Unit 10 The Idiocy of Urban Life课文翻译综合教程四

1、Unit 10 The Idiocy of Urban LifeHenry Fairlie1 Between about 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. the life of the city is civil. Occasionally the lone footsteps of someone walking to or from work echo along the sidewalk. All work that has to be done at those hours is useful in bakeries, for example. Even the newspaper

2、 presses stop turning forests into lies. Now and then a car comes out of the silence and cruises easily through the blinking traffic lights. The natural inhabitants of the city come out from damp basements and cellars. With their pink ears and paws, sleek, well-groomed, their whiskers combed, rats a

3、re true city dwellers. Urban life, during the hours when they reign, is urbane.2 These rats are social creatures, as you can tell if you look out on the city street during an insomniac night. But after 6 a.m., the two-legged, daytime creatures of the city begin to stir; and it is they, not the rats,

4、 who bring the rat race. You might think that human beings congregate in large cities because they are gregarious. The opposite is true. Urban life today is aggressively individualistic and atomized. Cities are not social places. 3 The lunacy of modern city life lies first in the fact that most city

5、 dwellers try to live outside the city boundaries. So the two-legged creatures have created suburbs, exurbs, and finally rururbs (rubs to some). Disdaining rural life, they try to create simulations of it. No effort is spared to let city dwellers imagine they are living anywhere but in a city: patch

6、es of grass in the more modest suburbs, broader spreads in the richer ones further out; prim new trees planted along the streets; at the foot of the larger backyards, a pretense to bosky woodlands.4 The professional people buy second homes in the country as soon as they can afford them, and as early

7、 as possible on Friday head out of the city they have created. The New York intellectuals and artists quaintly say they are “going to the country” for the weekend or the summer, but in fact they have created a little Manhattan-by-the-Sea around the Hamptons, spreading over the Long Island6 potato fi

8、elds whose earlier solitude was presumably the reason why they first went there. City dwellers take the city with them to the country, for they will not live without its pamperings. The main streets of Americas small towns, which used to have hardware and dry goods stores, are now strips of boutique

9、s. Old-fashioned barbers become unisex hairdressing salons. The brown rats stay in the cities because of the filth the humans leave during the day. The rats clean it up at night. Soon the countryside will be just as nourishing to them, as the city dwellers take their filth with them.5 Work still giv

10、es meaning to rural life, the family, and churches. But in the city today work and home, family and church, are separated. What the office workers do for a living is not part of their home life. At the same time they maintain the pointless frenzy of their work hours in their hours off. They rush fro

11、m the office to jog, to the gym or the YMCA pool, to work at their play with the same joylessness.6 Even though the offices of todays businesses in the city are themselves moving out to the suburbs, this does not necessarily bring the workers back closer to their workplace. It merely means that to t

12、he rush-hour traffic into the city there is now added a rush-hour traffic out to the suburbs in the morning, and back around and across the city in the evening. As the farmer walks down to his farm in the morning, the city dweller is dressing for the first idiocy of his day, which he not only accept

13、s but even seeks the journey to work.7 In the modern office building in the city there are windows that dont open. This is perhaps the most symbolic lunacy of all. Outdoors is something you can look at through glass but not to touch or hear. These windows are a scandal because they endanger the live

14、s of office workers in case of fire. But no less grievous, even on the fairest spring or fall day the workers cannot put their heads outside. Thus it is not surprising that the urban worker has no knowledge of the seasons. He is aware simply that in some months there is air conditioning, and in othe

15、rs through the same vents come fetid central heating. Even outside at home in their suburbs the city dwellers may know that sometimes its hot, and sometimes its cold, but no true sense of the rhythms of the seasons is to be had from a lawn in the backyard and a few spindly trees struggling to surviv

16、e. 8 The city dweller reels from unreality to unreality through each day, always trying to recover the rural life that has been surrendered for the city lights. No city dweller, even in the suburbs, knows the wonder of a pitch-dark country lane at night. Nor does he naturally get any exercise from h

17、is work. 9 Every European points out that Americans are the most round-shouldered people in the world. Few of them carry themselves with an upright stance, although a correct stance is the first precondition of letting your lungs breathe naturally and deeply. Electric typewriters cut down the amount

18、 of physical exertion needed to hit the keys; the buttons of a word processor need even less effort, as you can tell from the posture of those who use them. They rush out to jog or otherwise Fonda-ize their leisure to try to repair the damage done during the day.10 Everything in urban life is an eff

19、ort either to simulate rural life or to compensate for its loss by artificial means. It is from this day-to-day existence of unreality, pretence, and idiocy that the city people, slumping along their streets even when scurrying, never looking up at their buildings, far less the sky, have the insolen

20、ce to disdain and mock the useful and rewarding life of the country people who support them. Now go out and carry home a Douglas fir, call it a Christmas tree, and enjoy 12 days of contact with nature. Of course city dwellers dont know it once had roots.城市生活之蠢行亨利费尔利1 每天凌晨3点到6点，城市生活文明有礼。偶有匆匆上下班的脚步寂寥而

21、过，回响在人行道上。在这个时段中所做的一切工作都是有用的比如面包房此时的忙碌。这时即便是报纸印刷机也不再化森林为谎言了。偶尔从寂静中开来一辆汽车，在闪闪烁烁的红绿灯中悠然穿梭。居住在城市中的大自然居民从潮湿的地下室和地窖中冒出来；它们有着粉红色耳朵和脚爪，全身毛发油光发亮，触须平整这些老鼠真是名副其实的城市居民。城市生活，当老鼠们大行其道之时，堪称文明生活。2 这些老鼠是群居动物，如果你在一个不眠之夜向外张望城市街道，便可知道这一点。但到早晨6点以后，两条腿的城市动物们便开始躁动。正是他们，而不是老鼠，带来了你死我活的鼠斗。也许你会认为人类聚集在大城市当中是因为他们喜欢群居。恰恰相反。在今天的

22、城市中，人们离群索居，生活四分五裂。城市并不是社交的好地方。3 现代城市生活的愚蠢荒谬首先在于大多数城市居民都试图住在城外。所以这些两条腿的家伙创造了近郊、远郊甚至是更偏远的郊区(某些人称之为rubs)。他们一方面看不起农村生活，一方面又试图模拟农村生活。他们不遗余力地让城里人想象自己现在住的地方绝不是城市：一块块草坪点缀在相对不那么富裕的郊区，在更为富裕的远郊，草坪的面积更大；街道两旁种植着修剪齐整的簇新的树木；面积更大的后院里，有类似林木成荫的植被。4 专业人士一旦有钱便马上在乡下购置第二套房产，周五便尽早地离开他们创建的城市。纽约的知识分子和艺术家古怪地说他们“到乡下”过周末或者消夏，但

23、事实上他们已经在汉普顿四镇周边建造了一个“海边的小曼哈顿”，横跨长岛的马铃薯地。这里早先的幽静与孤寂也许正是他们最早到那里去的缘由。城里人把城市带到了乡间，因为他们离不开城市对他们的娇宠。过去拥有五金商店和纺织品商店的美国小镇的中心商业街，如今到处都是精品专卖店。老式理发店成为不分男女的美发沙龙。褐色老鼠呆在城里是因为人类白天在那里留下的污物。老鼠们晚上将污物打扫干净。很快乡下对老鼠来说就会和城里一样吃喝不愁，因为城市居民走到哪里就把垃圾带到哪里。5 工作对乡村生活、家庭和教会仍有意义。但如今城市中工作和家，家庭和教会却分道扬镳。办公室白领赖以谋生的工作并不是他们家庭生活的一部分。与此同时他们在上班之余仍然保持工作时的无目的疯狂状态。他们从办公室冲出来接着慢跑，或者冲向健身房，或者冲向基督教青年会的游泳池，带着同样兴味索然的神情，似乎玩耍也是一种工作。6 尽管今天城里公司的办公室本身也在迁往郊区，这并不一定使员工更靠近他们的工作场所。这仅仅意味着早高峰时间除了涌向城市的车流之