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17#
发表于 2007-10-6 18:23
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原帖由 boilingsnow 于 2007-10-4 06:41 发表 
林语堂从小就读英文教会学校，英语至少也是母语水平。
他作为文化人，写作水平超过一般英美母语人士也很正常。
二楼有些搞笑了。
林语堂读英文教会学校,英语相当于母语水平?我看你有些搞笑
不可否认他得文学功底,还有他在他那个年代英语绝对水平很高!因为当时中国人文盲还是主要人口,何况英文!
贴一段.生活的艺术.大家都懂英文,我也曾经与我的外教谈论过这部作品.
APPROACH TO LIFE
IN what follows I am presenting the Chinese point of view, because I cannot help
myself.
I am interested only in presenting a view of life and of things as the best and wisest
Chinese minds have seen it and expressed it in their folk wisdom and their literature.
It is an idle philosophy born of an idle life, evolved in a different age, I am quite
aware. But I cannot help feeling that this view of life is essentially true, and since
we are alike under the skin, what touches the human heart in one country touches all.
I shall have to present a view of life as Chinese poets and scholars evaluated it
with their common sense, their realism and their sense of poetry. I shall attempt
to reveal some of the beauty of the pagan world, a sense of the pathos and beauty
and terror and comedy of life, viewed by a people who have a strong feeling of the
limitations of our existence, and yet somehow retain a sense of the dignity of human
life.
The Chinese philosopher is one who dreams with one eye open, who views life with love
and sweet irony, who mixes his cynicism with a kindly tolerance, and who alternately
wakes up from life s dream and then nods again, feeling more alive when he is dreaming
than when he is awake, thereby investing his waking life with a dream-world quality.
He sees with one eye closed and with one eye opened the futility of much that goes
on around him and of his own endeavors, but barely retains enough sense of reality
to determine to go through with it. He is seldom disillusioned because he has no
illusions, and seldom disappointed because he never had extravagant hopes. In this
way his spirit is emancipated.
For, after surveying the field of Chinese literature and philosophy, I come to the
conclusion that the highest ideal of Chinese culture has always been a man with a
sense of detachment (tukuan ) toward life based on a sense of wise disenchantment.
From this detachment comes high-mindedness ( k'uunghuui ), a high-mindedness which
enables one to go through life with tolerant irony and escape the temptations of fame
and wealth and achievement, and eventually makes him take what comes. And from this
detachment arise also his sense of freedom, his love of vagabondage and his pride
and nonchalance. It is only with this sense of freedom and nonchalance that one
eventually arrives at the keen and intense joy of living.
It is useless for me to say whether my philosophy is valid or not for the Westerner.
To understand Western life, one would have to look at it as a Westerner born, with
his own temperament, his bodily attitudes and his own set of nerves. I have no doubt
that American nerves can stand a good many things that Chinese nerves cannot stand,
and vice versa. It is good that it should be so that we should all be born different.
And yet it is all a question of relativity. I am quite sure that amidst the hustle
and bustle of American life, there is a great deal of wistfulness, of the divine desire
to lie on a plot of grass under tall beautiful trees of an idle afternoon and just
do nothing. The necessity for such common cries as "Wake up and live" is to me a good
sign that a wise portion of American humanity prefer to dream the hours away. The
American is after all not as bad as all that. It is only a question whether he will
have more or less of that sort of thing, and how he will arrange to make it possible.
Perhaps the American is merely ashamed of the word "loafing" in a world where everybody
is doing something, but somehow, as sure as I know he is also an animal, he likes
sometimes to have his muscles relaxed, to stretch on the sand, or to lie still with
one leg comfortably curled up and one arm placed below his head as his pillow. If
so, he cannot be very different from Yen Huei, who had exactly that virtue and whom
Confucius desperately admired among all his disciples. The only thing I desire to
see is that he be honest about it, and that he proclaim to the world that he likes
it when he likes it, that it is not when he is working in the office but when he is
lying idly on the
sand that his soul utters, "Life is beautiful. "
We are, therefore, about to see a philosophy and art of living as the mind of the
Chinese people as a whole has understood it. I am inclined to think that, in a good
or bad sense, there is nothing like il in the world. For here we come to an entirely
new way of looking at life by an entirely different type of mind. It is a truism lo
say that the culture of any nation is the product of its mind. Consequently, where
there is a national mind so racially different and historically isolated from the
Western cultural world, we have the right to expect new answers to the problems of
life, or what is better, new methods of approach, or, still better, a new posing of
the problems themselves. We know some of the virtues and deficiencies of that mind,
at least as revealed to us in the historical past. It has a glorious an and a
contemptible science, a magnificent common sense and an infantile logic, a fine
womanish chatter about life and no scholastic philosophy. Il is generally known that
the Chinese mind is an intensely practical, hard-headed one, and it is also known
to some lovers of Chinese art that it is a profoundly sensitive mind; by a still smaller
proportion of people, it is accepted as also a profoundly poetic and philosophical
mind. At least the Chinese are noted for taking things philosophically, which is
saying more than the statement that the Chinese have a great philosophy or have a
few great philosophers. F'or a nation to have a few philosophers is not so unusual,
bul for a nation to take things philosophically is terrific. It is evident anyway
that the Chinese as a nation are more philosophic than efficient, and that if it were
otherwise, no nation could have survived the high blood pressure of an efficient life
for four thousand years. Four thousand years of efficient living would ruin any
nation.
An important consequence is that, while in the West, the insane are so many th;n they
are put in an asylum, in China the insane are so unusual that we worship them, as
any body who has a knowledge of Chinese literature will testify. And that, after all,
is what I am driving at. Yes, the Chinese have a light, an almost gay, philosophy,
and the bcsl proof of their philosophic temper is to be found in this wise and merry
of living.
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发表于 2007-10-24 14:13
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