又一篇好文来啦，请阁下细细品尝。
(昨天发表了这篇大作马斯洛需求层次理论的重要性，不要错过哦)
现代社会，聚少离多是多么的常见，我们也是多么的珍惜相聚的日子，相比过去，我们更深刻地感受到孤独。而如果想让人们觉得不那么孤独，真正的方法是让他们相信，孤独并不意味着失败，孤独并非是什么特殊的诅咒，只是优秀的人最终的归宿而已，我们之所以孤独，也并非有精神问题。When we think about what's difficult in the modern world, we’re liable to think about mealtimes: how seldom they now take place communally, how rare it is for whole families to gather, and how much technology can intrude. In paintings of communal meals from the olden days, we can appreciate how all ages used to come together around one table and how welcoming the atmosphere seems to have been. Even the family horse might have been invited to join in. The modern condition appears so bleak by comparison. Rather than a family around the hearth, the emblematic image is of a single person with a tray on their knees in front of the television.当我们思考现代社会有哪些生活困难时，我们总是会想到用餐时间：现在，集体聚餐是多么的少见，家人聚在一起吃饭是多么的难得，并且科技又会怎样影响我们的用餐。在描绘古代集体聚餐的画作中，我们可以欣赏到男女老少聚在一起围着同一张桌子就座，这种氛围看起来非常温馨。甚至连家里的马都可以加入聚餐。相比之下，现代社会的用餐场景显得十分凄凉。最典型的画面不是一家人围坐在壁炉旁，而是一个坐在电视机前的人，膝盖上放着一个托盘。It was the Swanson Corporation, originally a poultry producer in Omaha, Nebraska, that launched the frozen TV dinner in 1954, the same year colour television was introduced in the U.S. It is a short distance in time, but a long way in spirit, from Norman Rockwell’s laughter-filled family Thanksgiving celebration to Swanson’s industrially produced turkey meal for one (‘Just heat and serve’). The modern world is surely a lonelier place than the one that preceded it. The question is why. It isn’t ultimately technology (cities, cars or screens) that have made us lonely; it’s an identifiable set of ideas. We have rendered ourselves lonely first and foremost because of certain stories we started to tell about what loneliness means.斯旺森公司最初是内布拉斯加州奥马哈市的一家禽类生产商，1954年，该公司推出了“电视餐”（又称冷冻餐），同年美国推出了彩色电视机。从诺曼·洛克威尔画作中充满欢笑的感恩节家庭庆祝活动到斯旺森公司批量生产的火鸡大餐（即热即食），其间的物理时间虽短，但人们的精神过程却很长。当然，相比于过去，现代社会是一个让人更加孤独的地方。问题来了，这是为什么呢？最终，我们感受到的孤独并不是由技术造成的（比如城市、汽车或荧幕），而是一组可以辨认出来的观念。我们之所以感到孤独，首先是因为我们开始讲述一些关于孤独的故事，关于孤独意味着什么。Most eras before our own knew that solitude did not - per se - have to be a sign of wretchedness. In the fourth century, the greatest saint of early Christianity, Saint Anthony, was said to have spent more than forty years by himself in Egypt’s Western desert, not saying a word, eating only bread and salt, and communing with God. So impressed were some with St Anthony’s life, they came to join him in the desert, and became collectively known as the Desert Fathers, and their philosophy of solitary piety would go on to have a decisive influence on the founding of monasteries. At the height of monasticism in the Middle Ages, a million people across Europe and north Africa chose to forego the bustle of family in order to dwell in some of the most rugged and remote terrain in the world, in silent contemplation of God.在我们之前的大多数时代，孤独本身并不一定是不幸的标志。据说在公元四世纪，早期基督教最伟大的圣徒安东尼，独自在埃及西部沙漠生活了四十多年，他一句话也不说，只吃面包和盐，终日与上帝交流。圣安东尼的生活让一些人感到钦佩，这些人来到沙漠和他一起生活，并被称为“沙漠教父”，他们孤独虔诚的信念对修道院的建立产生了决定性的影响。在中世纪独身修行主义的鼎盛时期，欧洲和北非有100万人选择放弃热闹的家庭，住到世界上一些最崎岖、最偏远的地方，在寂静中通过祈祷感受上帝的力量。However, in the wake of the Reformation and the destruction of the monasteries, solitary piety began to lose its prestige and recede as a practical option. Those who had previously lived alone at the tops of mountains were now encouraged to serve God by remaining in the community, finding a spouse, and starting a family. To this newly social religious impetus was added the influence of Romanticism, a movement of ideas that - with different ends in view - similarly encouraged people to give up on commitments to their own company. For the Romantics, happiness lay in identifying one exceptional soulmate to whom one could surrender one’s independence and with whom one might fuse mind and body. The Romantic movement turned solitude from a respectable choice to evidence of pathology.然而，随着宗教改革的兴起和修道院的毁坏，独自修行的神圣地位开始下降，不再是一个可行的选择。那些曾经独自隐居在山顶的人们，现在被劝导回归社群，结婚成家，以此来履行对上帝的侍奉。这一新的社会宗教推动力还有着浪漫主义的影响，浪漫主义是一种思想运动，虽然是出于不同的目的，但它也同样鼓励人们放弃对孤独的追求。对浪漫主义者来说，幸福就在于找到一个特别的灵魂伴侣，为了这个人你可以放弃自己的独立性，和这个人在一起能使你身心相融。浪漫主义运动将孤独从一种体面的选择转变为病理学证据。When the Beatles released Eleanor Rigby in 1966, the song that more than any other defined what loneliness meant for the modern age, it was at once clear why Eleanor was a pitiful figure. The famous face that she kept in a jar by the door had been intended for the enchanting partner that, like all single people, she must have longed to find. Only with romantic love could there be a decent life, so ran the philosophy of the song, of all the Beatles’ works and in fact, of every pop song ever written. Fail to fall completely in love and, Romanticism warned, one would soon enough be picking up rice in the church where a wedding had been or rivalling for strangeness the very odd Father Mackenzie, around whom there seemed so little of the glamour that had once attended the Desert Fathers.1966年，甲壳虫乐队发行了《埃莉诺·里格比》，这首歌比其他任何歌曲都更能诠释现代社会的孤独，这首歌让我们立刻明白了为什么埃莉诺是一个可怜的人。和其他单身的人一样，她也一定想找个伴侣，所以那副存放在门边罐子里的面具，正是她为了迷人的另一半所戴的。只有拥有浪漫的爱情，才能过上体面的生活，这是《埃莉诺·里格比》的核心思想，也是甲壳虫乐队的所有作品，甚至实际上是所有流行歌曲的核心思想。浪漫主义发出警告：人们如果不能完全陷入爱情，那么他们很快就要在刚刚举行过婚礼的教堂里捡拾米粒（意指孤独终老），或者变成古怪的麦肯齐神父那样的人，在他身上可是一点也看不到当年那些“沙漠教父”所拥有的魅力。The modern world not only made it mandatory to have a partner. It also made it feel essential to have a vibrant gang of friends and to enjoy seeing them regularly at parties. An empty diary has became an emblem of deformity. But there was not the slightest admission that it might, all things considered, be a bit of curious thing to stand in a crowded room full of status-panicked, often socially-anxious people, every one of them terrified of honesty or failure.现代社会不仅强迫人们要拥有伴侣，而且还要求人们拥有一帮充满活力的朋友，并且得享受和他们的定期聚会。不参加聚会成为了缺陷的象征。但是，现代社会并不承认从整体来看，那些在拥挤的房间里参加聚会的人都是些对地位感到恐慌、常常患有社交焦虑的人，他们都害怕诚实、害怕失败，这件事真的有点古怪。In 1921, Carl Jung - in his book Psychological Types - introduced the terms 'extraverted’ and ‘introverted’ to divide humanity. The former referred to a sort of person who could best realise their potential in the company of others; the latter were those who needed to move away from crowds in order to regain their integrity. ‘Everyone possesses both mechanisms,’ wrote Jung, but it was evident where the spirit of the modern age has resided. It’s been the achievement of a few, often ignored artists of the modern period to make a case for introversion, to try to coat solitude in glamour.1921年，卡尔·荣格在其《心理类型》一书中引入“外向”和“内向”两个词对人类进行划分。外向者指的是那种在与他人相处时能够充分发挥个人潜力的人；而内向者则是那些需要远离人群才能重新让自己恢复活力的人。荣格说，“每个人的性格都是内向与外向的综合”，但是现代社会的精神属于哪一种，却又显而易见。不过，少数经常被忽视的现代艺术家会以自己的方式为性格内向做辩护，试图让孤独看起来充满魅力。In a painting by the German artist Caspar David Friedrich, we are invited to trust that the lonely figure in the landscape is privy to insights that would be lost in the crowd down in the lowlands. The man has needed to travel up to the mountains in order to put the bluster and envy of humans in perspective; we should dare to follow him in his trajectory. Separated by many decades, Gwen John’s young woman doesn’t seem to belong to any official religion. But if there was one dedicated to the appreciation of solitude, then she would be one of its saintly and legendary figures. Her expression - kind, gentle, melancholy - is an advertisement for all that modernity has neglected in its promotion of active, cheery lives.德国艺术家卡斯帕·戴维·弗里德里希的一幅画告诉我们，站在风景中的那个孤独的人具有洞察力，这种洞察力是在低地上的人们所不具有的。画中人必须向高处攀登，到山上才能够正确地看待人世间的喧嚣和嫉妒。我们要敢于追随他的足迹。几十年后，格温·约翰画笔下的年轻女子看起来没有任何宗教色彩。不过，如果有哪种宗教崇尚孤独的话，那么她一定能成为这个宗教中的圣人或者传奇人物。她有着善良、温柔并且忧郁的表情，这是提倡积极愉快生活的现代社会所忽视的景象。Isolation isn’t a particular curse; it’s just where good people tend to end up. We should dare to believe that we are in solitude not because we are mentally ill but because we are noble of spirit. We don’t hate company; it’s just that we would prefer to stay home rather than accept the counterfeit tokens of community that are too often on offer.孤独并非是什么特殊的诅咒；这只是优秀的人最终的归宿而已。我们应该敢于相信，我们之所以孤独并不是因为有精神问题，而是因为我们精神高尚。我们不讨厌和别人相处，只是我们相比于接受过度频繁的所谓应酬，更喜欢呆在家里而已。The way to make people feel less alone is not to pull them out of their musings in the forest or in the diner, in the library or the desert and force them to go bowling. It’s to reassure them that being alone is no sign of failure.如果想让人们觉得不那么孤独，方法并不是把他们从森林、餐馆、图书馆或沙漠的沉思中拉出来，强迫他们去打保龄球。真正的方法是让他们相信，孤独并不意味着失败。To lessen modernity’s crisis of loneliness, we need for solitude to be rehabilitated and for singlehood to regain its dignity. There is nothing catastrophic about eating dinner, many dinners, on our own. Those Swanson TV dinners might have been capable of improvement, but it is ultimately far better to be eating a basic meal in peace than to be in a ballroom surrounded by false smiles and oppressive judgements. When we do so, we aren’t in fact on our own at all. We are, as modernity has failed to remind us, dining with some of the finest, most elevated spirits who have ever lived. We are, though ostensibly by ourselves, in the very best company.为了减轻现代社会的孤独危机，我们需要恢复孤独状态，恢复独处的尊严，恢复单身的尊严。独自吃饭，即便长期如此，也并非是件悲惨的事情。斯旺森的电视餐或许还有需要改进的地方，但是不管怎样，相比于在一个宴会厅里被虚假的笑容和压迫性的判断所包围，独自安静地吃顿简餐要好得多。当我们这样做的时候，我们实际上并不孤独。虽然现代社会没能提醒我们，但是我们正在和一些有史以来最优秀、最高尚的灵魂一起用餐。表面上我们看似孤身一人，但实际上我们却有着最好的陪伴。