24
Love Lessons
爱的课堂
1. We must assume that there are certain lessons to be drawn from love, or else we remain happy to repeat our errors indefinitely, like flies that drive themselves insane butting their heads against windowpanes, unable to understand that though the glass may look clear it cannot be flown through. Are there not certain basic truths to be learnt, shreds of wisdom that could prevent some of the excessive enthusiasms, the pain and the bitter disappointments? Is it not a legitimate ambition to become wise about love, in the way that one may become wise about diet, death, or money? 我们必须承认，从爱情中可以获得一些教训，否则我们会无止境地重复错误却仍然乐此不疲，就如苍蝇不懂得玻璃看起来透明却飞不过去的道理、发疯似地朝玻璃窗上撞一样。难道没有一些基本的道理需要把握？难道没有些许智慧可以防止过分的激情、痛苦和苦涩的失意？如同精明地安排食谱、死亡或金钱一样去理智地去爱，这难道不是一个合情合理的愿望？
2. We start trying to be wise when we realize that we are not born knowing how to live, but that life is a skill that has to be acquired, like riding a bicycle or playing the piano. But what does wisdom counsel us to do? It tells us to aim for tranquillity and inner peace, a life free from anxiety, fear, idolatry, and harmful passions. Wisdom teaches us that our first impulses may not always be true, and that our appetites will lead us astray if we do not train reason to separate vain from genuine needs. It tells us to control our imagination or it will distort reality and turn mountains into molehills and frogs into princesses. It tells us to hold our fears in check, so that we can be afraid of what will harm us, but not waste our energies fleeing shadows on the wall. It tells us we should not fear death, and that all we have to fear is fear itself.我们对生活并不是生而知之，它是一门必须掌握的技巧，就像学骑自行车或学弹钢琴一样。当意识到这此时，我们开始想拥有智慧。然而智慧建议我们做什么呢？它让我们远离焦虑、恐惧、盲目崇拜以及有害的激情，追求镇静与内心的平和。智慧教育我们，最初的冲动也许并不总是真切的，如果我们没有陶铸理智将真正的需要与虚浮的偏好分开，欲望将把我们引入歧途；智慧告诉我们，要控驭我们胡想象，否则它将歪曲现实，将高山化为小丘，将青蛙变为公主；智慧告诉我们，要抑制我们的恐惧，这样才能防备真正的危害，而不是将精力浪费在妄想逃出我们映在墙上的影子；智慧 告诉我们，不必害怕死亡，我们所要害怕的只是害怕本身。
3. But what does wisdom say about love? Is it something that should be given up completely, like coffee or cigarettes, or is it allowed on occasions, like a glass of wine or a bar of chocolate? Is love directly opposed to everything that wisdom stands for? Do sages lose their heads or only overgrown children? 但是对于爱情，智慧又有什么见解？它是不是应该完全被抛弃，就像咖啡或香烟？或者应该偶一为之，就像一杯酒或一块巧克力？爱情与智慧的立场是不是截然相反？哲人是失去了理智，还只是早熟的孩子？
4. If certain wise thinkers have given a nod of approval to love, they have been careful to draw distinctions between its varieties, in much the way that doctors counsel against mayonnaise, but allow it when it is made with low-fat ingredients. They distinguish the rash love of a Romeo and Juliet from Socrates' contemplative worship of the Good, they contrast the excesses of a Werther with the brotherly love suggested by Jesus.如果有睿智的思想家赞同爱，那么他们就去细致地将各种爱区分开来，就如医生建议不吃蛋黄酱，但用低胆固醇成分制作的蛋黄酱则可以吃。他们将罗密欧与朱丽叶式的激烈爱情与苏格拉底对善的沉思型崇拜区分开来；他们将维特式的过度激情与基督倡导的兄弟般不流血的爱作鲜明有对比。
5. The difference could be grouped into categories of mature and immature love. Preferable in almost every way, the philosophy of mature love is marked by an active awareness of the good and bad within each person, it is full of temperance, it resists idealization, it is free of jealousy, masochism, or obsession, it is a form of friendship with a sexual dimension, it is pleasant, peaceful, and reciprocated (and perhaps explains why most people who have known the wilder shores of desire would refuse its painlessness the title of love). Immature love on the other hand (though it has little to do with age) is a story of chaotic lurching between idealization and disappointment, an unstable state where feelings of ecstasy and beatitude combine with impressions of drowning and fatal nausea, where the sense that one has finally found the answer comes together with the feeling that one has never been so lost. The logical climax of immature (because absolute) love comes in death, symbolic or real. The climax of mature love comes in marriage, and the attempt to avoid death via routine (the Sunday papers, trouser presses, remote-controlled appliances). For immature love accepts no compromise, and once we refuse compromise, we are on the road to some kind of cataclysm.这种区别可被分为成熟的爱和不成熟的爱。成熟的爱几乎每一方面都值得称许，它的原理就是，敏锐地觉察到每个人的优点和缺陷。成熟的爱充满自我节制，不会将事物理想化，能够摆脱嫉妒、受虐狂或痴迷的困扰。成熟的爱是一种有性关系的友谊，相处和睦，令人愉悦，彼此回应（也许这能够解释为何许多了解欲望的人不给这无痛的情感以爱的称号）。而不成熟的爱（尽管与年龄大小没有太多关系）是一个在理想化和失望感之间摇摆不定的故事，一个狂喜、幸福与溺毙般感受和无比憎恶夹杂的不稳定状态，在这种状态中，最终找到心上人的感觉伴随着没有过的迷失感。不成熟的（因为绝对化了的）爱，其逻辑终点就是死亡，或是象征性的死亡，或是真正意义上的死亡。成熟的爱，其高潮就是共筑爱巢和努力避免日常生活的龌龊（星期日的报纸、逼对方换条裤子、遥控器）导致的爱情破裂。不成熟的爱不接受妥协，而一旦我们拒绝妥协，就踏上了迈向终点的不归路。对于一个已经体验过不成熟激情的顶峰的人来说，决定结婚是一个无法承受的代价——真不如驾车冲下悬崖，结束一切。
6. With the naive common sense that complex problems may elicit, I would sometimes ask (as though the answer could fit on the back of an envelope), 'Why can't we just all love one another?' Surrounded on every side by the agonies of love, by the complaints of mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, friends, and soap-opera stars, I would hold out the hope that simply because everyone was inflicting and suffering from much the same pain, a common answer could be found -- metaphysical solution to the world's romantic problems on the grandiose scale of the Communists' answer to the inequities of international capital.带着复杂的问题可能诱发的浅识，我有时会发出疑问（好像答案就在信封的背面一样），“为什么我们就不能互相恋爱？”为爱情的痛苦重重围困，为父母、兄弟、姐妹、朋友、肥皂剧明星以及理发师的抱怨层层包围，我会抱有这样一个希望：因为所有的人都无可逃避这相同的痛苦，所以一个放之四海皆准的答案——一个对于世上情爱问题的形而上的解决方法——可以找到，这寻找答案的规定如同共产主义为国际资本主义的不公正提出解决办法一样宏伟浩大。
7. I was not alone in my utopian daydream, joined there by a group of people, let me call them romantic positivists, who believed that with enough thought and therapy, love could be made into a less painful, indeed almost healthy, experience. This assortment of analysts, preachers, gurus, therapists, and writers, while acknowledging that love was full of problems, supposed that genuine problems must have equally genuine solutions. Faced with the misery of most emotional lives, romantic positivists would try to identify causes ?a selfesteem complex, a father complex, a mother complex, a complex complex ?and suggest remedies (regression therapy, a reading of the City of God, gardening, meditation). Hamlet's fate could have been avoided with the help of a good Jungian analyst, Othello could have got his aggression out on a therapeutic cushion, Romeo might have met someone more suitable through a dating agency, Oedipus could have shared his problems in family therapy.我在自己乌托邦式的白日梦中并不孤单，有一群人与我同行。他们相信通过足够的思考和治疗，爱情可以成为一个痛苦较少、几乎是健康的人生体验。就让我称他们是爱情实证主义者吧。分析家、传道士、教派领袖、治疗师和作家之类的人，在认可爱情充满重重难题的同时，认为真正的问题必然有同样真正有效的解答。面对许多充满激情的生命遭受的苦难，爱情实证主义者会努力找出原因——自尊情结、恋父情结、恋母情结、情结的情结——并且提出治疗方法（回归疗法、阅读《上帝之域》、从事园艺业、沉思）。有了荣格的帮助，哈姆雷特的命运就可以重写；通过治疗缓解，奥赛罗也许会放弃过激行为；借助一个约会代理机构，罗密欧也许会遇见更适合自己的人；采取家庭疗法，俄狄浦斯的问题也许可以得到分担。
8. Whereas art has a morbid obsession with the problems that attend love, romantic positivists throw the focus on the very practical steps that can be taken to prevent the most common causes of anguish and heartache. Next to the pessimistic views of much of Western romantic literature, romantic positivists appear as brave champions of a more enlightened and confident approach in an area of human experience traditionally left to the melancholy imagination of degenerate artists and psychotic poets.尽管艺术病态地痴迷爱情中的难题，爱情实证主义者却致力于寻找实用的方法，以阻止引发生气和心痛的最普遍诱因。与大多数西方浪漫主义文学的悲观主义观点相比，爱情实证主义者像勇敢的战士，更加富有知识和自信地进入了人生历程的一个领域，一个传统上属于颓废艺术家和精神错乱的诗人忧郁想象的领域。
9. Shortly after Chloe left, I came across a classic of romantic positivist literature on a stand in a station bookshop, a work by a certain Dr Peggy Nearly that went by the title of The Bleeding Heart. (Peggy Nearly, Capulet Books, 1987). Though in a hurry to get back to my office, I bought the book nevertheless, attracted by a notice on its pink back cover that asked, 'Must being in love always mean being in pain?' Who was this Dr Peggy Nearly, a woman who could boldly claim to answer such a riddle? From the first page of the book, I learnt that she was... a graduate of the Oregon Institute of Love and Human Relations, currently living in the San Francisco area, where she practises psychoanalysis, child therapy, and marriage counselling. She is the author of numerous works on emotional addiction, as well as penis envy, group dynamics, and agoraphobia.与克洛艾分手不久，有次在车站书店浏览时，我看到了一本爱情实证主义的经典作品——《流血的心》，作者是派姬·尼尔莉博士。我被粉红色封面上的问题“爱情必然意味着痛苦吗？”吸引了，尽管要急着赶回办公室，仍然买了这本书。这个派姬·尼尔莉博士，这个勇敢地宣称找到谜底的女人是谁？从书的扉页，我了解了她：
“……毕业于俄勒冈州爱情与人类关系研究所，现居旧金山，从事心理分析、儿童治疗和婚姻咨询等工作。她写过很多关于处理情感沉迷、阴茎妒忌、群体动力、恐旷症等病症的书籍。”
10. And what was The Bleeding Heart about? It told the unfortunate yet optimistic story of men and women who fell in love with unsuitable partners, those who would treat them cruelly or leave them emotionally unfulfilled, take to drink or become violent. These people had made an unconscious connection between love and suffering, and could not stop hoping that the unsuitable types they had chosen to adore would change and love them properly. Their lives would be ruined by the delusion that they could reform people who were by nature incapable of answering their emotional needs. By the third chapter, Dr Nearly had identified the roots of the problem as lying in deficient parents, who had given these unfortunate romantics a warped understanding of the affective process. If they had never loved people who were nice to them, it was because their earliest emotional attachments had taught them that love should be unreciprocated and cruel. But by entering therapy and being able to work through their childhood, they might understand the roots of their masochism, and learn that their desire to change unsuitable partners was only the relic of a more infantile fantasy to convert their parents into proper care-givers.《流血的心》分析的是什么问题呢？它讲述的是那些不幸而又乐观的男男女女的故事，他们爱上了不适合自己的人，那些人虐待他们，或是让他们的情感得不到满足，或是酗酒，或是使用暴力。这些人潜意识里把爱情与痛苦联系在一起，痴痴地盼望着他们爱上的人会改变，好好来爱他们。他们幻想能够重塑那些本质上无法满足他们感情需要的人，就是这种幻想毁掉了他们的生活。在第三章，派姬·尼尔莉博士指出问题的根源在于父母们有过错，是父母使这些不幸的浪漫者曲解了感情生活。如果他们从来没有爱上善待他们的人，那是因为早年受到的感情教育告诉他们，爱不应该要求回报，爱是残酷的。但是通过治疗，分析童年时代，他们就会理解自己受虐狂的根源，知道他们改变不合适伴侣的愿望只是幼年时代想把父母改变成为合适养护者的幻想的残余念头。
11. Perhaps because I had finished reading it only a few days before, I found myself drawing an unlikely parallel between the plight of those described by Dr Nearly and the heroine of Flaubert's great novel, the tragic Emma Bovary. Who was Emma Bovary? She was a young woman living in the French provinces, married to an adoring husband whom she loathed because she had come to associate love with suffering. Consequently, she began to have adulterous affairs with unsuitable men, cowards who treated her cruelly and could not be depended upon to fulfil her romantic longings. Emma Bovary was ill because she could not stop hoping that these men would change and love her properly ?when it was obvious that Rodolphe and Leon considered her as nothing more than an amusing distraction. Unfortunately, Emma lacked the opportunity to enter therapy and become self-conscious enough to realize the origins of her masochistic behaviour. She neglected her husband and child, squandered the family money, and in the end killed herself with arsenic, leaving behind a young child and a distraught husband.也许是因为几天前才读完那本书，我发现自己与尼尔莉博士笔下的人物以及福楼拜杰作中的女主人公——悲惨的爱玛·包法利——的困境并不相同。爱玛·包法利是谁？她是一个生活在法国外省的年轻女子，嫁的丈夫受人尊重。由于她觉得与丈夫的爱情令人痛苦，所以对他产生了厌恶之情，并因此开始与不适合自己的男人发生奸情。那些懦夫虐待她，无法满足她浪漫的渴望。当罗多尔夫和莱昂只把她当作有趣的消遣时，爱玛·包法利还是盼望这些男人能够改变，好好爱她，于是她是病态的了。不幸的是，爱玛没有机会获得治疗，无法清醒过来，意识到自己受虐狂行为的根源。她不顾丈夫的孩子，胡乱花钱。最终丢下幼子和困惑苦恼的丈夫，用砒霜结束了自己的生命。
12. It is sometimes interesting to think how differently events in the past might have unfolded had certain contemporary solutions been available. What if Madame Bovary had been able to discuss her problem with Dr Nearly? What if romantic positivism had had a chance to intervene in one of literature's most tragic love stories? One wonders at how the conversation would have flowed had Emma walked into Dr Nearly's San Francisco clinic.有趣的是，事物的情态千变万化，却有着超越时空的解决办法。如果包法利夫人能够和尼尔莉博士谈谈她的问题，结果会是怎样？如果爱情实证主义有机会干预文学中最悲惨的爱情故事之一，又会是怎样？谁都会为爱玛踏进尼尔莉博士旧金山的诊所兵力发生的谈话感到诧异。
(Bovary on the couch, sobbing.)
（包法利夫人躺在诊察台上，抽抽嗒嗒。）
NEARLY: Emma, if you want me to help you, you'll have to explain what's wrong.
尼尔莉：爱玛，如果想要我帮你，你得说出自己的问题。
(Without looking up, Madame Bovary blows her nose into an embroidered handkerchief.)
（包法利夫人没有抬起目光，用一方绣花手帕擤着鼻子。）
NEARLY: Crying is a positive experience, but I don't think we should be spending the entire fifty minutes on it.
尼尔莉：哭泣有积极作用，但是我想我们不能把整整五十分钟都花在哭上面。
BOVARY: (speaking through her tears) He didn't write, he didn't... write.
包法利：（哭着说）他不写信了，他不……写信了。
NEARLY: Who didn't write, Emma?
尼尔莉：谁不写信了，爱玛？
BOVARY: Rodolphe. He didn't write, he didn't write. He doesn't love me. I am a ruined woman. I am a ruined pathetic, miserable, childish woman.
包法利：罗多尔夫。他不写信了，他不写信了。他现在不爱我了。我是一个堕落的女人，一个可怜巴巴、痛苦不堪而且天真幼稚的女人。
NEARLY: Emma, don't speak this way. I've told you already, you must learn to love yourself.
尼尔莉：爱玛，别这么说。我已经告诉地你，你必须学会爱自己。
BOVARY: Why compromise by loving someone that stupid?
包法利：为什么要妥协去爱一个愚蠢的人？
NEARLY: Because you are a beautiful person. And it's because you don't see it that you are addicted to men who inflict emotional pain.
民尔莉：因为你是一个漂亮的人。因为你不明白这一点，你才爱上令你痛苦的男人。
BOVARY: But it was so good at the time.
包法利：但那时一切都太美好了。
NEARLY: What was?
尼尔莉：什么太美好？
BOVARY: Being there, with him beside me, making love to him, feeling his skin next to mine, riding through the woods. I felt so real, so alive, and now my life is in ruins.
包法利：在那儿，他在我身边，和他做爱，感受他的肌肤贴着我的身体，骑着马在林间漫步。我感受那么真切，那么活生生，而现在我的生活全毁了。
NEARLY: Maybe you felt alive, but only because you knew it couldn't last, that this man didn't really love you. You hate your husband because he listens to everything you say, but you can't stop falling in love with the sort of man who will take two weeks to answer a letter. Quite frankly, Emma, your view of love betrays evidence of compulsion and masochism.
尼尔莉：也许你觉得活生生，但这只是因为你知道你们不可能天长地久，这个男人并不真正爱你。你恨你的丈夫，因为他对你言听计从，但是你无法止住爱上那些两个星期才给你回信的男人。非常坦率地说，爱玛，你的爱情观表明你有强迫症和受虐狂。
BOVARY: Does it? What do I know? I don't care if it's all a sickness, all I want is to kiss him again, to feel him holding me in his arms, to smell the perfume of his skin.
包法利：是吗？我不明白。我才不在乎是不是病呢。我只想再吻他，感受他的拥抱，闻他肌肤的香味。
NEARLY: You have to start to make an effort to look inside yourself, to go over your childhood, then perhaps you will learn that you don't deserve all this pain. It's only because you grew up in a dysfunctional family in which your emotional needs were not met that you are stuck in this pattern.
尼尔莉：你必须努力透视自己的内心，回头考察你的童年，这样也许你会知道你本不该遭受所有的这些痛苦。只是因为你生长在一个机能失调的家庭，你的感情需求没有得到满足，所以才会像现在这样沉迷其中。
BOVARY: My father was a simple farmer.
包法利：我父亲是一个朴实的农民。
NEARLY: Perhaps, but he was also emotionally unreliable, so that you now respond to an unmet need by falling in love with a man who can't give you what you really want.
尼尔莉：也许是吧。但是在感情上，他却不能给予你什么，所以没有得到满足的情感才会使你现在爱上这样一个男人，但这个男人实际也不能给予你真正想要的东西。
BOVARY: It's Charles that's the problem, not Rodolphe.
包法利：问题出在查理，不是罗多尔夫。
NEARLY: Well, my dear, we'll have to go on with this next week. It's coming to the end of your session.
尼尔莉：好了，亲爱的，下个星期我们再谈吧。你的时间到了。
BOVARY: Oh, Dr Nearly, I meant to explain earlier, but I won't be able to pay you this week.
包法利：哦，尼尔莉博士，我本来打算早一点解释，我这个星期没钱付给你。
NEARLY: This is the third time you tell me this sort of thing.
尼尔莉：这是你第三次说这样的话了。
BOVARY: I apologize, but money is such a problem at the moment, I am so unhappy, I find myself spending it all on shopping. Just today, I went and bought three new dresses, a painted thimble, and a china tea set.
包法利：对不起，但是眼下我正缺钱，我一点也不开心，我发现自己把钱都花在购物上了。就在今天，我还去买了三件衣服，一个漆花顶针和一套瓷器茶具。
13. It is hard to imagine a happy end to Madame Bovary's therapy, or indeed a much happier end to her life. It takes a fervent romantic positivist to believe that Dr Nearly (if she was ever paid) could have converted Emma into the well-adjusted, uncompulsive, and caring wife that would have turned Flaubert's book into an optimistic tale of redemption through self-knowledge. Certainly Dr Nearly had an interpretation of Madame Bovary's problem, but there is a great difference between identifying a problem and solving it, between wisdom and the wise life. We are all more intelligent than we are capable, and awareness of the insanity of love has never saved anyone from the disease. Perhaps the concept of wise or wholly painless love is as much of a contradiction as that of a bloodless battle - Geneva Conventions aside, it simply cannot exist. The confrontation between Madame Bovary and Peggy Nearly is the confrontation between romantic tragedy and romantic positivism. It is the confrontation between wisdom and wisdom's opposite, which is not the ignorance of wisdom (that is easy to put right), but the inability to act on the knowledge of what one knows is right. Knowing the unreality of our affair had proved to be of no help to Chloe and me, knowing we might be fools had not turned us into sages.很难想象包法利夫人的治疗会有一个满意的结果，或她的生活会有一个更幸福的收场。狂热的爱情实证主义者相信，尼尔莉博士（如果她一直能够收到治疗费的话）可以将爱玛转变成一个调整好的、不冲动、善于照料人的妻子，从而把福楼拜的小说变成一个通过自我认识而得以救赎的乐观的故事。尼尔莉博士确实对包法利夫人的问题进行了提示，但是发现问题和解决问题、聪明的妻子之间有巨大的差距。我们都比自己实际表现出的程度更聪明一些，意识到爱情疯狂症，但无人能够幸免。也许智慧或完全没有痛苦的爱情这类概念就如无血的战争这个说法——且不说《日内瓦条约》——一样充满矛盾，根本不存在。包法利夫人和派姬·尼尔莉之间的交锋是爱情悲剧和爱情实证主义之间的对抗，是智慧和智慧反面的对抗。不是没有智慧（那很容易对付），而是不能根据明显正确的原则行事。知道我们的情事不现实对克洛艾和我来说毫无帮助；知道我们也许很愚蠢并不能使我们成为哲人。
14. Rendered pessimistic by the intractable pains of love, I decided to turn away from it altogether. If romantic positivism could be of no help, then the only valid wisdom was the stoic advice never to fall in love again. I would henceforth retreat from the world, see no one, live frugally, and throw myself into austere study. I read with admiration stories of men and women who had escaped earthly distractions, made vows of chastity, and spent their lives in monasteries and nunneries. There were stories of hermits who had endured life in caves in the desert for forty or fifty years, living only off roots and berries, never talking or seeing other human beings.爱情挥之不去的痛苦令人悲观，于是，我决定拔慧剑断情丝。如果爱情实证主义于事无补，那么惟一恰当可取的方法就是禁欲主义所提倡的永远不要再坠入爱河。从此，我将退入一个象征意义上的修道院，不见一个人，俭朴地生活，严格地学习。我满怀敬意地读着一些故事，故事中的男女躲开人世的纷扰，誓言一生贞洁，在隐修院里度过人生。此外还有隐士的故事，他们在沙漠的洞穴里坚持生活四五十年，以植物根茎和野果为食，从不与人交谈，也不与人相见。
15. But sitting at a dinner party one evening, lost in Rachel's eyes while she outlined the course of her office life for me, I was shocked to realize how easily I might abandon a stoic philosophy in order to repeat all the mistakes I had lived through with Chloe. If I continued to look at Rachel's hair tied elegantly in a bun, or at the grace with which she used her knife and fork or the richness of her blue eyes, I knew I would not survive the evening intact.然而，有一天在晚宴上，当蕾切尔向我介绍她办公室的工作事务时，我迷失在她的双眸中。我震惊了，意识到自己会多么轻易地丢弃禁欲主义哲学，重蹈与克洛艾交往时犯下的所有错误。如果我继续看着蕾切尔的头发挽成的精致小圆髻，她使用刀叉的优雅姿势，或她蓝色眼眸的丰富内蕴，我知道这个晚上我将无法全身而退。
16. The sight of Rachel alerted me to the limits of the stoic approach. Though love might never be painless and was certainly not wise, neither could it be forgotten. It was as inevitable as it was unreasonable ?and its unreason was unfortunately no argument against it. Was it not absurd to retreat into the Judaean hills in order to eat roots and shoots? If I wanted to be courageous, were there not greater opportunities for heroism in love? Moreover, for all the sacrifices demanded by the stoic life, was there not something cowardly within it? At the heart of stoicism lay the desire to disappoint oneself before someone else had the chance to do so. Stoicism was a crude defence against the dangers of the affections of others, a danger that it would take more endurance than a life in the desert to be able to face. In calling for a monastic existence free of emotional turmoil, stoicism was simply trying to deny the legitimacy of certain potentially painful yet fundamental human needs. However brave, the stoic was in the end a coward at the point of perhaps the highest reality, at the moment of love.邂逅蕾切尔使我警醒于禁欲主义的局限。爱情并非聪明之举，也许永远无法摒弃痛苦，但也永远无法忘怀。爱情的不可避免，犹如爱情的缺乏理性——然而不幸的是，缺乏理性并不是反对爱情本身的理由。难道为了吃到植物根茎和野果而去朱迪亚山不是有些荒唐？如果我想勇气十足，难道爱情中就没有更多的机会表现英雄主义？而且，在禁欲生活需要的所有牺牲中，难道就没有一些懦弱的成分？禁欲主义的本质中有这样的愿望，在他人有机会令你失意之前先使自己失意。禁欲主义是对他人感情的危险采取一种原始的防卫方法，面对这种危险，人们需要拥有比在沙漠里生活更大的忍受能力。禁欲主义要求人们过一种隐修克己的生活，避免感情的折磨，这只是试图否定某些人类需求的合理性，这些需求既存在潜在的勇敢，又是最为基本的需求。无论禁欲主义者是怎样的勇敢，但面对最真切的现实，面对爱情，他最终只是一个懦夫。
17. We can always blind ourselves to the complexities of a problem by suggesting solutions that reduce the issue to a lowest common denominator. Both romantic positivism and stoicism were inadequate answers to the problems raised by the agonies of love, because both of them collapsed the question rather than juggling with its contradictions. The stoics had collapsed the pain and irrationality of love into a conclusive argument against it ?thereby failing to balance the undoubted trauma of our desires with the intractability of our emotional needs. On the other hand, the romantic positivists were guilty of collapsing a certain easy grasp of psychological wisdom into a belief that love could be rendered painless for all, if only we learnt to love ourselves a little more ?thereby failing to juggle a need for wisdom with the inherent difficulties of acting on its precepts, reducing the tragedy of Madame Bovary to an illustration of Dr Nearly's truistic theories.我们总是蒙住自己的眼睛，提出一些简化问题的方案，从而回避问题的复杂性。对爱情中的巨大痛苦，爱情实证主义和禁欲主义的解答都不充分。因为两者都瓦解了问题，而没有解决矛盾。禁欲主义将爱情的痛苦和荒谬化解为一个结论性的理由来反对爱情——从而无法在我们欲望的真正创伤和感情需求的完整性之间找到平衡。另一方面，爱情实证主义把一种可以轻易把握的心理智慧错误地瓦解为一种信念，认为只要我们学会多些自爱，每个人就可以拥有没有痛苦的爱情。因而爱情实证主义无法处理好需要智慧和遵照其规则行事随之而来的困难之间的关系，将包法利夫人的悲剧简化为尼尔莉博士老生常谈的理论的一个例证。
18. I realized that a more complex lesson needed to be drawn, one that could play with the incompatibilities of love, juggling the need for wisdom with its likely impotence, juggling the idiocy of infatuation with its inevitability. Love had to be appreciated without flight into dogmatic optimism or pessimism, without constructing a philosophy of one's fears, or a morality of one's disappointments. Love taught the analytic mind a certain humility, the lesson that however hard it struggled to reach immobile certainties (numbering its conclusions and embedding them in neat series), analysis could never be anything but flawed ?and therefore never stray far from the ironic.我意识到，需要上一堂更为复杂的课，这一课可以解决爱情中的不和谐，协调智慧的需要和智慧可能存在的无效，协调迷恋者的愚蠢行为和迷恋的不可避免。人们在正确评价爱情时，必须不带有教条主义的乐观或悲观，摒弃害怕爱情的禁欲主义学说，或爱情实证主义失望的道德观。爱情教会善于分析的人一种谦逊，教会他无论怎样费力地找到不可改变的确凿真理（为其结论编号，将其装入整齐的序列），分析也永远都是有瑕疵的，因此从来都与谬误相去不远。
19. Such lessons appeared all the more relevant when Rachel accepted my invitation for dinner the following week, and the very thought of her began sending tremors through the region the poets have called the heart, tremors that I knew could have meant one thing only ?that I had once more begun to fall.当蕾切尔接受邀请，答应接下来那周和我共进晚餐时，这类课程显得尤为确当。仅仅就是想起她，都开始有激动的颤栗穿过那诗人称之为心的地方。我知道这颤栗只意味着一件事——我又一次坠入爱河。
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