又一篇好文来啦，请阁下细细品尝。跳舞是人类最重要并且最有益的活动之一，不必像专业舞者，疯狂乱舞可能才是我们真正想做的事，不仅有利于身体锻炼，对改善我们的精神状态非常重要。疯狂乱舞让我们放下对正常自我的控制，抛弃手脚的协调，忘我到与宇宙融合，忘情地完全地展露自己的傻瓜属性，使我们成为自己更好的朋友，成为别人更富同情心的伙伴。One of the strangest but also most intriguing and redemptive things that humans get up to, in almost any culture one cares to study, is occasionally to gather in large groups, bathe in the rhythmic sounds of drums and flutes, organs and guitars, chants and cries, and move their arms and legs about in a complicated and frenzied way, losing themselves in the bewilderment of a dance.几乎在任何一种人们想要研究的文化中，人类最奇怪但又最有趣并最有救赎感的事情之一就是偶尔聚集成群，沐浴在鼓点、长笛、风琴和吉他的声音里，听着人们吟唱圣歌、大声叫喊，以一种复杂而疯狂的方式移动他们的胳膊和腿，在混乱的舞蹈中迷失自我。 Dancing has a claim to be considered among the most essential and salutary activities we ever partake in. Not for nothing did Nietzsche, a painfully inhibited figure in day-to-day life, declare ‘I would believe only in a God who could dance’ (a comment that stands beside his equally apodictic pronouncement: ‘Without music, life would be a mistake.’)跳舞完全有资格被认为是人们参与过的最重要并且最有益的活动之一。难怪弗里德里希·尼采，这个生活在痛苦和压抑中的人，说“我只相信会跳舞的上帝”（这句话可以媲美他的另一个观点：“如果没有音乐，生活就是一个错误”）。But dancing is, at the same time, an activity that many of us, arguably, those of us who might most need to do it, are powerfully inclined to resist and deep down to fear. We stand on the side of the dance floor, appalled at the possibility of being called to join in, we attempt to make our excuses the moment the music begins, we take pains that no one will ever, ever see our hips unite with a beat. The point here is definitely not to learn to dance like an expert, it is to remember that dancing badly is something we might actually want to do and, equally importantly, something that we already well know how to do to – at least to the level of appalling proficiency we need to possess in order to derive key benefits.但与此同时，对我们中的许多人来说，可以说是对我们中最需要跳舞的人来说，跳舞是他们强烈抵制并深深恐惧的一项活动。我们站在舞池边上，为可能会收到的跳舞邀请而担惊受怕，从音乐开始的瞬间，我们就试图找借口拒绝跳舞，我们竭尽所能不让别人发现我们在随着节拍舞动。这里的重点绝对不是像专业舞者一样跳舞，要记住，乱舞可能才是我们真正想做的事，并且同样重要的是，乱舞是我们早已擅长的事——至少达到了非常熟练的水平。为了获得重要的好处，我们需要学会乱舞。In almost all cultures and at all points of history (except oddly enough perhaps our own), dancing has been widely and publicly understood as a form of bodily exercise with something very important to contribute to our mental state. Dancing has had nothing to do with dancing well, being young or revealing one’s stylishness. Summed up sharply, we might put it like this: dancing has been valued for allowing us to transcend our individuality and for inducing us to merge into a larger, more welcoming and more redemptive whole. 在几乎所有的文化和历史上（除了特别奇怪的文化和历史，或许我们的就是），大众都广泛地认为舞蹈是一种身体锻炼的形式，对改善我们的精神状态非常重要。跳舞这件事和跳得好不好、跳舞的人是不是年轻以及他们是否时尚都没有任何关系。我们可以这样总结：舞蹈之所以受重视，是因为它允许我们超越个体的存在，引导我们融入一个更大、更受欢迎、更有救赎感的整体。The Ancient Greeks were, for the most part, committed worshippers of the rational mind. Their foremost God, Apollo, was the embodiment of cool reason and disciplined wisdom. However, the Greeks understood – with prescience – that a life devoted only to the serenity of the mind could be at grave risk of desiccation and loneliness. And so they balanced their concern with Apollo with regular festivals in honour of a quite different God, Dionysus, a god that drank wine, stayed up late, loved music – and danced. 古希腊人在很大程度上是理性思维的忠实崇拜者，对古希腊人来说，最重要的神是阿波罗，他是冷静理性和自律智慧的化身。然而，希腊人有先见之明，他们知道一个人如果只专注于心灵的宁静，那么就会面临无聊和孤独的风险。因此，他们通过定期的节日来纪念一位完全不同的神，从而找到了与阿波罗关系的平衡，这位就是酒神狄俄尼索斯，他喜欢喝酒、熬夜、热爱音乐和舞蹈。The Greeks knew that the more rational we usually are, the more important it is – at points – to fling ourselves around to the wild rhythms of pipes and drums. At the festivals of Dionysius, held in Athens in March every year, even the most venerable and dignified members of the community would join into unrestrained dancing that, irrigated by generous amounts of red wine, lasted until dawn. 希腊人知道，人通常越是理性，在某些时候，就越有必要跟随管乐和鼓乐的狂野节奏进行舞蹈。每年三月，在雅典举行的狄俄尼索斯节上，即便是最德高望重的人也会加入到狂欢的舞蹈人群中，这群人豪饮红酒，狂欢到黎明。A word often used to describe such dancing is ‘ecstatic’. It’s a telling term. Ecstatic comes from two Latin words: ex (meaning apart) and stasis (meaning standing) – indicating a state in which we are symbolically ‘standing apart’ from ourselves, that is, separated from the dense, detailed and self-centered layers of our identities which we normally focus on and obsess over and reconnected with something more primal and more necessary: our common human nature. We remember, through a period of ecstatic dancing, what it’s like to belong, to be part of something larger than ourselves, to be indifferent to our own egos – to be reunited with humanity.一个经常用来描述这种舞蹈的词是“狂喜”，这是个非常生动的写照。这个词来源于两个拉丁语词汇：ex（指的是离开）stasis（指的是静止）——表明我们的精神象征性地与身体“分离”的状态，与难懂、复杂并且利己的自我分离开来，我们通常专注痴迷于这样的自我。在“分离”状态中，我们与更原始、更必要的东西重新建立联系：我们共同的人性。通过一段欣喜若狂的舞蹈，我们能够记起什么是归属感，记起成为比自己更大的事物的一份子是什么感觉，并且记起放下自我，重新融入人类群体的感觉。This aspiration hasn’t entirely disappeared in modernity – but it’s been assigned to very particular and woefully selective ambassadors: the disco and the rave. These associations point us in unhelpful directions: towards being cool, a certain age, wearing particular clothes, liking a certain kind of often rather arduous music. Such markers of an elite, knowing crowd reinforce, rather than dismantle, our tendencies towards isolation and loneliness.在现代社会中，这种渴望并没有完全消失，不过它被分配给了非常特殊但却选择失当的事物：迪斯科和狂欢晚会。这些联想把我们引向无益的方向：追求酷炫、特定年龄、特殊服装，并且喜欢特定的音乐，通常是令人难以忍受的那种。这些精英人群的标志没有消除我们孤立和孤独的倾向，反而却加强了这些倾向。So we need urgently to recover a sense of the universal benefit and impact of dancing. But the greatest enemy of this is fear, and in particular, the fear – as we may put it – that we will look ‘like an idiot’ in front of people whose opinion might matter. The way through this is not to be told that we will in fact appear really rather fine and, with a bit of effort, very far from idiotic. Quite the opposite, we should accept with good grace that the whole point of redemptive, consoling, cathartic communal dancing is a chance to look like a total, thoroughgoing idiot, the bigger the better, in the company of hundreds of other equally and generously publicly idiotic fellow humans.因此，我们迫切需要恢复对舞蹈的认识：舞蹈拥有普遍益处和广泛影响。不过，关于跳舞，我们最大的敌人是恐惧，尤其是我们常用的理由：我们跳舞的话，会在话语权很大的人面前看起来像个傻瓜。解决这种恐惧的方法并不是告诉自己实际上我们跳得还不错，并且只要我们再努力一点的话，舞姿看起来就不傻了。恰恰相反：我们应该欣然接受这样的观点，即有救赎感、有安慰性、并且可以宣泄的集体舞蹈是一个机会，可以让你看起来像一个彻头彻尾的傻瓜，让你与成百上千个同样在公众面前大方跳舞的傻瓜同胞为伴，人越多越好。We spend a good deal of our time fearing – as if it were a momentous calamity that we didn’t even dare to contemplate in daylight – that we might be idiots and holding back from a host of important aspirations and ambitions as a result. 我们花了很多时间去害怕，仿佛这是一场我们甚至不敢在光天化日之下细想的重大灾难——害怕我们可能会变成傻瓜。这造成我们在许多重要的抱负和志向面前退缩。We should shake ourselves from such inhibitions by loosening our hold on any remaining sense of dignity and by accepting frankly that we are – by nature – of course, completely idiotic, great sacks of foolishness that cry in the night, bump into doors, fart in the bath and kiss people’s noses by mistake – but far from being shameful and isolating, this idiocy is in fact a basic feature of our nature that unites us immediately with everyone else on the planet. We are idiots now, we were idiots then, and we will be idiots again in the future. There is no other option for a human to be.我们应该通过放松自己紧紧握着的自尊感，坦率地接受我们本来就是傻瓜的事实，从而让自己摆脱这种压抑。我们就是一群傻瓜，会在夜里哭泣、会撞到门上、会在浴缸里放屁、会不小心亲到别人的鼻子——但是这些愚蠢的行为不足以感到羞耻或孤立自己。事实上，犯傻是地球上所有人本性中都存在的一个基本特征。我们现在会犯傻，过去会犯傻，我们以后还会再次犯傻。对于人类来说，没有其他选择。Dancing provides us with a primordial occasion on which this basic idiocy can be publicly displayed and communally celebrated. On a dance floor filled with comparable idiots, we can at last delight in our joint foolishness; we can throw off our customary shyness and reserve and fully embrace our dazzling strangeness and derangement. An hour of frantic jigging should decisively shake us from any enduring belief in our normalcy or seriousness. 舞蹈为我们提供了一个原始的场合，在这个场合，这种基本的犯傻行为可以公开展示，并且会得到大家的赞美。在一个满是傻瓜的舞池里，我们终于可以为大家一起犯傻感到高兴了。我们可以摆脱惯常的害羞和矜持，完全接受自己令人眼花缭乱的陌生感和疯狂。一个小时的疯狂摇摆应该会彻底动摇我们在正常或严肃状态下所有的长期信仰。Whenever we have the chance to invite others around, especially very serious people by whom we’re intimidated or whom we might be seeking to impress, we should remember the divine Dionysus and dare, with his wisdom in mind, to put on “Dancing Queen”, “I’m So Excited” or “We Are Family”. Knowing that we have Nietzsche on side, we should let rip with a playlist that includes “What a Feeling”, “Dance with Somebody” and “Hey Jude”. 每当我们有机会邀请其他人，尤其是那些严肃的人，可能是严肃到让我们害怕或者我们想给对方留下深刻印象的人，我们应该想起酒神狄俄尼索斯，利用他的智慧，大胆地随着音乐起舞，比如Dancing Queen、I’m So Excited或We are Family。由于知道我们有尼采为伴，所以我们应该拥有这样一个歌单，包含：What a Feeling、Dance with Somebody以及Hey Jude。We should lose command of our normal rational pilot selves, abandon our arms to the harmonies, throw away our belief in a ‘right’ way to dance, build the intensities of our movements to a frenzy – and merge with the universe or at least its more immediate representatives, our fellow new mad friends, before whom the disclosure of idiocy will be total.我们应该放下对正常自我的控制，抛弃手脚的协调，扔掉我们对“正确”舞蹈的信仰，疯狂地舞蹈，忘我到与宇宙融合，或者至少融入到在舞池中忘情跳舞的新朋友当中，在他们面前，完全地展露自己的傻瓜属性。Through a dance, we glimpse a huge project: how we might more regularly experience ourselves as vulnerable in front of other people in order to become better friends to ourselves and more generous and compassionate companions to others. The true potential of dancing has for too long been abandoned by thoughtful people to stylish ambassadors who have forgotten the elemental seriousness of allowing themselves to be and to look idiotic. We should reclaim the ecstatic dance and uninhibited boogie-woogie for their deepest universal purposes: to reconnect, reassure and reunite us.通过跳舞，我们看到了一个宏大的主题，为了成为自己更好的朋友，成为别人更慷慨、更富同情心的伙伴，我们何不更经常地在别人面前展现自己的缺点，进行乱舞呢。长期以来，舞蹈的真正潜力被有思想的人所抛弃，被时尚人士所遗忘，他们忘记了让自己犯傻并且看起来像个傻瓜是人的基本属性。我们应该重新找回狂喜的乱舞和不受压抑的布吉伍吉舞，找回他们最深刻的通用目的：安抚人们，让人们重新联系在一起。By The School of Life译：Fay、良哥