評論
打印
One Vote for This Age of Anxiety
投焦慮時代一票
Margaret Mead
瑪格麗特·米德
When critics wish to repudiate the world in which we live today, one of their familiar ways of doing it is to castigate modern man because anxiety is his chief problem. This, they say, in W. H. Auden's phrase, is the age of anxiety. This is what we have arrived at with all our vaunted progress, our great technological advances, our great wealth — everyone goes about with a burden of anxiety so enormous that, in the end, our stomachs and our arteries and our skins express the tension under which we live. Americans who have lived in Europe come back to comment on our favorite farewell which, instead of the old goodbye (God be with you), is now "Take it easy," each American admonishing the other not to break down from the tension and strain of modern life.
當批評家們想要否定我們現在生活的社會時，他們常用的一種方法就是指責現代人，說焦慮成了他的主要問題。他們說，如今的時代，用W·H·奧登的話來說，是一個焦慮的時代。盡管我們自吹自擂取得了多少進步，我們的技術獲得了多大的進展，我們積累了多么巨大的財富，但是到頭來我們得到的卻是一個焦慮的時代——所有人都背著巨大的焦慮的重負，以致最后我們的胃、我們的動脈和我們的皮膚都顯示出我們生活的重壓。在歐洲生活過的美國人回來后評論我們最愛用的告別語說，過去是"再見"（goodbye——原意為"上帝與你同在"），如今卻說“多保重”（take it easy——原意為“放松些”），美國人都在相互告誡，別讓緊張勞累的現代生活搞垮身體。
Whenever an age is characterized by a phrase, it is presumably in contrast to other ages. If we are the age of anxiety, what were other ages? And here the critics do a very amusing thing. First, they give us lists of the opposites of anxiety: security, trust, self-confidence, self-direction. Then, without much further discussion, they let us assume that other ages, other periods of history, were somehow the ages of trust or confident direction.
每當人們用一個詞兒概括一個時代的特征的時候，想必那是將它與別的時代相對照而言。如果我們的時代是焦慮的時代，那么其他時代又是什么呢？在這兒，批評家們的行為非常有趣。首先，他們給我們開出一長串焦慮的反義詞：安全、信任、自信、自主。然后，未經進一步討論，他們就讓我們認定其他時代、其他歷史時期，似乎就是信任的時代或自信、自主的時代。
The savage who, on his South Sea island, simply sat and let breadfruit fall into his lap, the simple peasant, at one with the fields he ploughed and the beasts he tended, the craftsman busy with his tools and lost in the fulfillment of the instinct of workmanship — these are the counter-images conjured up by descriptions of the strain under which men live today. But no one who lived in those days has returned to testify how paradisiacal they really were.
南太平洋島嶼上未開化的人，就這么坐著等待面包果掉到他的懷里；純樸的農民，和他耕種的田地和飼養的家畜一起和諧地生活著；手工匠人忙碌地工作，沉湎于自己的手藝制作——這些就是他們描述當今人們生活的壓力時勾起的與之相反的形象。但是，生活在那些年代中的人們，沒有人回來作證說他們的生活果真有那么美好。
