought you'd never get here," someone says. "But now you are. Come inside. Come inside. We're so happy...." It is enough. I've caught what I came for, and can now row home again.

　

　

Mary Ellen Mark
Brighton, England - 1965

I took this when I first started to discover the world and photograph it. England is full of funny and eccentric people. That day, there were many of them at the beach. I also took a picture of a woman with a parrot on her shoulder. As I took her picture, the parrot bit her nose.

At home, a medium-sized John Deere tractor has appeared in the driveway -- a number 855 -- a backhoe and front loader attached on opposite ends. It is green like no other green, its springing deer medallion shiny in what has become hazier sunlight. A more modest Norway spruce has also arrived, ready for planting and protection duties. The Conley's men are opening a hole for it, using the toothed bucket of the backhoe, and have already torn through earth and roots to reveal the hard flat pan of rock, half a foot below. I venture down the little hillside that ends at our neighbors' new guest house, and stand as close as I can to the digging, as the bucket scrapes the revealed rock surface and leaves white scars. I want to gain a feel for the bucket's power and its canny precision, and am secretly happy to have a need for such an implement at my own house. The Conley's men are maestros at this digging business. One gives direction from beside the hole, while the other sits and calmly operates the levers. Neither speaks to me, though it is clear I would like to be of use, to assist in making something happen better. But I'm not needed. One of them says to me, or perhaps to no one -- it is Freeman in his clean NRA T-shirt -- "It's not really soil here. It's duff. It won't hold much. We'll have to put in loam and mound it up for anything to grow." "Yes," I say and think of the sentence, "We are putting in the Norway." I run this line over in my head. It is a sentence Vonnegut might've written, full of sad, appealing irony, meant to do no one harm. The Conley's men have done this many times, with no one's help. In an hour or less the tree will be in, all loamed and mounded and ready for life and a future longer than mine. And then they will be gone.

　

Early in the morning, long before the workmen arrive next door, I wake in the gray light to the sound of the lobsterman, hauling traps a quarter mile out on the bay. I go to the window, entirely naked, just to watch him at his duties. He is a single-hander, a seasonal fisherman, wenching his traps up in the furred light, barely visible to me, but visible enough. His radio is playing out across the still, metallic water. I can hear, by some strange chance, a Red Sox score from the night just past. 8-3. A late-night loss in Oakland. I stand and watch, hear the motor-grind of his wench, the clatter of the heavy basket down onto the deck, the deep gurgling thrust of his smoky engine as his boat comes about then motors on. My legs grow cold, my hands, my feet. The dog in our room makes a whimper from some dream he's having. My wife stirs in the bed behind me, aware even in her sleep that I'm away. It is summer now. Summer of course is a variable time, different in whatever place you are at this hour. Though what could it be, I wonder, whatever could it possibly be, that any of us are disguising, are mimicking, are seeking shelter from in a too-brief season when shelter's of no avail? Too hard, I think. No answers are forthcoming as the new day wanders up. Summer is a different time. Not much a season for reckoning.

　

Richard Ford, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the author of six novels and three collections of stories. His most recent novel is "The Lay of the Land."

[edrifter]

回複小米粥的評論:

Wow! It's like a thunderclap in spring time to hear the name of "Kant", rousing and rare, in this forum. And it's even more inspring to know someone reads Kant in the "age of no Kant" - my hat off to you for that!

No one else ever, in the modern history of philosophy, could be more influential and had profound impact than Kant when he revolutionized the epistemology by declaring that our understanding of the ourter world has its foundations not merely in experience, as claimed by empirical philosopers, but also in a priori concepts, maintained by those rationlist philosophers. As you cited, knowledge in Kantian terms never be just the experience of thing-in-itself collected by our senses, but that of ordered through individual's cognitive framework, prior knowledge, feeling, value and ideology, etc.

Thank you very much for sharing your thoughts!

[小米粥]

這位老先生更喜歡單色的冬天而不喜歡“淺薄”的夏天，嗬嗬，這大概就是人們常說的“projection”的意思吧。今天恰好讀到康德的一句話，“Reason only perceives that which it produces after its own design. It must proceed in advance with principles of judgment according to unvarying laws and compel nature to answer its questions....”在我的誤讀之下，這句話倒是在我們談論夏天或是任何季節的時候相當地應景呢。

[edrifter]

回複蘇鄉門地的評論:

向新英格蘭的鄰居問好！:)) 看到你對那裏的殷殷之情，很有一份感動。 我們都是無根漂泊的世界公民啊！無論在哪裏居住過，都會有一點家的感覺和懷念。漂泊的經曆反倒豐富了對於家的體驗，倒不失為一件好事。

謝謝你來“棧橋”遊覽！ ：））

[蘇鄉門地]

回複edrifter的評論:

隨便說說，也是因為懷念那個地方。 原來，曾經跟您是鄰居啊。
我們住過的那個“島”很小很小，而且我從來沒在那邊垂過鉤:))

近來發現，罷了先生把你這兒比喻成“網上棧橋”，真是再貼切不過啊！

[edrifter]

回複蘇鄉門地的評論:

不愧是蘇鄉門第，講得真好！:))

關於作者的年齡，書香壇的 RPV 已經研究過了，Ford 64歲，是普利策獎和福克那獲的獲得者。

昨天寫得匆匆忙忙，然後又有其它事情，感到意猶未盡。所以今天晚上又加了幾句。你的讀後感很準確，提供了一個很好的理解角度。"“無奈”的確是作者的一個很好的心情寫照。

我曾在麻州的 Cambridge 住過幾年，所以對新英格蘭地區的夏天有一點了解，那兒的的確確是一個容易讓人產生遐想的地方，很懷念。

謝謝分享！

[蘇鄉門地]

至少是退休的年齡！？

那種倦怠不如說是無奈，是對夏季周而複始的無奈，還是對遊客們來去匆匆的無奈，總之是一種“年年歲歲花相似，歲歲年年人不同”的無奈吧。

曾經有一個夏天，在那裏宿營過五天，和另外一對夫婦。 他倆每天都堅持要去釣魚，自然，那裏最容易釣到的魚就是mackerel,然後回到營地cook out,就成了每天的晚餐，每天的功課，家長心裏為此憋了一肚子的火，直到最後一天，在一家港口魚店買回兩隻捕撈回來不久的大龍蝦，自己在營地燒煮，吃過甜甜的龍蝦肉，才給這次宿營劃了較圓滿的句號。

新英格蘭的夏天很容易令人產生遐想，隻要你在那兒呆過。