1

1

一个夏天，我应邀和朋友一起在普罗旺斯的一座农舍里度过了几天时间。我知道“普罗旺斯”这个词能让许多人产生无限遐想，然而它对于我而言并不意味着什么。我倾向于通过这样一种感觉，即那个地方与我并不相投，来打消自己对这个词的联想。没错，在一些聪明人眼里，普罗旺斯美若仙境——“啊，普罗旺斯！”他们会怀着崇敬之情作如此感叹，一如他们正在观看歌剧或是欣赏代尔夫特 [1] 陶艺品。

One summer, I was invited to spend a few days with friends in a farmhouse in Provence. I knew that the word 'Provence' was for many people rich in associations, though it meant little to me. I tended to switch off at its mention out of a sense, founded on little, that the place would not be congenial to me. What I did know was that Provence was generally held by sensible people to be very beautiful- 'Ah, Provence!' they would sigh, with a reverence otherwise reserved for opera or Delft earthenware.

飞抵马赛机场后，我租了一辆小小的雷诺汽车，前往主人的住所。他们的房子建在阿尔卑斯山脚下，处于两个小镇阿尔勒和桑特拉米之间。出了马赛机场，我竟走错了路，车子一直开到了滨海福斯的炼油厂。它那纠结在一块儿的管道和冷却塔诉说着这种液体生产的复杂性，我习惯于将这种液体注入我的汽车却从不思考它的来处。

I flew to Marseilles and, after renting a small Renault at the airport, headed for the home of my hosts, which lay at the foot of the Alpilles hills, between the towns of Arles and Saint-Rémy. At the exit out of Marseilles, I grew confused and ended up at the giant oil refinery at Fos-sur-Mer, whose tangle of pipes and cooling towers spoke of the complexity involved in the manufacture of a liquid that I was used to putting into my car with scant thought for its origins.

我终于找到了自己的路，返回到N568公路，穿过拉克罗生长着小麦的大片原野，我进入法国内陆。由于时间还早，在圣马丹-德克罗的村庄外面，离我的目的地几公里的地方，我在路边停下，关掉了发动机，停在一片橄榄林的一端。除了隐藏在树中蝉的鸣叫之外，周围都很安静。在橄榄林的后面是一大片麦田，以一排柏树作为分界线。那些柏树的顶部依稀可见阿尔卑斯山脉不规则的山脊。天空湛蓝一片。

I found my way back to the N568, which led me inland across the wheat-growing plain of La Crau. Outside the village of St-Martin-de-Crau, a few miles from my destination, being too early, I pulled off the road and turned off the engine. I had come to a stop on the edge of an olive grove. It was quiet save for the sounds of cicadas hidden in the trees. Behind the grove were wheat fields bordered by a row of cypresses, over whose tops rose the irregular ridge of the Alpilles. The sky was a cloudless blue.

我浏览着这片景象。我并不在寻找某些特定的东西：猎物，度假小屋或是回忆。我的动机很单纯，快乐就是我的出发点，我在寻找美的踪迹。我希望普罗旺斯的橄榄树、柏树和天空能够“带给我喜悦，让我生机勃勃”。这是一个伟大而松散的计划。此刻眼睛自由自在，却反倒有些迷惘。眼睛在完成了当日的搜索任务——如寻找租车处，离开马赛的公路出口——之后，开始无拘无束地在景物中穿梭。如果把眼睛经过的路线用一支巨大的铅笔描绘出来，那么天空就将立即被躁动而随意的线条涂满了。

I scanned the view. I was not looking for anything in particular: not for predators, holiday homes or memories. My motive was simple and hedonistic: I was looking for beauty. 'Delight and enliven me' was my implicit challenge to the olive trees, cypresses and skies of Provence. It was a vast, loose agenda and my eyes were bewildered at their freedom. Without the motives that had marked the rest of the day-to seek out the car-rental desk, the exit out of Marseilles and so on-they careered from object to object, so that if their path had been traced by the mark of a giant pencil, the sky would soon have been darkened by random impatient patterns.

尽管风景并不难看，但在一段时间的仔细观察之后，我却找不到传言中充满魅力的景致。橄榄树看上去很矮小，与其说是树，倒不如说是灌木；而麦田则让我想起了平坦却枯燥的英格兰东南部地区，我曾在那里的一所学校里读书，而且过得并不快乐。我有些疲惫，无力再去注意这里的谷仓、山上的石灰岩或是生长在一群柏树下的罂粟。

Though the landscape was not ugly, I could not-after a few moments of scrutiny-detect the charm so often ascribed to it. The olive trees looked stunted, more like bushes than trees, and the wheat fields evoked the flat, dull expanses of south-eastern England, where I had attended a school and been unhappy. I lacked the energy to register the barns, the limestone of the hills or the poppies growing at the feet of a group of cypresses.

雷诺汽车的车厢里持续上升的温度让我觉得乏味而且极不舒适，我开始出发驶向目的地。见了朋友，我向他们问候，口是心非地称道此地真是人间天堂。

Bored and uncomfortable in the Renault's increasingly hot plastic interior, I set off for my destination and greeted my hosts with the remark that this was simply paradise.

在接触一地风景时，我们的感觉会迅速涌出，就如发现雪是冰的而糖是甜的一样，因此很难想象风景对我们的吸引力可以改变或者增强。似乎对一个地方的感觉已经被这些地方内在的气质或是我们心中根深蒂固的思维模式所决定。因此，当我们力图改变对于这些美丽风景的感觉时，会觉得很无助，就好像力图改变自己对已经觉得味美的冰淇淋的感觉一样。

Because we find places to be beautiful as immediately and as apparently spontaneously as we find snow to be cold or sugar sweet, it is hard to imagine that there is anything we might do to alter or expand our attractions. It seems that matters have been decided for us by qualities inherent in the places themselves or by hard-wiring in our psyches and that we would therefore be as helpless to modify our sense of the places we find beautiful as we would our preference for the ice-creams we find appetizing.

但是审美品位不会像上面作的类比那么刻板。我们忽略了一些地方，是因为从来没有什么事物促使我们发现其欣赏价值，或者是因为一种不幸却随意的联想使我们有负面的判断。我们和橄榄树的关系，在我们被引导向它那树叶上的银色光芒或是其枝干的形态的过程中得到了提升。当我们看到一株株结实饱满的麦穗在风中倾下头颅时，我们不禁会对这种脆弱而又必不可少的作物产生了悲悯之情，一些新的联想就此产生。一旦我们被告知，即使从最原始的角度来看，普罗旺斯天空的主宰仍是蓝色，我们就能在天空中找到一些值得欣赏的东西。

Yet aesthetic tastes may be less rigid than the analogy suggests. We overlook certain places because nothing has ever prompted us to conceive of them as worthy of appreciation, or because some unfortunate but stray association has turned us against them. Our relationship to olive trees can be improved by being directed towards the silver in their leaves or the structure of their branches. New associations can be created around wheat once we are directed to the pathos of this fragile and yet essential crop as its stalks bend their grain-filled heads in the wind. We may find something to appreciate in the skies of Provence once we are told, even if only in the crudest way, that it is the shade of blue that counts.

或许视觉艺术最能提升我们欣赏风景的能力。我们可以把许多艺术作品想象为有着无限微妙含义的工具，它们将教会我们如何欣赏：“注视着普罗旺斯的天空，更新你对麦子的认识，不要小看了橄榄树。”在成千上万个事物中，以一片麦地为例子，一幅成功的作品将描绘出这麦田的特色，并且使美感和兴趣从观众心中升起。视觉艺术将使平常湮没在众多素材中的要素凸现出来，同时使其稳定下来，一旦我们熟悉了这些要素，视觉艺术就会在不知不觉中推动我们在周遭的世界中发现这些要素；如果我们已经发现它们了，它将使我们更有信心，让这些要素在生命中发酵。我们就像这样一个人，有一个词语在他耳边已经被提及多次，但是只有他体会到这个词语的含义时，他才开始倾听到它。

And perhaps the most effective way in which our sense of what to look for in a scene can be enriched is through visual art. We could conceive of many works of art as immensely subtle instruments for telling us what amounts in effect to: 'Look at the sky of Provence, redraw your notion of wheat, do justice to olive trees.' From amidst the million things in, for example, a wheat field, a successful work will draw out the features capable of exciting a sense of beauty and interest in the spectator. It will foreground elements ordinarily lost in the mass of data, it will stabilize them and, once we are acquainted with them, prompt us imperceptibly to find them in the world about us-or, if we have already found them, lend us confidence to give them weight in our lives. We will be like a person around whom a word has been mentioned on many occasions, but who only begins to hear it once he has learnt its meaning.

我们探寻美的旅程也是这样；我们想要从哪里开始艺术之旅，艺术作品就从哪里开始潜移默化地影响我们。

And in so far as we travel in search of beauty, works of art may in small ways start to influence where we would like to travel to.