什么是观光，什么又是旅行？

Literary Excursions
By CHRIS WALLACE August 09, 2013
旅游
什么是观光，什么又是旅行？
CHRIS WALLACE 2013年08月09日
On a trip to Tulum last Christmas, I think I managed the true Epicurean ideal of hedonism, sipping gently of the tropical sun, bodysurfing more than I read, reading more than I ate, and eating more than I worried. The entire endeavor was calibrated to maximize pleasure and minimize hardship, and so I learned nothing. I relaxed. I kept myself entertained. I visited the local Mayan ruins and paid more consideration to the vigilant application of sun goop than to the historical artifacts on display. I had joined the neocolonialist community that, through sky miles and vacation days, has effectively turned the developing world into a Sandals resort.
去年圣诞到图卢姆一游，我想我品尝到了正宗伊比鸠鲁派的享乐主义理想：轻啜热带阳光，人体冲浪比我所读的多，阅读比我所吃的多，吃喝比我所顾虑的多。我尽量让自己享受欢愉、少吃苦头，因此我什么也没学到。我放松，让自己好好享受款待。我参观当地玛雅遗址，却把更多的心思放在随时涂防晒霜上，而不是眼前的历史文物。通过累积飞行里程和假日，我成了新殖民主义者的一员，把发展中国家变成凉鞋团的度假胜地。
In other words, I was touring, to use Paul Bowles’s classic distinction, rather than traveling — seeking enjoyment rather than experience. I had failed to abide Camus’s dictum that the trip ought to be the highest form of asceticism. “There is no pleasure in traveling,” he wrote in his notebooks. “I look upon it more as an occasion for spiritual testing. If we understand by culture the exercise of our most intimate sense — that of eternity — then we travel for culture.” One imagines he is using the Bowlesian distinction here, meaning capital-T Traveling — to find communion with the universal and, ultimately, with the deepest, “most intimate sense” of oneself. Camus goes on to say: “Pleasure takes us away from ourselves in the same way as distraction, in Pascal’s use of the word, takes us away from God. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.”
换句话说，借用保罗·鲍尔斯(Paul Bowles)的经典划分，我是在观光而非旅行，追求享受而非体验。我没能遵守加缪(Camus)的格言——出行该是禁欲主义的至高形态。“旅行中没有欢愉，”他在笔记中写道，“我更把它视为灵性测试的机遇。如果我们通过文化理解了我们内心最深处感知的练习，关乎永恒，那我们才是为文化而旅行。”你可想像他用的正是鲍尔斯的划分方式，意指大写的T，旅行‭(Traveling)——为寻觅跟普世万物，以至最终与心底的“最深处的感知”交谈。加缪接着说道：“欢愉带我们离开自己，让人走神，用帕斯卡(Pascal)的说法，就是把我们从神那里带走。旅行，如同伟大庄重的科学，带我们重返自己。”
Addicted, as we are, to comfort, utterly intolerant of boredom and feeling entitled to traipse about the globe, we have all but killed off the adventurer-memoirist. That species, at least in the Anglophone world, flourished with such organizations as the Royal Geographical Society and the scientific appetite for taxonomy in the late 19th century, reaching its apogee with the dissolute wanderings of the so-called leisure class. Rather than treat these creatures as relics, might we learn something from their methods, take a page out of their handbooks, adopt a little of that romantic Victorian approach in an effort to return to ourselves?
正如我们沉溺舒适安逸，完全无法忍受沉闷，心安理得地到处闲逛，彻底毁掉了冒险家的传记回忆。冒险家这个物种，至少在英语世界的十九世纪末，曾因英国皇家地理学会那样的机构以及对分类学的科学渴求而绽放，因所谓的有闲阶级的四处游荡而达到顶点。我们与其把这群家伙视为老古董，倒不如学一学他们的方法，翻开他们的“旅游手册”，借鉴一点维多利亚时代的浪漫风范，尝试回归自己。

It was in this spirit that I returned to their books, ­gobbling up Henri de Monfreid’s memoirs from the ’30s, of running hash and guns off the coast of Somalia; Freya Stark’s chronicle of trekking to the ancient castle of the Assassins; Bowles’s travel essays in “Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue”; Richard Burton’s tales of exploring India, Africa and Arabia; Bruce ­Chatwin’s travelogues in Patagonia, Africa and Australia; and Ryszard Kapuscinski’s fearless accounts of war-torn states the world over. I read and reread these writers in eccentric loops, sometimes tossing them aside after a short while (Chatwin felt so familiar I couldn’t bear to reread much of his work), and in some cases going back in for the whole canon. Even if I didn’t need confirmation that Sir Richard Burton, in addition to being the standard-bearer for Victorian explorers, was a thrilling writer, it was fun to get it anyway.
在这种精神的驱使下，我回溯他们的著作，快速粗略地阅读亨利·德·曼弗雷德(Henri de Monfreid)上世纪三十年代在索马里海岸走私大麻枪械的回忆录；弗雷娅·史塔克(Freya Stark)徒步探访十字军暗杀者堡垒的纪事；鲍尔斯在《他们的头是绿的手是蓝的》(Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue)中的旅行随笔；理查德·伯顿(Richard Burton)探索印度、非洲与阿拉伯半岛的故事；布鲁斯-查特文(Bruce Chatwin)的巴塔哥尼亚、非洲和澳大利亚游记；理夏德·卡普钦斯基(Ryszard Kapuscinski)对世界各地被战争撕裂的国度的大胆描述。我反复阅读这些作家的作品，有时中途把它们扔在一旁（因感觉与查特文太亲近而不忍重读），有时又回来读完全本。我无须重申理查德·伯顿爵士不仅是维多利亚时代探险家的领头人，还是一位精彩的作家，读他的书总是很有趣。
In one lifetime, Burton translated the Kama Sutra and “The Arabian Nights,” traveled all of India, sneaked into Mecca in disguise, searched for the source of the Nile, traveled to Harar, and wrote several spectacular books. To witness his commitment and erudition is to see why. “So, after the first year,” he writes in “Falconry in the Valley of the Indus,” “when I had Persian at my fingers’ ends, sufficient Arabic to read, write and converse fluently, and a superficial knowledge of that dialect of Punjaubee which is spoken in the wilder parts of the province, I began my systematic study of the Scindian people, their manners and their tongue.” A great student of humanity, and a brilliant actor by necessity — he could remain incognito in hostile territory for months, when being found out would have meant his own death — Burton speaks to a belief that, in the trying on of many selves, he might find another, or at least more of himself.
伯顿在其有生之年翻译了《印度爱经》(Kama Sutra)和《阿拉伯之夜》(The Arabian Nights)，走遍整个印度，乔装潜入麦加，追寻尼罗河源头，游走至哈勒尔(Harar)，写成了几本惊世之作。见证他的投入与博学，正是想了解“为什么”。“因此，第一年之后，”他在《在印度河山谷猎鹰》(Falconry in the Valley of the Indus)中写道，“当我对波斯语了如指掌，能够读写并以阿拉伯语流利沟通，且对旁遮普省偏远地区的土语有点皮毛知识，我开始对辛迪亚人(Scindian)的风俗和语言进行系统研究。”伯顿是人性的伟大学生，必要时还是位出色的演员——他能在充满敌意的地区停留数月，一旦身份暴露，可能意味着死亡。伯顿提到一种信念，那就是在扮演许多个自我的过程中，他可能发现了另一个自我，或者至少更了解自己了。
In Stark, we get the straight Tao of traveling. “I had never thought of why I came,” she writes of ending up in Syria, alone, in 1927. “As to what I was going to do — I saw no cause to trouble about a thing so nebulous beforehand.” But by the end of her trip, when her local companions consider her a kind of pilgrim, she is driven with the doggedness of a Shackleton or a Hillary. “This is a great moment,” she writes, upon spotting the far-off castle she’d been hunting for months, “when you see, however distant, the goal of your wandering. The thing which has been living in your imagination suddenly becomes a part of the tangible world. It matters not how many ranges, rivers or parching dusty ways may be between you: it is yours now forever.”
在史塔克的书中，我们领略旅行之“道”。“我从没想过我为什么会来，”关于1927年她独自前往叙利亚她这样写道。“至于我将要做什么——对于一件如此模糊的事情，我看没必要预先自寻烦恼。”不过在旅程终结前，当地的旅伴认为她是来朝圣的，实际上她是被沙克尔顿(‬Shackleton)或希拉里(Hillary)的顽强精神驱使而来的。“这是一个重要时刻，”当她看到自己寻觅了好几个月的堡垒就在远处时，她写道，“当你看见自己流浪寻觅的目标在眼前时，无论它多遥远，你都会十分激动。因为那个一直活在你想像中的事物突然变成了有形世界的一部分。不管你和它之间隔着多少山脊、河流和崎路，从此以后，它永远属于你。”
All through India, China, Japan, Australia and the greater part of Africa, the Polish war correspondent Ryszard Kapuscinski carried a copy of Herodotus’ “Histories,” and after reading his thrilling body of work, it is illuminating to read the memoir in which he summarizes all of this trekking with his teacher in his pocket. In “Travels With Herodotus,” Kapuscinski rightly wonders why on earth his Greek hero spent a lifetime cataloging what was then the sum total of anthropological data on mankind. “Maybe he did everything on his own initiative, possessed by a passion for knowledge, driven by a restless and unfocused compulsion?” he reckons. “Perhaps he had a naturally inquiring mind, a mind that continuously generated a thousand questions giving him no peace, keeping him up nights?” Clearly Kapuscinski is afflicted with this “private mania” too, and it is difficult not to fall prey oneself.
波兰战地记者卡普钦斯基在踏遍印度、中国、日本、澳大利亚以及非洲的大部分地区时，总是随身携带一本希罗多德(Herodotus)的《历史》(Histories)。在读完他震撼人心的作品之后，再读他总结的与袋中相伴的老师一起艰险跋涉的回忆录，很有启发性。在《与希罗多德同行》(Travels With Herodotus)中，卡普钦斯基理直气壮地怀疑：他的希腊英雄为何要耗尽一生为当时全部的人类学数据编目。“也许他所做的一切都是出于自己的意愿，出于对知识的狂热，出于无休无止、无边无际的冲动？”他猜想，“或许他天生有着寻根究底的精神，让他不断产生无穷的问题，让他思潮起伏，彻夜难眠？”很明显，卡普钦斯基也在经受这种“个人狂热”的折磨，很难不成为自己的牺牲品。
Some of the best writing done now is the great conflict reportage that could claim Kapuscinski’s work as distant ancestry — Denis Johnson’s “Seek” and Dexter Filkins’s “The Forever War” leap to mind — but these newer projects tend to be more political than personal. The searchers of the last century have been displaced by the gourmands of today, who write as often as not about the dumplings in Hong Kong or the truffles in Provence — by those who tour, not travel.
当今的一些最杰出的作品是那些可把卡普钦斯基的作品视为远祖的重大冲突报导，瞬间想到的有丹尼斯·约翰逊(Denis Johnson)的《探寻》(Seek)和德克斯特·费尔金斯(Dexter Filkins)的《永远的战争》(The Forever War)，但这些近年的作品更偏向政治性而非出于个人追求。上世纪的探索者已被今日的美食家所取代，他们往往更关心香港的点心或普罗旺斯的松露，他们是在观光而非旅行。
The tourist, Bowles wrote in “The Sheltering Sky,” “accepts his own civilization without question; not so the traveler, who compares it with the others, and rejects those elements he finds not to his liking.” Bowles, the perpetual expatriate, wrote movingly about the empathy required for this project. He took on his ventures as a search for alternate modes of living and being — not mere anthropological study, but more like continuing education in existential possibility. Deep in the Sahara, he distilled the sense of danger, of the risk versus reward in commitment to one’s travels, and the transcendence available therein — what he called the baptism of solitude: “You have the choice of fighting against it, and insisting on remaining the person you have always been, or letting it take its course. For no one who has stayed in the Sahara for a while is quite the same as when he came.”
鲍尔斯在《遮蔽的天空》(The Sheltering Sky)中写道，游人‭ ‬“毫不质疑地接受他自己的文明；但旅行者不然，他会比较自己的文明和其他文明，并排斥那些不对自己胃口的元素。”‭ ‬永远的流放者鲍尔斯动人地书写关于这次旅程所需的神入。他把自己的冒险当作是对其他生活和生存模式的探寻，这不仅是人类学研究，更像有关存在可能性的延伸教育。深入撒哈拉，他把危险化成汗水蒸发掉，坚持与风险对阵，追寻旅行中的回馈，从而获得超越——他称之为孤独的洗礼：“你可选择与之对抗，坚守你的本色，或者顺其自然。因为在撒哈拉待上一段日子的人，没一个仍是当初的自己。”
Nor, indeed, is anyone who has stayed for a while in his books. The best travelogues are like little countries we can visit on the page, civilizations unto themselves, complete with elements we can borrow or bemoan. Even if we only laze on their lovely seasides.
确实，曾在鲍尔斯书中徘徊流连的读者也不再一样。最优秀的游记，就如我们在书页上神游各个迷你国度，有着它们自身的文明，有我们可以借鉴或叹息的元素。即使我们只是懒散地躺在它们迷人的海滩上。


Chris Wallace has written for The Paris Review Daily, TheAtlantic.com, the Los Angeles Review of Books and other publications.
 



本文作者Chris Wallace为《巴黎每日评论报》、《洛杉矶书评》和大西洋网站撰稿，并出版过其他一些作品。