活在自己的世界

 多年以前，为了检测我的领导力，一个资深人力资源方面的朋友给我做了一个据说是相当专业的测试。一个星期以后，朋友告诉我，你不适合当领导。我们聊了半个小时左右，他对我评价中有一句话我印象最深：你活在自己的世界里。

他以为我会感觉受到批评和屈辱，所以，又安慰了我好久。其实不然，我很感谢他，因为我打心眼里为自己高兴：是的，我就是活在自己的世界里，活在一个不现实的世界，而我的理想就是活在书中。

今天读了这篇英语文章，自己的感想随心应和书中的语言。先和大家分享几句：

But the trains sped by and the planes tool off without me, so I wandered the world through books.

火车驶过、飞机起落，我在原地徘徊，可书籍带我漫游世界。

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

我家住在费城郊外一处舒适的地方。但我实际上生活在另一个地方，生活在书页之中。

But there was always a part of me, the best part of me, at home, within some book laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people were, the trees that moved in the wind, the still, dark waters.

但我内心中的一部分，最美好的一部分，总是呆在家里，呆在平铺在桌上的书本里。书里有虚拟幻化的人物，有风中摇曳的树木，有幽深平静的水池。

It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.

事实证明，年少的我梦想插翅飞翔，不过是想让心灵翩翩起舞。书籍就是飞机，就是火车，就是道路。书籍就是目的地，就是旅程，就是我的家园。

文章很美，我言辞太钝，大家读原文吧：

 

What’s Right About Reading

By Anna Quindlen

 

Ever since I was very small, I’ve had the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. I remember watching trains click by—a blur of gray, the diamond glitter of sunshine on glass—and wishing I was aboard. I remember going to the airport with my parents when I was 13 and reading the destinations board, seeing all the places I could go: San Juan, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, London.

 

But the trains sped by and the planes tool off without me, so I wandered the world through books. I went to St. Petersburg before the fall of the czar with Anna Karenina. I went to Tara and Manderley and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses with their high ceilings land high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind, Rebecca and Jane Eyre.

 

My home was in a pleasant place outside of Philadelphia. But I really lived, truly lived, somewhere else. I lived within the covers of books.

 

There was a club chair in our house, a big one, sitting in the living room corner to the fireplace, with a table next to it. In my mind, I am flung into it, reading, with my skinny legs slung over one arm. “It’s a beautiful day,” my mother is saying. She said the always—autumn, spring, even when there was fresh snowfall. “All your friends are outside.”

 

It was true; they always were. Sometimes I went out with them, coaxed into the street, out into the fields, down by the creek, drawn by the lure of what I knew intuitively was normal childhood. I have clear memories of lifting rocks at the creek to search for crayfish, of laying pennies on the tracks of the trolley and running to fetch them, flattened, when the trolley had passed.

 

But there was always a part of me, the best part of me, at home, within some book laid flat on the table to mark my place, its imaginary people were, the trees that moved in the wind, the still, dark waters.

 

In books I traveled, not only to other worlds, but into my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be, what I might aspire to, and what I might dare to dream about my world and myself. In the years since those days in my club chair, I have learned that I was not alone in my devotion to books, although at the time it seemed I was the only child anyone knew who preferred reading a book to ice skating or playing kick-the-can.

 

By the time I became on adult, I realized that the world was often as blind to the joy of reading as my girlfriends has been when they banged on our screen door, begging me to put down the book—“that stupid book,” they usually called it.

 

While we pay lip service to virtues of reading, there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much as lazy, as dreamers, as people who need to grow up and come outside where real life is, as people think themselves superior in their separateness.

 

There is something in the American character that is suspicious of reading as anything more than a tool for advancement. America is also a nation that prizes sociability and community, believes that alone leads to loner, loner to loser. Any sort of turning away human contact is suspect.

 

We have a get-out-and-going ethos at the heart of our national character. The images of American Presidents that stick are those that portray them as men of action: Theodore Roosevelt on safari, John Kennedy throwing a football around with his brothers. There may only be Lincoln to give solace to the inveterate reader, a solitary figure sitting by the fire who believed that books held the knowledge he so eagerly sought. “My best friend’s the man who’ll get me one,” he once said.

 

Perhaps at base we readers are dissatisfied people, yearning to be elsewhere, to live through words in a way we cannot live directly through life. Perhaps we are the world’s great nomads, if only in our minds. I travel today in the way of traveling as a child—on airplanes and in trains. And the irony is that I don’t care for it very much. I am the sort of person who prefers to stay at home, surrounded by family, friends, familiarity, books. The only thing I do like about traveling is the time on airplanes spent reading.

 

It turns out that when my younger self thought of taking wing, she wanted only to let her spirit soar. Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.