The School of Life ---- 要是一輩子都找不到真愛怎麼辦?

[翻譯]

從踏入成人開始，我們就持續的在等待著真愛的出現。在可能得到真愛的機會之前，我們就已經本能的理解愛了。我們知道它能夠讓我們有這些感覺 : 能夠深刻的被對方理解而且也能夠被包容所有說出口的話，不用害怕自己說的話被批判或是被完全作賤。愛就像是兩人之間的小小陰謀，其他所有的人都太笨了不能夠理解我們的"愛"，而且愛就是我們生命的目的。愛的意思就是完完全全的喜歡那個人的每一個部分。而且那個人還完完全全的真心喜歡著你的每一部分，甚至到了你能夠毫無顧忌的跟他做所有事情的程度，即使你想要放一根手指進到他的嘴裡並叫他用力的咬下去。

我們想像著愛情就是人生裡面最好的部分 ---- 而我們也不完全是錯的。以愛之名，我們讓自己的生活產生巨大變化。我們比平常更頻繁的出門。我們買了特別華麗的衣服，我們開始在意自己的髮型並擔心自己站在不對的地方，我們讓自己喝下酒精濃度特別高的鮮豔雞尾酒，我們讓自己在凌晨時處在城裡不熟悉的地方，甚至是在我們知道不該去的人的房間裡，就因為至少在這之後就能夠推進兩人之間的關係。我們接受了跟那些特別不正經的人交往，就因為我們不想要被認為自己太固執或是很奇怪。

但愛並不永遠是正確的，甚至大多數的時候它都是錯的，但是我們一直讓自己打起精神並告訴自己最後事情總會變好的，就跟我們的伴侶屢次告訴我們的一樣。但是隨著時間的流逝，數十年過去了。我們讓自己身陷於問題重重的關係中，旁人認為我們看起來像是愛人，但是我們的關係就算再怎麼說不清就偏偏不是愛人。我們花了太多時間脫離現在的困境並為自己發聲。就在那個時間點，我們開始理解我們一直在跟甚麼樣的恐懼掙扎，而且那時應該是晚上，因為要在陽光下直視這種恐懼實在太困難了。到最後，我們理解了愛大概不是我們能擁有的，儘管我們已經使盡各種嘗試也曾有過那樣的夢想。

我們將會在不知道深深渴求的愛究竟是甚麼的時候就死去。而會如此的原因總是如此枯燥乏味。原因可能是因為我們過去的人生太過複雜，我們難以輕易信任別人，我們長太醜了，我們太缺乏自信，我們沒有遇到正確的人，我們的運氣太差了，任何的可能看起來都太冒險了。雖然我們已經嘗試過了，甚至比其他任何人都還要努力，我們就是沒有辦法達成。愛永遠不會是我們的。讓我們理解如此悲傷的真相的永遠是看似平淡無奇沒有傷害性的失望 : 也許有其中一場中途結束的約會(儘管在上甜點時看起來還很有希望)，或者是又一個沒有回電的人。就在這時我們對於浪漫愛情的渴望已經乾涸了，我們事前完全無法預知他們會這樣對待我們，而且他們肯定也不是故意的(很不幸的因此我們無法恨他們)，就因為他們是真真切切的對我們沒有興趣，他們讓我們理解了這個概念，現在這個概念讓我們僅有的理智快要消失了。

在我們閉緊的房門後，場面不是特別好看。感謝上帝我們能在門後造就了是非分明的世界並將那些我們想要忘記的記憶擋在門外。接下來會有好幾個小時非常不愉快又尷尬的崩潰 : 會有滿滿的淚水，痛罵所有的人事物，自我可憐並且不斷重複說著帶有復仇及恨意的句子 "這實在是太多了，我已經沒有辦法繼續忍受下去了，無論如何這已經完全超出了我所能承受，完全不公平。" 在晚上，我們將所有僅存下來平凡的小小希望全部都粉碎掉。我們要自己找到出路。這就只是大腦在自己擅自做著它的例行公事，努力的調整著存在於我們的希望與恐怖的現實之間的落差。我們開始平靜下來。畢竟我們是明白怎麼死亡的生物。我們一直以為我們不清楚怎麼殺死自己，但是我們總是會在盛怒之下想到這件事。我們可以理解所有的概念。我們告訴自己絕對不會讓自己淪陷於失去說話能力或切掉一段腸子，但是醫生告訴我們最後有可能會需要忍受鼻胃管進食跟所有的穢物袋，而且之後只能夠用顫抖的眼皮跟外界溝通。任何其他的方法都會比較好。所以我們必須要對缺乏愛所帶來的災難性後果進行處理。凌晨到了，稍微有點寒冷而且有點太冷了，但是天空的魚肚白讓我們清醒過來。我們整理了床鋪，將所有的絕望清掃掉，接著繼續過自己的生活。

有一些能夠緩解我們哀痛的事物。首先是非常激烈的抗拒，對整個宇宙罵"幹你娘"並幹譙所有攪動我們情感的敗類，它們不該存在在界上。還有某些的藝術作品，那種人生中曾和我們經歷過相同寂寞的藝術家們所製造出來的作品。他們在更先前的時光中就理解了我們現在的悲傷與寂寞，尤其是擅長描寫悲傷的藝術家們如夏爾皮耶波特萊爾，賈克莫來奧帕爾迪，費爾南多珮索阿，跟畢卡索，他們能夠表述我們小人物人生中再平凡不過的卻極強烈又難以抒發的悲痛，並向我們介紹最能保留自尊的懊悔。他們曾經也身處於相同的場合，儘管是用某種極其抽象的方法，他們仍然能夠告訴我們"我理解你的痛苦"。

而且還有友情，雖然它沒有辦法抹消我們的寂寞，但是它讓我們能夠有機會表達。我們雖然沒有辦法直接的幫助到彼此，不如說我們更像是一群在醫院中臨死的患者們圍成一圈，我們沒有辦法避免即將到來的死亡但是至少不是一個人面對。我們也理解了大多數的人的狀況 : 對理解甚少的我們而言像這樣的遭遇是很正常的。我們屬於所有人類可能經歷的苦難中不能小覷的小眾。

缺乏愛會將是我們最大的負擔，是從青春期到死亡時都無法避免的悲痛，一個原本應該要解決但是一直留在這裡的問題。在我們從來都沒有跟別人分享過的墓碑上會寫著 : 我們的愛情都沒有結果，而且我們非常渴望它們能善終。這句刻在墓碑上的話不僅會嚇到我們的孩子也會向未來和我們繼承了相同情緒的人保證你不是唯一一個。這句被轉換成文字的話是為了要說出對我們而言最真實的事情 : 我們渴望愛情 ---- 但是它從未到來。在最後我們用罕見的平靜誠實說出這句實話，並帶來心靈上的救贖。

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[單字]

1. censure: the act of expressing strong disapproval and criticism.
2. ossify: to become unwilling to consider new ideas or change your behaviour.
3. enmeshed: very involved in an unpleasant or complicated situation.
4. extricating: to escape from a difficult or embarrassing situation, or to help someone escape.
5. grapple: to fight or struggle with someone, holding them tightly.
6. banal: ordinary and not interesting, because of a lack of new or different ideas.
7. sombre: sad and serious.
8. innocuous: not offensive, dangerous, or harmful.
9. moralistic: with very strong beliefs about what is right and wrong, especially when this makes you judge other people's behaviour.
10. unedifying: unpleasant and embarrassing.
11. invariable: always happening in the same way, at the same time etc.
12. verdict: an official decision made in a court of law, especially about whether someone is guilty of a crime or how a death happened.
13. cataclysm: a violent or sudden event or change, such as a serious flood or earthquake.
14. ravaged: to damage something very badly.
15. incensed: very angry.
16. realist: a writer, painter etc who shows or describes things, especially unpleasant things, as they really are in life.
17. transcendental: transcendental experiences or ideas are beyond normal human understanding and experience.
18. induct: to officially give someone a job or position of authority, especially at a special ceremony.
19. benighted: having no knowledge or understanding.
20. parliament: the group of people who are elected to make a country's laws and discuss important national affairs.
21. epitaph: a short piece of writing on the stone over someone's grave.
22. redemptive: the state of being freed from the power of evil, believed by Christians to be made possible by Jesus Christ.

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[原文對照]

From the start of adulthood, we have been waiting. We understood love intuitively long before it was ever a practical possibility. We knew that it was bound up with a sense of being profoundly understood and finally able to say everything, without fear of judgment or censure. Love was a two-person conspiracy against everyone else too dumb or leaden to get 'it', the true nature of being alive. It had to with fancying someone totally. and the amazingness that they might fancy you back, to the extent that you could do anything with them, like rest a finger inside their mouth and ask them to bite it hard. 

We imagined from the first that love might be the best part of life ---- and we were not wrong. In the name of love, we put ourselves in extraordinary situations. We went out far more than we would have wanted. We bought fancy clothes, we thought about our hair and worried about our spots, we drank intensely coloured cocktails, we ended up at small hours in alien parts of town, in the bedrooms of people we knew weren't right but that seemed at least in some way to be an advanced on the cause. We accepted dates with people we knew were problematic because we wanted not to ossify or grow too peculiar. 

It wasn't always right, in fact, it was mostly always wrong, but we kept our spirits up and told ourselves it would eventually be OK, as they kindly assured us it would. But time passed; decades went by. We got enmeshed in some very troubling situations that looked like love from the outside but were anything but. We spent far too long extricating ourselves and finding our voice. And at a certain point, we started to apprehend something whose terror we are still grappling with, probably late at night, because such things aren't easy to look at in daylight; the probability love isn't, after all, despite our efforts and insights, ever going to come right for us.

We are going to die without ever having known the love we so long for. The reasons are multiple and in their ways entirely banal. Because our past is too complicated; our lack of trust too deep; we are too ugly; we are too unconfident; we don't meet the right people; our luck is too slim; hope feels too risky. Though we try, harder than we try at anything else, we can't do this thing. It won't work out for us. The ambassador for this sombre grand truth might be an objectively rather innocuous disappointment: perhaps one more date that didn't in the end ---- despite a very hopeful stage around dessert ---- go as it should, or one more person who didn't call back. They, the angel of romantic death, couldn't have known what they were doing to us, and certainly didn't mean to (we can't hate them for a moment, unfortunately), but through their lack of desire, they initiated us into an idea which now threatens to blow our sanity.

Behind closed doors, the scenes aren't pretty. Thank goodness for privacy to shield a moralistic world from scenes that need to be forgotten. There will be hours of the most unedifying desperation: tears, bitter denunciations of everyone and everything, self-pitying and vengeful rants" this is too much, I can't take it any more, this is unfair beyond measure. In the night, we smash through the crash barriers of ordinary hope. We're going to do away with ourselves. They'll regret us, they'll miss us now. But we won't, of course, do anything silly. It's just the mind doing it's normal work, adjusting to yet another yawning gap between the way we would want things to be and the horrid way they are. We settle. We are ---- after all---- creatures who know how to die. We think we don't know how to, but we invariably do, whatever the fierce rage. We can digest pretty much any verdict. We tell ourselves we'd never endure not being able to speak or losing our bowels, but then the doctors tell us what has to be and we put up with a feeding tube and a bag and being able to communicate only through a quivering eyelid. It's always better than the alternative.So of course we deal with the cataclysmic lack of love. Dawn comes, chilly and severe and yet reassuring in its sober bleakness. We make the bed, clear away the despair, and get on.

There are a few consolations. First and foremost, a ravaged incensed defiance, a fuck you to the universe and all those who peddle sentimental nonsense that doesn't fit our reality. A certain kind of artworks too, the sort created by unflinching genius realist who went through as much loneliness as we have, who understood our sadness ahead of time, grief-stricken masters like Baudelaire and Leopardi, Pessoa and Pascal, who can express our pretty domestic sorrow in mighty transcendental terms and induct us to the most dignified kind of regret. They were there too and, in the most abstract accomplished ways, tell us 'I know'.

And we have friendship, not the kind that obliterates the loneliness, but that allows us to commune around it. We can't help each other directly, we're more like a group of the dying in a hospice talking circle who won't be able to eradicate the end but now they are at least not alone with it. We get better too at understanding statistics: that this is normal for a benighted group of us. We belong to an important minority party in the parliament of human suffering.

Lovelessness will have been our major burden, a grief that endured from adolescence to the end, a problem that was meant to go away and never did. On our secret gravestone, it should say: Love didn't work out for them, and how they longed that it might: an epitaph to frighten children and reassure our emotional successors. What was meant to be a phase turned into the truest thing about us: that we longed for love ---- and that it never came, a truth all the more redemptive for being expressed at last with a rare calm unflinching honesty.

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[原影片網址]

頻道: The School of Life

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUtBj2PY0gQ

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[我想說的話]

歡迎大家使用我翻譯的內容到原影片做字幕! 他們的影片真的是結構非常精緻的小品文，但是因為載體是影片所以要找內容可能會有點困難，只能夠使用標題尋找----而且還必須看完整支影片，如果看完卻發現沒有自己想要的內容應該會蠻失望的。如果只是想要看到一兩句或一兩段可以安慰自己的句子，用文章的形式比較合適，加上這些影片的內容都很合適在接下來的人生中遇到挫折時可以回顧，所以就打成文章了。打這篇花了超多時間，當然也遇見了很多英文單字，還常常搞不清楚我看到哪一行，另外也有很多省略或是加入字詞為了翻的更順，可能中英對照會有點困難，但是每一句確實都有被翻到的。這個頻道是我在前陣子心煩意亂的時候看的，不僅說到我心坎裡，還真實的有幫助到我，加上一部只有五分鐘，非常適合一部接著一部的看下去，也隨時都可以中斷。原影片有英文字幕，所以不用刻意開影片跟文章中的原文對照喔，想要練英聽的人可以去試試看。其中我最受用的內容是童年創傷的部分，這頻道裡面有許多影片都是在講這件事情，接下來我會陸續放上內容，希望能幫助到需要被幫助的人。

我並不擁有這部影片。

我並不擁有原文創作權。