So, I'm going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let's probe away at our notions of success. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own.
阿兰·德波顿
英国作家

阿兰·德波顿(Alain de Botton),英国作家,1969年出生于瑞士苏黎世,毕业于英国剑桥大学。著有小说《爱情笔记》、《爱上浪漫》、《亲吻与诉说》及散文作品《拥抱逝水年华》、《哲学的慰藉》、《旅行的艺术》、《身份的焦虑》等。

And I went to talk to them about certain of the great tragedies of Western art. I wanted to see how they would seize the bare bones of certain stories, if they came in as a news item at the news desk on a Saturday afternoon.

我去找他们聊聊,西方艺术中最伟大的几个悲剧故事,我想知道他们会如何露骨地以新闻的方式,在周日下午的新闻台上,呈现这些经典悲剧故事。

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阿兰·德波顿

In a way, if you like, at one end of the spectrum of sympathy, you've got the tabloid newspaper. At the other end of the spectrum, you've got tragedy and tragic art. And I suppose I'm arguing that we should learn a little bit about what's happening in tragic art. It would be insane to call Hamlet a loser. He is not a loser, though he has lost. And I think that is the message of tragedy to us, and why it's so very, very important, I think.

如果同情心的一个极端,是这些八卦小报。另一个极端便是悲剧和悲剧艺术,我想说的是或许我们该从悲剧艺术中学习,你不会说汉姆雷特是个失败者,虽然他失败了,他却不是一个失败者。我想这就是悲剧所要告诉我们的,也是我认为非常重要的一点。

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阿兰·德波顿

The other thing about modern society and why it causes this anxiety, is that we have nothing at its center that is non-human. We are the first society to be living in a world where we don't worship anything other than ourselves. We think very highly of ourselves, and so we should; we've put people on the Moon, done all sorts of extraordinary things. And so we tend to worship ourselves.

现代社会让我们焦虑的另一个缘故是,我们除了人类以外没有其它重心。我们是从古至今的第一个无神社会,除了我们自己以外,我们不膜拜任何事物,我们对自己评价极高,为什么不呢,我们把人送上月球,达成了许多不可思议的事,我们习惯崇拜自己。

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阿兰·德波顿

Our heroes are human heroes. That's a very new situation. Most other societies have had, right at their center, the worship of something transcendent: a god, a spirit, a natural force, the universe, whatever it is -- something else that is being worshiped. We've slightly lost the habit of doing that, which is, I think, why we're particularly drawn to nature.

我们的英雄是人类,这是一个崭新的情况。历史中大部分的社会重心都是敬拜一位人类以外的灵体,神,自然力、宇宙,总之是人类以外的什么。我们逐渐失去了这种习惯,我想这也是我们越来越被大自然吸引的原因。

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阿兰·德波顿

Not for the sake of our health, though it's often presented that way, but because it's an escape from the human anthill. It's an escape from our own competition, and our own dramas. And that's why ween joy looking at glaciers and oceans, and contemplating the Earth from outside its perimeters, etc. We like to feel in contact with something that is non-human, and that is so deeply important to us.

虽然我们时常显示是为了健康,但我不这么认为,我认为是为了逃避人群的蚁丘,逃避人们的疯狂竞争,我们的戏剧化,这便是为什么我们如此喜欢看海、观赏冰山,从外太空观赏地球等等,我们希望重新和那些“非人类”的事物有所连接,那对我们来说很重要。

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阿兰·德波顿

What I think I've been talking about really is success and failure. And one of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. If I said that there's somebody behind the screen who's very successful, certain ideas would immediately come to mind. You'd think that person might have made a lot of money, achieved renown in some field. My own theory of success -- I'm somebody who's very interested in success, I really want to be successful, always thinking, how can I be more successful? But as I get older, I'm also very nuanced about what that word "success" might mean.

我一直在谈论成功和失败。成功的有趣之处是,我们时常以为我们知道成功是什么,如果我现在说,这个屏幕后面站着一个非常成功的人,你心里马上就会产生一些想法。你会想,这个人可能很有钱,在某些领域赫赫有名,我对成功的理解是。首先,我是一个对成功非常有兴趣的人,我想要成功,我总是想着“要怎样我才能更成功?”,但当我渐渐长大,我越来越疑惑,究竟什么是“成功”的真正意义。

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阿兰·德波顿

Here's an insight that I've had about success: You can't be successful at everything. We hear a lot of talk about work-life balance. Nonsense. You can't have it all. You can't. So any vision of success has to admit what it's losing out on, where the element of loss is. And I think any wise life will accept, as I say, that there is going to be an element where we're not succeeding.

我对成功有一些观察,你不可能在所有事情上成功。我们常听到有关工作和休闲的平衡,鬼话。你不可能全部拥有。你就是不能。所有对成功的想象,必须承认他们同时也失去了一些东西,放弃了一些东西。我想一个智者能接受,如我所说,总是有什么是我们得不到的。

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阿兰·德波顿

And the thing about a successful life is that a lot of the time, our ideas of what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They're sucked in from other people; chiefly, if you're a man, your father, and if you're a woman, your mother. Psychoanalysis has been drumming home this message for about 80 years. No one's quite listening hard enough, but I very much believe it's true.

常常,我们对一个成功人生的想象,不是来自我们自己,而是来自他人。如果你是个男人,你会以父亲做榜样,如果你是个女人,你会以母亲做榜样,精神分析已经重复说了80年,但很少有人真正听进去。但我的确相信这件事。

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阿兰·德波顿

And we also suck in messages from everything from the television, to advertising, to marketing, etc. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. When we're told that banking is a very respectable profession, a lot of us want to go into banking. When banking is no longer so respectable, we lose interest in banking. We are highly open to suggestion.

我们也会从电视、广告,各样的市场宣传中得到我们对成功的想象。这些东西影响了我们,对我们自己的看法、我们想要什么。当我们听说银行业是个受人尊敬的行业,许多人便加入银行业,当银行业不再受人尊敬,我们便对银行业失去兴趣,我们很能接受建议。

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阿兰·德波顿

So what I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas, and make sure that we own them; that we are truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it's bad enough not getting what you want, but it's even worse to have an idea of what it is you want, and find out, at the end of the journey, that it isn't, in fact, what you wanted all along.

我想说的是,我们不该放弃,我们对成功的想象,但必须确定那些都是我们自己想要的,我们应该专注于我们自己的目标,确定这目标是我们真正想要的,确定这个梦想蓝图出自自己笔下。因为得不到自己想要的已经够糟糕了,更糟糕的是,在人生旅程的终点,发觉你所追求的从来就不是你真正想要的。

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阿兰·德波顿

So, I'm going to end it there. But what I really want to stress is: by all means, success, yes. But let's accept the strangeness of some of our ideas. Let's probe away at our notions of success. Let's make sure our ideas of success are truly our own.

我必须在这里做个总结,但我真正想说的是,成功是必要的,但请接受自己怪异的想法,朝着自己对成功的定义出发,确定我们对成功的定义都是出于自己的真心。

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阿兰·德波顿

I think it's merely the randomness of the winning and losing process that I want to stress, because the emphasis nowadays is so much on the justice of everything, and politicians always talk about justice. Now I'm a firm believer in justice, I just think that it's impossible. So we should do everything we can to pursue it, but we should always remember that whoever is facing us, whatever has happened in their lives, there will be a strong element of the haphazard. That's what I'm trying to leave room for; otherwise, it can get quite claustrophobic.

在输赢的过程中有太多偶然,今日我们太讲求所有事情的正义和公平,政治人物总是在谈论正义,我非常支持正义,我只是觉得那不可能,我们应该尽力,尽力去追求正义,但我们也应该记得,我们所面对的,无论在他们人生中发生过什么,偶然总是一个强烈的因素,我希望大家留一点空间这么想,不然真令人有一种幽闭恐怖症的感觉。

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阿兰·德波顿

The nightmare thought is that frightening people is the best way to get work out of them, and that somehow the crueler the environment, the more people will rise to the challenge. You want to think, who would you like as your ideal dad? And your ideal dad is somebody who is tough but gentle. And it's a very hard line to make. We need fathers, as it were, the exemplary father figures in society, avoiding the two extremes, which is the authoritarian disciplinarian on the one hand, and on the other, the lax, no-rules option.

梦魇是相信恐吓人们是刺激他们发奋的最好办法,或是环境越残酷,就会有越多人接受挑战。你必须想,你的理想父亲是怎样的?你的理想父亲往往是严厉又温和的,虽然这界限很难画定,我们社会需要的模范性人物是像一个理想父亲,不要走极端,不要完全集权、纯粹纪律,也不要模糊马虎,乱无规章。

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阿兰·德波顿