11
What Do You See in Her?
你爱她什么？
1. Summer flew in with the first week of June, making a Mediterranean city of London, drawing people from their homes and offices into the parks and squares. The heat coincided with the arrival of a new colleague at work, an American architect, who had been hired to spend six months working with us on an office complex near Waterloo.伴随着六月的第一个星期，夏天翩然而至，把伦敦变成了一个地中海的城市。人们从家中、从办公室里走出来，来到公园里，来到广场上。与炎热一起到来的还有一位新同事——一位美国建筑师。他被借用六个月，和我们共同设计滑铁卢大桥附近和一座综合写字楼。
2. 'They told me it rained every day in London--and look at this!' remarked Will as we sat one lunchtime in a restaurant in Covent Garden. 'Incredible, and I brought only pullovers.'“人们跟我说，伦敦每天都下雨——可你瞧这天气！”当威尔和我在科文特花园广场的一家餐厅吃午饭时，他这样说道，“简直让从难以置信，我可只带了套衫。”
'Don't worry, Will, they have T-shirts here too.'“没关系，威尔，这里也有T恤卖。”
I had met William Knott five years before, when we had both spent a year together on scholarships at Yale. He was immensely tall, with the perpetual tan, intrepid smile, and rugged face of an explorer but the hands of a pianist. Since finishing his studies at Berkeley, he had developed a successful career on the West Coast, where he was considered one of the most thoughtful practitioners of his generation.我是在五年前认识威廉·诺特的，当时我们一起在罗得艾兰设计学院学习了一个学期。他长得魁梧高大，皮肤棕褐色，总是面带机灵的微笑，满是皱纹的脸颇有探险家的味道。从伯克莱大学毕业后，他在美国本海岸发展得非常成功，被认为是同辈人中最有创意和才智的建筑师之一。
The Architects' Journal had described him, with little concern for biological reality, as 'the illegitimate love-child of Mies van der Rohe and Geoffrey Bawa' and even the normally reserved Architectural Review had commended him on his use of concrete.
3.'So tell me, are you seeing anyone?' asked Will as we began our coffee. 'You're not still with what's her name, that...?'“喂，你那个女朋友呢？”当我们开始喝咖啡时，威尔问我道，“就是那个叫什么来着的女孩。”
'No, no, that finished long ago. I'm involved in something serious now.'“噢，你是说那一段，早就结束了。我现在正儿八经地恋爱呢。”
'Great, tell me about it.'“好极了，说来听听。”
'Well, you must come over for dinner and meet her.'“好，你什么时候来我家吃顿饭吧，见见她。”
'I'd love to. Tell me more.'“很乐意，先介绍一下吧。”
'She's called Chloe, she's twenty-four, she's a graphic designer. She's intelligent, beautiful, very funny...'“她叫克洛艾，二十四岁，是个平面设计师。她人很聪明，长得也漂亮，非常有趣……”
'It sounds terrific.'“听起来真是不错。”
'How about you?'“你呢？”
'Nothing to say really, I was dating this girl from UCLA, but you know, we were getting in each other's head-space, so we sort of both pulled the rip-cord. We weren't ready to ride the big one together, so... But tell me more about this Chloe, what is it you see in her?'“没什么好说的，我在与加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校的一个女生约会。不过你要知道，我们刚刚认识，彼此都还在试探，没怎么考虑结果，所以……还是你再谈谈这个克洛艾吧，你爱她什么？
4.What did I see in her? The question came back to me later that evening in the middle of Safeway, watching Chloe at the till, enraptured by the way she went about packing the groceries into a plastic bag. The charm I detected in these trivial gestures revealed a readiness to accept almost anything as incontestable proof that she was perfect. What did I see in her? Almost everything.我爱她什么？那天晚上在塞夫韦连锁店我又想起威尔的问题。当时克洛艾在收银台旁，我看着她，被她忙着把东西装进塑料袋的样子深深吸引。我从这些细微的动作上发现的魅力表明，我乐于把几乎任何事情都当作无可置疑的证据，以证明她的完美无缺。我爱她什么？几乎爱她的一切。
5. For a moment, I fantasized I might transform myself into a carton of yogurt so as to undergo the same process of being gently and thoughtfully accommodated by her into a shopping bag between a tin of tuna and a bottle of olive oil. It was only the incongruously unsentimental atmosphere of the supermarket ('Liver Promotion Week') that alerted me to how far I might have been sliding into romantic pathology.一时间，我幻想能把自己变作一盒酸奶，同样被她轻轻地、若有所思地放进购物袋，摆在一听金枪鱼和一瓶橄榄油之间。只是超市里讲究实际的气氛与我的心境不相适宜，这使我明白过来，我已经多么深地陷入浪漫的病态之中。
6. On the way back to the car, I complimented Chloe on the adorable way she had gone about the business of doing the grocery shopping.在回停车场的路上，我赞美着她购物时令人爱慕的姿态。
'Don't be so silly,' she replied. 'Can you open the boot, the keys are in my bag.'“别犯傻了，”她说。“把行李厢打开，钥匙在我包里。”
从异乎常情的方面寻找魅力，就是拒绝对显而易见的东西着迷。
7. It is easy enough to find charm in a pair of eyes or the contours of a well-shaped mouth. How much harder to detect it in the movements of a woman's hand across a supermarket checkout. Chloe's gestures were like the tips of an iceberg, an indication of what lay submerged. Did it not require a lover to discern their true value, a value that would naturally seem meaningless to someone less curious, less in love?从一双眼睛里或是线型优雅的嘴唇轮廓上发现魅力是再容易不过和事。而要从一个女子在超市收银台整理物品的动作中发现魅力，那可是困难多了啊。克洛艾的个人习惯为情人寻找完美提供了更为广阔的空间，就如冰山露出的尖顶预示了下面巨大的冰体。难道这不需要情人去辨出它们真正的价值吗？只有那些缺少好奇、缺少爱意的人才会认为这是毫无意义的价值。
8. Yet I remained pensive on the drive home through the evening rush hour. My love began to question itself. What did it mean if things I considered charming about Chloe, she considered incidental or irrelevant to her true self? Was I reading things into Chloe that simply did not belong to her? I looked at the slope of her shoulders and the way that a strand of her hair was trapped in the car headrest. She turned towards me and smiled, so for an instant I saw the gap in between her two front teeth. How much of my sensitive, soulful lover lay in my fellow passenger? 驾车回家时正是晚上交通拥堵时分，我仍然陷在沉思之中。我的爱开始扪心自问：如果在我看来是克洛艾魅力所在的地方却被她自己认为是一时的现象或与真实的她毫不相干，那么这意味着什么？我从克洛艾身上领会到的是不是并非她实际拥有的东西？我看着她肩头轻泻的曲线，一缕头发被压在靠背上。她转过头，对我笑了，于是，在一刹那间我看见她两颗门齿间的缝隙。我心中那位敏感、情致深切的心上人到底在身边的这位同伴身上体现了多少？
9. Love reveals its insanity by its refusal to acknowledge the inherent normality of the loved one. Hence the boredom of lovers for those standing on the sidelines. What do they see in the beloved save simply another human being? I had often tried to share my enthusiasm for Chloe with friends, with whom in the past I had found much common ground over films, books, and politics, but who now looked at me with the secular puzzlement of atheists faced with messianic fervour. After the tenth time of telling friends these stories of Chloe at the dry cleaner or Chloe and me at the cinema, or Chloe and me buying a takeaway, these stories with no plot and less action, just the central character standing in the centre of an almost motionless tale, I was forced to acknowledge that love was a lonely pursuit.爱情不愿意承认心上人与生俱来的平庸，从而显出它的不可理喻。因此在局外人看来，情人们都是乏味无聊的。除了把我们的心上人视作另一个普普通通的人之外，局外人还能从他们身上看到什么呢？我经常让朋友们分享我对克洛艾的激情，我曾经与他们在电影、书籍和政治方面有很多共同的观点，但他们现在却用疑惑的目光看着我，就像无神论者看到对救世主的狂热迷信时表现的疑惑一样。在我第十次告诉朋友克洛艾在干洗店、克洛艾和我在电影院或克洛艾和我买外卖的故事之后，这些故事已经没有了情节、没有了动作，只剩下中心人物站在一个几乎没有变化的故事的中心。我不得不承认，爱情是一个孤独的追求，爱情至多只能被另一个人——被爱的人——所理解。
爱情和幻想之间只在一线之隔，爱情与自信也只有一步之遥，这种自信与外界现实几无联系，基本上是一种个人挥之不去的自我陶醉。
10. There was of course nothing inherently lovable about Chloe's way of packing the groceries, love was merely something I had decided to ascribe to her gesture, a gesture that might have been interpreted very differently by others in line with us at Safeway. A person is never good or bad per se, which means that loving or hating them necessarily has at its basis a subjective, and perhaps illusionistic, element. I was reminded of the way that Will's question had made the distinction between qualities that belonged to a person and those ascribed to them by their lover. He had carefully asked me not who Chloe was, but more accurately, what I saw in her.克洛艾包装物品的姿势当然并非生来就值得爱恋，爱情只是我决意将之归属于她手的姿势的某一样东西而已，而这姿势在塞夫韦连锁店里的其他人看来也许包含完全不同的意义。个人于自身而言从来都无所谓好坏，这意味着爱恋或是厌恶必定出于他人的主观感觉。也许还有幻想的成分。我想起了是威尔提问的方式将一个人本身和性格和爱人赋予的品质截然分开。威尔没有问：克洛艾是谁（心上人怎么会如此客观呢？），而是问：我爱她什么——一个更主观，也许更不可信的认识。
12.Shortly after her older brother died, Chloe (who had just celebrated her eighth birthday) went through a deeply philosophical stage. 'I began to question everything,' she told me, 'I had to figure out what death was, that's enough to turn anyone into a philosopher.' One of her great obsessions, to which allusions were still made in her family, concerned thoughts familiar to readers of Descartes and Berkeley. Chloe would put her hand over her eyes and tell the family her brother was still alive because she could see him in her mind just as well as she could see them. Why did they tell her he was dead if she could see him in her own mind? Then, in a further challenge to reality and because of the way she felt towards them, Chloe would (with the grin of a six-year-old child facing the power of its hostile impulses) tell her parents she could kill them by shutting her eyes and never thinking of them again - a plan which no doubt elicited a profoundly unphilosophical response from the parents.在她哥哥死后不久，克洛艾（刚过完八岁生日）经历了一个深刻的哲学思考的阶段。“我开始质疑每一个事物，”她告诉我，“我得弄明白死亡是怎么一回事，这足以让人变成哲学家了。”克洛艾会用手蒙住眼睛，告诉家里人说，她哥哥还活着，因为她可以在自己的脑海中看到他，就像她可以看见家里其他人一样。如果她可以看到，家人又为何说他已经死去？接着，克洛艾进一步挑战现实，并且出于对父母的憎恨，她（带着一个八岁孩子面对敌意的冲动的诡笑）告诉他们说，只要她闭上眼睛，永远不再想他们，就可以把他们杀掉——个无疑会引发可以预料的非哲学反应的计划。
爱情和死亡似乎都会自然地产生内心愿望和外部现实的种种疑问，前者使我们从它的外部存在中生发出一种信念，后者使我们从它的空无所凭中寻求一种信念。无论克洛艾是什么划克洛艾是谁，难道我不可以闭上眼睛相信自己和认识是真实的？无论她或塞夫韦连锁店的人们怎么想，难道我不可以认为从她的身上挖掘出来的就是事实？
12. Yet solipsism has its limits. Were my views of Chloe anywhere near reality, or had I completely lost judgment? Certainly she seemed lovable to me, but was she actually as lovable as I thought? It was the old Cartesian colour problem: a bus may seem red to a viewer, but is this bus actually red in and of its essence? When Will met Chloe a few weeks later, he certainly had his doubts, unexpressed of course, but evident from the way he took little interest in her, boring her instead with a lengthy account of how he had once built a cantilevered roof for a villa in La Jolla, and in the way he told me at work the next day that for a Californian, English women were of course 'very special'.然而唯我论自有其局限。我对克洛艾的看法真实吗？或者，我是不是完全失去了判断能力？当然在我看来她似乎值得我爱，然而她实际真如我想象的那样值得爱恋吗？这属于为人熟知的笛卡儿颜色问题：在观者眼中，巴士也许是红色的。但是巴士果真是红色的？当几周后威尔见到克洛艾的时候，他肯定对我的判断产生了怀疑，当然他不会直言，但一切都表现在他的行动和第二天上班时他对我说的话语之中：对于一个加利福尼亚人来说，英国女人当然“非常特别”。
13. To be honest, Chloe gave me the occasional doubt herself. One night, I remember her sitting in my living room reading while we listened to a Bach cantata I had put on. The music sang of heavenly fires, Lord's blessings, and beloved companions, while Chloe's face, tired, but happy, bathed by a streak of light crossing the darkened room from the desk lamp, seemed as though it belonged to an angel, an angel who was only elaborately pretending (with trips to Safeway or the post office) that she was an ordinary mortal, but whose mind was in fact filled with delicate and divine thoughts.坦白地说，克洛艾自身有时也给我这样的怀疑。记得有一次，她坐在我的起居室看书，当时录音机里正播放着马赫的合唱曲。歌曲唱的是天堂之火、主的祝福以及被爱的人们。在暗暗的房间里，克洛艾的脸沐浴着一缕台灯光线，有些倦容，但却洋溢着幸福，看上去就如天使的脸一般，一个只是精心装扮成（到塞夫韦连锁店或邮局去时）普遍人，但内心实际充满最精致、最微妙、最神圣思想的天使。
14. Because only the body is open to the eye, the hope of the infatuated lover is that the soul is faithful to its casing, that the body owns an appropriate soul, that what the skin represents turns out to be what it is. I did not love Chloe for her body, I loved her body for the promise of who she was. It was a most inspiring promise.因为眼睛所见的只有躯壳，所以我希望这让人神魂颠倒的心上人的灵魂与躯壳保持一致，希望躯壳拥有一个相符合的灵魂，希望外表反映内心。我爱克洛艾，不是因为她的身体，我爱她的身体，则是因为她的内心。那是一个多么令人精神鼓舞的内心啊。
15. Yet what if her face was only a trompe l'oeil? 'By forty, everyone has the face they deserve,' wrote George Orwell, but Chloe was only just twenty-four ?and even if she had been older, we are in truth, despite Orwell's optimistic belief in natural justice, as unlikely to be given the face we deserve as the money or the opportunities.然而如果她的脸是错误视觉产生的逼真，是一个面具、一个与内心不符的外表，那该怎么办？再回到威尔没有明言的不同看法上来吧，克洛艾的诸多方面是不是出于我的想象？我知道世界上有些面孔会透射自身并不具备的智慧。“到了四十岁，每个人都有一张与其内心世界一致的脸，”乔治·奥威尔这样写道。但是，这种说法正确吗？或者，这是否只是一个让人们对外表放心的神话，就如经济领域里让人相信自由市场的调节一般？认清神话的真正面目，就得面对外表可怕而无法预测的本质，并由此放弃我们对上帝赋予（或至少富有含义地赋予）的脸蛋的信念。
站在离超市柜台不远处或呆在起居室的情人注视着他的心上人，开始幻想，释义她的脸、她的手势，从中寻找超脱凡俗、完美而迷人的东西。他们用心上人包装金枪鱼或倒茶的姿势作为幻想的素材，然而生活不总是迫使他们成为一个轻度失眠者，总是容易在更为世俗的真实面前清醒过来吗？
16. 'Can't you turn off this impossible yodelling,' said the angel all of a sudden.“你难道不能关上这唱来唱去的噪音？”天使突然说道。
'What impossible yodelling?'“什么唱来唱去的噪音？”
'You know, the music.'“你当然明白我是指那音乐。”
'It's Bach.'“可那是巴赫的乐曲。”
'I know, but it sounds so silly, I can't concentrate on Cosmo.'“我知道，但是太难听了，我根本没法看《Cosmopolitan》。”
17. Is it really her I love, I thought to myself as I looked again at Chloe reading on the sofa across the room, or simply an idea that collects itself around her mouth, her eyes, her face? In using her face as a guide to her soul, was I not perhaps guilty of mistaken metonymy, whereby an attribute of an entity is substituted for the entity itself (the crown for the monarchy, the wheel for the car, the White House for the US government, Chloe's angelic expression for Chloe...)? 我爱的就是她吗？当我再一次看着坐在房间那头的沙发上阅读着的克洛艾，我在心中问自己，或者只是关于她的嘴、她的眼、她的脸的意念组合而成的一种想法？将她的表情扩展为她的整个性格，难道我不是错误地使用了转喻，错误地将喻体当作标志和象征，取代了本体？王冠取代了帝王，轮子取代了车，白宫取代了美国政府，克洛艾天使般的表情取代了克洛艾自身……
18. In the oasis complex, the thirsty man imagines he sees water, palm trees, and shade not because he has evidence for the belief, but because he has a need for it. Desperate needs bring about a hallucination of their solution: thirst hallucinates water, the need for love hallucinates a prince or princess. The oasis complex is never a complete delusion: the man in the desert does see something on the horizon. It is just that the palms have withered, the well is dry, and the place is infected with locusts.在绿洲情结中，干渴的人们想象自己看见了水，看见了棕榈树和绿荫，不是因为他们找到了证据，而是因为他们需要这些证据。极度需要产生了幻觉：干渴产生水的幻觉，需求爱情产生了完美男人或女人的幻觉。绿洲情结从来不是完全的妄想：人在沙漠中确实看见地平线上有些东西，只是棕榈树叶已经枯萎，井已经干涸，这个地方害了蝗虫。
19 Was I not victim of a similar delusion, alone in a room with a woman who wore the face of someone composing The Divine Comedy while working her way through the _Cosmopolitan_ astrology column? 当我和一个女人在房间里独处时，她正读着的《Cosmopolitan》在我眼中却变成了《神曲》，那么我不同样也是一个妄想症的受害者?
