一、A Working Community
1. I have a friend who is a member of the medical community. It does not say that, of course, on the stationery that bears her home address.This membership comes from her hospital work.我有一个朋友,她是医学界的一员。当然,这在有她家庭住址的信笺上是找不到的。她的这个成员身份来自她的医院工作。2. I have another friend who is a member of the computer community. This is a fairly new subdivision of our economy, and yet he finds his sense of place in it.我有另一个朋友,他是电脑圈的一员。这是我们的经济的一个相当新的分支,但是他在这里找到了自己的归属感。3. Other friends and acquaintances of mine are members of the academic community, or the business community, or the journalistic community.我的其他朋友和熟人是学术界,商界,或新闻社区的成员。4. Though you cannot find these on any map, we know where we belong。虽然在任何地图上找不到这些,我们却知道自己的归属。
5、None of us, mind you, was born into these communities. Nor did we move into them, U-Hauling our possessions along with us. None has papers to prove we are card-carrying members of one such group or another. Yet it seems that more and more of us are identified by work these days, rather than by street.值得一提的是,我们没有谁一出生就属于这些社区,也不是后来我们搬了进来。这些身份是我们随身携带的,没有人可以拿出文件证明我们是这个或那个群体的会员卡持有者。然而,不知不觉中人们的身份更倾向于各自所从事的工作,而不是像以往一样由家庭住址来界定。
6、In the past, most Americans live in neighborhoods. We were members of precincts or parishes or school districts. My dictionary still defines community, first of all in geographic terms, as “a body of people who live in one place.”过去大多数彼邻而居的美国人彼此是同一个街区、教区、校区的成员。今天的词典依然首先从地理的角度来定义社区,称之为“一个由居住在同一地方的人组成的群体”。
7、But today fewer of us do our living in that one place; more of us just use it for sleeping. Now we call our towns “bedroom suburbs,” and many of us, without small children as icebreakers, would have trouble naming all the people on our street.然而,如今的情况是居住和工作都在同一个地方的人极少,对更多的人来说家成了一个仅仅用来睡觉的地方。我们的居住地被叫做“近郊居住区”,由于没有了孩子像过去那样起到沟通邻里关系的作用,许多人感到要叫出跟我们同住一条街的所有人的名字是件极不容易的事。
10、We may be strangers at the supermarket that replaced the corner grocer, but we are known at the coffee shop in the lobby. We share with each other a cast of characters from the boss in the corner office to the crazy lady in Shipping, to the lovers in Marketing. It’s not surprising that when researchers ask Americans what they like best about work,they say it is “the shmoose factor.” When they ask young mothers at home what they miss most about work, it is the people.人们曾经在杂货店的超市里可能是陌生人,但是却极可能在公司大厅的咖啡间里相识。我们谈论一些人物,从街头办文室的老板,到运输部中的疯女人,到营销部的情人们。难怪当研究者问及美国人关于工作他们最喜欢什么的时候,他们的回答是“和同事悠闲自在地闲扯”,当询问在家里做全职母亲的年轻妇女对工作最怀念什么时,她们说是工作中所接触过的人。
11、Not all the neighborhoods are empty, nor is every workplace a friendly playground. Most of us have had mixed experiences in these environments. Yet as one woman told me recently, she knows more about the people she passes on the way to her desk than on her way around the block. Our new sense of community hasn’t just moved from house to office building. The labels that we wear connect us with members from distant companies, cities, and states. We assume that we have something “in common” with other teachers, nurses, city planners.不是所有的住宅区都是空的,也不是所有的工作单位都是友好的。多数人在这些环境里都曾有过复杂的经历。然而,最近一位女性朋友告诉我她对工作单位里的人的了解程度要胜于对同一街区人的了解程度。我们不仅把社区的概念从住宅区搬进了办公楼,上班时身上所佩戴的标志也把我们和异国他乡的人们和公司员工联系在一起。我们假设自己和其他的教师、护士、城市规划者有着某些共同点。
12、It’s not unlike the experience of our immigrant grandparents. Many who came to this country still identified themselves as members of the Italian community, the Irish community, the Polish community. They sought out and assumes connection with people from the old country, Many of us have updated that experience. We have replaced ethnic identity with professional identity, the way we replaced neighborhood with the workplace. This whole realignment of community is surely most obvious among the mobile professions. People who move from city to city seem to put roots into their professions. In an age of specialists, they may have to search harder to find people who speak the same language.这有点像最初移民来到美国的我们的祖辈们的经历,许多人来到这里后把自己原来的国籍当成一个社区,所以有意大利人社区、爱尔兰人社区、波兰社区等。他们不断寻找并设想自己与来自同一个国家的人们有着亲密的联系。我们把这种体验提升了一步。像用工作单位取代居住地一样,我们用专业身份取代了种族身份。这种社区的完全重组在流动作业的行业中表现得最为明显,那些在不同城市变换工作的人似乎把自己的身份植根于他们的行业中。在这个充满专业人士的时代,他们不得不费尽周折去寻找有共同语言的人。
13、I don’t think that there is anything massively disruptive about this shifting sense of community. The continuing search for connection and shared enterprise is very human. But I do feel uncomfortable with our shifting identity. The balance has tipped, and we seem increasingly dependent on work for our sense of self.我并不认为这种社区概念的变迁会造成大面积的混乱,这种对联系和共同理想的不断追寻充满了人性。但我对我们不断变化的身份确实感到不安。身份意识的天平似乎已经日渐倾斜到工作决定身份这边。
14、If our office are our new neighborhoods, if our professional titles are our new ethnic tags, then how do we separate ourselves from our jobs? Self-worth isn’t just something to measure in the marketplace. But in these new, communities, it becomes harder to tell who we are without saying what we do.如果办公室真的彻底变成我们的社区,如果我们的所从事的行业真的彻底变成我们的种族印记,那我们怎样才能把自己和工作区分开来呢?自我价值并不是只有在市场环境中得到体现的。但是在这些新的社区中,如果不先说明我们是从事哪行哪业的,就越来越难以说清楚我们究竟是谁。
二、The Roots Of My Ambition
2、My mother,dead now to this world but still roaring free in my mind, wakes me some mornings before day-break. “If there’s one thing I can’t stand, Russell, it’s a quitter.”虽然她已离天人世,我母亲却依旧在我的脑子里大声嚷嚷,有时天还未破晓她就催我起床,罗素,假如有一件事情我不能容忍的话,那就是轻易放弃的人。
25、Onward and upward was the course she set. Small progress was no excuse for feeling satisfied with yourself. People who stopped to pat themselves on the back didn’t last long. Even if you got to the top, you ‘d better not take it easy. “The bigger they come, the harder they fall” was one of her favorite maxims.进取、进取、再进取,这是母亲给我设定的方向。小小的进步是不足以自我满足的。那些因成功而沾沾自喜停下来欣赏自己的人是不会持久的。即使你已经到达顶峰,你也最好不要放松。爬得越高,摔得越痛,是母亲的至理名言。
36、It wasn’t the gin that was shouting. It was my mother. The gin only gave me the courage to announce to them that yes, by God, I had always believed in success, had always believed that without hard work and self-discipline you could never amount to anything, and didn’t deserve to.其实不是杜松子酒在吼,是我的母亲在吼。酒只是借给了我勇气向他们宣布那个想法。是的,上帝可以作证,我一直相信成功,一直相信如果没有辛勤的劳动和严格的自律,一个人不可能有任何成就,也不配有成就。
三、Help Yourself through the Hard Times
3、With no idea what to do next, I resolved literally to “sail off into the sunset,” following the coastline from Connecticut to Florida. But somewhere off New Jersey I turned due east, straight out to sea. Hours later, I climbed up on the stern rail and watched the dark Atlantic slip beneath the hull. How easy it would be to let the water take me, I thought.无所适从的我决心真正驾船“向夕阳行驶”,沿着海岸线从康涅狄格州驶向佛罗里达州。但是在离新泽西巷的地方,我转向正东方,直接驶往大海。几小时后,我爬上船尾的栏杆,注视着从船体下面滑过的黑沉沉的大西洋海水。我想让海水淹死是多么容易的一件事。
5、Everyone, at some point, will suffer a loss-the loss of loved ones. Good health, a job. “It’s your desert experience-a time of feeling barren of options, even hope,” explains Patrick Del Zoppo, a psychologist and bereavement specialist with the Archdiocese of New York. “The important thing is not to allow yourself to be stranded in the desert.”每个人,在某个时刻,都将遭受损失—失去挚爱的人、健康或是工作。“这是你经历中的荒漠---一段感到毫无出路,甚至毫无希望的时期”,帕垂克·戴尔·左珀解释说。他是一名心理学家,纽约大主教管区的丧亲之痛专家,“重要的是不要让你自己陷入荒漠之中无法自拔”。
四、What Is Happiness?
14、Happiness is never more than partial. There are no pure states of mankind. Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming. What the Founding Fathers declared for us as inherent right,we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the meaningful pursuit of what is life-engaging and life-revealing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming. A nation is not measured by what it possesses or want