The Pleasures of Reading

阅读的乐趣

Bennett Cerf

贝内特.瑟夫

作者简介

贝内特.瑟夫（Bennett Cerf，1898—1971），著名出版家，美国大型出版社兰登书屋（Random House）的创始人。他的回忆录《我与兰登书屋》（At Random: The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf）是一部生动反映美国20世纪出版业风云变幻的经典著作，同时也是一部充满趣味、幽默与智慧的文学作品。

本文选自贝内特.瑟夫1957年出版的《阅读为乐》（Reading for Pleasure）。作为资深出版家，作者可谓阅书无数。读书于他，不是负担，而是享受。本文将图书馆的藏书比作城市中的建筑，气势宏大而贴切入微，类似的比喻比比皆是。作者的不凡气度令人叹服。

All the wisdoms of the ages, all the stories that have delighted mankind for centuries, are easily and cheaply available to all of us within the covers of books—but we must know how to avail ourselves of this treasure and how to get the most from it. The most unfortunate people in the world are those who have never discovered how satisfying it is to read good books.

I am most interested in people, in meeting them and finding out about them. Some of the most remarkable people I’ve met existed only in a writer’s imagination, then on the pages of his book, and then, again, in my imagination. I’ve found in books new friends, new societies, new words.

If I am interested in people, others are interested not so much in “who” as in “how”. “Who” in the books includes everybody from science fiction superman two hundred centuries in the future all the way back to the first figures in history. “How” covers everything from the ingenious explanations of Sherlock Holmes to the discoveries of science and ways of teaching manner to children.

Reading is a pleasure of the mind, which means that it is a little like a sport: your eagerness and knowledge and quickness make you a good reader. Reading is fun, not because the writer is telling you something, but because it makes your mind work. Your own imagination works along with the author’s or even goes beyond his. Your experience, compared with his, brings you to the same or different conclusions, and your ideas develop as you understand his.

历代智慧、千古趣事，都可轻易从书中获得，而且耗资不多。但我们须知道如何充分利用这一宝藏，并惠及自身。不知阅读好书之乐者，可谓世间最为不幸之人。

我对书中人物最感兴趣，乐于同他们相会相知。我遇见的一些卓越人士，起初只存在于作家的想象中，后来出现在某些作品里，再后来重现于我的想象中。我在书中发现了新朋友、新阶层、新词语。

我喜爱书中人物，他人则更关注书中情节。从先古历史人物，到2万年后的科幻超人，皆属“人物”；从福尔摩斯的巧妙推理，到科学领域的众多发现，再到教育孩子的方式方法，则属“情节”。

阅读是种精神享受，热忱、学识、悟性使你成为一名优秀的读者——这和体育运动有几分相似。阅读之所以有趣，不是因为作者告诉你什么，而是因为阅读活跃你的思想。你随作者一同想象，甚至超越他的想象。你拿自己的经历与作者的相比，会得出相同或相异的结论。随着对作者的理解不断加深，你自己的想法也会不断拓展。

Every book stands by itself, like a one-family house, but books in a library are like houses in a city. Although they are separate, together they all add up to something; they are connected with each other and with other cities. The same ideas, or related ones, turn up in different places; the human problems that repeat themselves in life repeat themselves in literature, but with different solutions according to different writings at different times. Books influence each other; they link the past, the present and the future and have their own generations, like families. Wherever you start reading you connect yourself with one of the families of the ideas, and, in the long run, you not only find out about the world and the people in it; you find out about yourself, too.

Reading can only be fun if you expect it to be. If you concentrate on books somebody tells you, you “ought” to read, you probably won’t have fun. But if you put down the book you don’t like and try another till you find one that means something to you, and then relax with it, you will almost certainly have a good time—and if you become, as a result of reading, better, wiser, kinder, or more gentle, you won’t have suffered during the process.

每一本书如同独门独户的房屋，孑然独立。图书馆的藏书则像城市中的建筑——尽管它们各自独立，却构成一个整体；房与房相互关联，城与城相互联系。相同或相关的思想在不同地方出现；人类生活中反复出现的难题在文学作品中也反复出现。但不同时期的不同作品却提出了不同的解决方案。书籍相互影响，联系过去、现在与未来。它们如同家族，有自己的传承。无论你从何处读起，都会与某一思想体系相连。长远看来，你不仅能从书中理解世界和人类，还能审视自我。

只有你以阅读为乐，阅读才会有趣。若是别人说你“应该”读某书，你便埋头苦读，那很可能毫无乐趣。但若放下不爱读的书，转而尝试另一本，直到发现你认为有意义的书，那时再尽情享用，便会感到其乐无穷——这几乎毫无疑问。如果通过阅读，你变得更优秀、更睿智、更善良、更文雅，就不再会视阅读为煎熬了。

阅读是种精神享受，热忱、学识、悟性使你成为一名优秀的读者——这和体育运动有几分相似。

Bennett Cerf 贝内特•瑟夫