我已经忘记如何阅读 - 环球邮报

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我已经忘记如何阅读 - 环球邮报

原文标题：I have forgotten how to read

Author of Solitude: A Singular Life in a Crowded World and The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in an Age of Constant Connection.

孤独》的作者：拥挤世界中的奇特生活》和《缺席的终结》：在一个不断连接的时代，重拾我们所失去的东西。

Turning, one evening, from my phone to a book, I set myself the task of reading a single chapter in one sitting. Simple. But I couldn't. There was nothing wrong with my eyes. No stroke or disease clouded my way. Yet – if I'm being honest – the failure was also not a surprise.

一天晚上，我从手机上翻开一本书，给自己定下的任务是一口气读完一个章节。很简单。但是我做不到。我的眼睛没有任何问题。没有中风或疾病遮挡我的道路。然而--如果我是诚实的--这个失败也不是一个惊喜。

Paragraphs swirled; sentences snapped like twigs; and sentiments bled out. The usual, these days. I drag my vision across the page and process little. Half an hour later, I throw down the book and watch some Netflix.

段落旋转；句子像树枝一样折断；感情流露。这些天来都是如此。我在书页上拖动我的视线，几乎没有处理。半小时后，我扔下书，看起了Netflix。

Out for dinner with another writer, I said, "I think I've forgotten how to read."

与另一位作家出去吃饭时，我说："我想我已经忘记了如何阅读。"

"Yes!" he replied, pointing his knife. "Everybody has."

"是的！"他回答，指着他的刀。"每个人都有。"

"No, really," I said. "I mean I actually can't do it any more."

"不，真的，"我说。"我的意思是我实际上不能再这样做了。"

He nodded: "Nobody can read like they used to. But nobody wants to talk about it."

他点了点头："没有人能够像以前那样阅读。但没有人愿意谈论这个问题。"

For good reason. It's embarrassing. Especially for someone like me. I'm supposed to be an author – words are kind of my job. Without reading, I'm not sure who I am. So, it's been unnerving to realize: I have forgotten how to read – really read – and I've been refusing to talk about it out of pride.

理由很充分。这很令人尴尬。特别是对于像我这样的人。我应该是一个作家--文字是我的一种工作。没有阅读，我就不知道自己是谁。因此，意识到这一点让我很不安：我已经忘记了如何阅读--真正的阅读--而我一直拒绝谈论这个问题，因为我很自豪。

Books were once my refuge. To be in bed with a Highsmith novel was a salve. To read was to disappear, become enrobed in something beyond my own jittery ego. To read was to shutter myself and, in so doing, discover a larger experience. I do think old, book-oriented styles of reading opened the world to me – by closing it. And new, screen-oriented styles of reading seem to have the opposite effect: They close the world to me, by opening it.

书籍曾经是我的避难所。躺在床上看一本海史密斯的小说是一种救赎。读书是为了消失，是为了超越我自己紧张的自我而沉浸其中。阅读是为了关闭自己，并在这样做的过程中发现更大的经验。我确实认为旧的、以书为导向的阅读方式向我打开了世界--通过关闭它。而新的、面向屏幕的阅读方式似乎有相反的效果：他们通过打开世界，向我关闭世界。

In a very real way, to lose old styles of reading is to lose a part of ourselves.

以一种非常真实的方式，失去旧的阅读方式就是失去我们自己的一部分。

For most of modern life, printed matter was, as the media critic Neil Postman put it, "the model, the metaphor, and the measure of all discourse." The resonance of printed books – their lineal structure, the demands they make on our attention – touches every corner of the world we've inherited. But online life makes me into a different kind of reader – a cynical one. I scrounge, now, for the useful fact; I zero in on the shareable link. My attention – and thus my experience – fractures. Online reading is about clicks, and comments, and points. When I take that mindset and try to apply it to a beaten-up paperback, my mind bucks.

在现代生活的大部分时间里，正如媒体评论家尼尔-波兹曼所说，印刷品是 "所有话语的模型、隐喻和衡量标准"。印刷书籍的共鸣--它们的线条结构，它们对我们注意力的要求--触及我们所继承的世界的每个角落。但网络生活使我成为一个不同类型的读者--一个愤世嫉俗的人。现在，我在寻找有用的事实；我在寻找可分享的链接。我的注意力--也就是我的经验--断裂了。在线阅读是关于点击、评论和积分。当我带着这种心态，试图把它应用于一本破旧的平装书时，我的思想就会崩溃。

Author Nicholas Carr ( The Shallows) writes that, "digital technologies are training us to be more conscious of and more antagonistic toward delays of all sorts." We become, "more intolerant of moments of time that pass without the arrival of new stimuli." So, I throw down the old book, craving mental Tabasco sauce. And yet not every emotion can be reduced to an emoji, and not every thought can be conveyed via tweet.

作家尼古拉斯-卡尔（《浅滩》）写道，"数字技术正在训练我们对各种延迟有更多的意识和更多的对立"。我们变得 "更加不能容忍没有新刺激到来的时间时刻"。因此，我扔下旧书，渴望精神上的塔巴斯科酱。然而，并不是每一种情绪都可以被简化为一个表情符号，也不是每一种思想都可以通过推特来传达。

Even Eric Schmidt, the erstwhile chief executive of Google, was anxious about the mental landscape he was helping to cultivate. He once told Charlie Rose: "I worry that the level of interrupt, the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information … is in fact affecting cognition. It is affecting deeper thinking. I still believe that sitting down and reading a book is the best way to really learn something. And I worry that we're losing that." In fact, there's a great deal of reporting now – from neuroscientists such as Susan Greenfield and Gary Small – to show that digital native brains do engage in concretely different ways from those of previous generations. Spend 10 hours a day staring at screens and – yes – your synapses will adapt.

即使是曾经的谷歌首席执行官埃里克-施密特（Eric Schmidt），也对他正在帮助培养的精神面貌感到焦虑。他曾经告诉查理-罗斯："我担心中断的程度，那种压倒性的快速信息......事实上正在影响认知。它正在影响更深入的思考。我仍然相信，坐下来读一本书是真正学到东西的最好方法。我担心我们正在失去这一点。"事实上，现在有大量的报告--来自苏珊-格林菲尔德和加里-斯莫尔等神经科学家--表明数字原生大脑的参与方式确实与前几代人的方式不同。每天花10个小时盯着屏幕，--是的--你的突触会适应。

For a long time, I convinced myself that a childhood spent immersed in old-fashioned books would insulate me somehow from our new media climate – that I could keep on reading and writing in the old way because my mind was formed in pre-internet days. But the mind is plastic – and I have changed. I'm not the reader I was.

长期以来，我说服自己，沉浸在老式书籍中的童年会在某种程度上使我与我们的新媒体环境绝缘--我可以继续以老方式阅读和写作，因为我的思想是在前互联网时代形成的。但思想是可塑的--我已经改变了。我已经不是以前的那个读者了。

When we become cynical readers – when we read in the disjointed, goal-oriented way that online life encourages – we stop exercising our attention. We stop reading with a sense of faith that some larger purpose may be served. This doesn't mean we're reading less – not at all. In fact, we live in a text-gorged society in which the most fleeting thought is a thumb-dash away from posterity. What's at stake is not whether we read. It's how we read. And that's something we'll have to each judge for ourselves; it can't be tallied by Statistics Canada. For myself: I know I'm not reading less, but I also know I'm reading worse.

当我们成为愤世嫉俗的读者时--当我们以网络生活所鼓励的不连贯、以目标为导向的方式阅读时--我们就不再锻炼我们的注意力。我们不再怀着对某种更大目的的信心去阅读。这并不意味着我们的阅读量减少--完全不是。事实上，我们生活在一个文本充斥的社会中，在这个社会中，最转瞬即逝的想法与后人相差无几。现在的关键不是我们是否阅读。而是我们如何阅读。这是我们每个人都必须自己判断的事情；它不能由加拿大统计局来统计。就我自己而言：我知道我的阅读量没有减少，但我也知道我的阅读量在下降。

It's no wonder why. Spend your life flashing between points of transitory data and a dog-eared novel begins to feel interminable.

这也难怪。将你的生活在短暂的数据点之间闪转腾挪，而一本狗皮膏药的小说开始感觉无休止。

Our sense of time has always been warped by our technologies. Church bells segmented the day into intervals. Factory whistles ushered workers. But the current barrage of alerts and pings leaves us more warped than ever. I've been trained not just to expect disruption, but to demand it. Back in 1890, William James wrote in The Principles of Psychology that "our sense of time seems subject to the law of contrast." No kidding.

我们的时间感总是被我们的技术所扭曲。教堂的钟声将一天的时间分割成若干段。工厂的口哨声为工人们带来了福音。但是，目前一连串的警报和铃声让我们比以往更加扭曲。我已经被训练成不仅要期待干扰，而且要要求干扰。早在1890年，威廉-詹姆斯在《心理学原理》中写道："我们的时间感似乎受制于对比法则"。不是开玩笑。

Marshall McLuhan believed that every technology "has the power to numb human awareness during the period of its first interiorization." And it seems we have digested our devices; they can numb us, now, to the pleasure of patience. They can numb our enjoyment of that older literary experience.

马歇尔-麦克卢汉（Marshall McLuhan）认为，每一种技术 "都有能力在其首次内部化期间麻木人类意识"。而我们似乎已经消化了我们的设备；它们可以让我们麻木，现在，对耐心的乐趣。它们可以麻木我们对那种古老的文学经验的享受。

The other day, I was spending time with a young niece – still a toddler – while she watched videos on her iPad. She was working her way through a YouTube playlist – in each video, a pair of hands opened a Kinder Surprise and assembled the toy inside. Thinking I was doing her a favour, I made the video full-screen. But this sent my niece into a panic. "Little TV!" she insisted. "Not big TV!" She needed the smaller screen format so as to monitor the lineup of videos still to come. Focusing, even for a minute, on a single video was no good. She needed the panoply, the stream, the comfort of attending entertainments.

有一天，我和一个仍在学步的小侄女呆在一起，她在iPad上看视频。她正在观看一个YouTube播放列表--在每个视频中，一双手都打开了一个健达惊喜，并组装了里面的玩具。我以为我是在帮她的忙，就把视频做成了全屏。但这让我的侄女陷入了恐慌。"小电视！"她坚持说。"不是大电视！"她需要较小的屏幕格式，以便监视仍将到来的视频阵容。专注于一个视频，哪怕只有一分钟，也是不行的。她需要全景，需要流，需要参加娱乐活动的舒适感。

The suggestion that, in a few generations, our experience of media will be reinvented shouldn't surprise us. We should, instead, marvel at the fact we ever read books at all. Great researchers such as Maryanne Wolf and Alison Gopnik remind us that the human brain was never designed to read. Rather, elements of the visual cortex – which evolved for other purposes – were hijacked in order to pull off the trick. The deep reading that a novel demands doesn't come easy and it was never "natural." Our default state is, if anything, one of distractedness. The gaze shifts, the attention flits; we scour the environment for clues. (Otherwise, that predator in the shadows might eat us.) How primed are we for distraction? One famous study found humans would rather give themselves electric shocks than sit alone with their thoughts for 10 minutes. We disobey those instincts every time we get lost in a book.

几代人之后，我们对媒体的体验将被重塑，这种说法不应该让我们感到惊讶。相反，我们应该惊叹于我们曾经读过书的事实。Maryanne Wolf和Alison Gopnik等伟大的研究人员提醒我们，人类的大脑从来就不是为了阅读而设计的。相反，视觉皮层的元素--为其他目的而进化--被劫持了，以便完成这个把戏。小说所要求的深度阅读并不容易，而且它从来就不是 "自然 "的。我们的默认状态是，如果有的话，就是分心的状态。我们的视线转移，注意力飘忽；我们在环境中寻找线索。(否则，阴影中的捕食者可能会吃掉我们。）我们对分心有多大的准备？一项著名的研究发现，人类宁愿给自己电击，也不愿意独自坐在那里思考10分钟。每当我们在书中迷失时，我们就会违背这些本能。

Literacy has only been common (outside the elite) since the 19th century. And it's hardly been crystallized since then. Our habits of reading could easily become antiquated. The writer Clay Shirky even suggests that we've lately been "emptily praising" Tolstoy and Proust. Those old, solitary experiences with literature were "just a side-effect of living in an environment of impoverished access." In our online world, we can move on. And our brains – only temporarily hijacked by books – will now be hijacked by whatever comes next.

自19世纪以来，识字才开始普遍（在精英阶层之外）。而且从那时起，它几乎没有被具体化过。我们的阅读习惯很容易变得陈旧。作家克莱-舍基甚至提出，我们最近一直在 "空洞地赞美 "托尔斯泰和普鲁斯特。那些古老的、孤独的文学经历 "只是生活在贫乏的环境中的一个副作用"。在我们的网络世界里，我们可以继续前进。而我们的大脑--只是暂时被书籍所劫持--现在将被接下来的任何东西所劫持。

Victor Hugo once wrote that the book replaced architecture as "the great handwriting of the human race." Is it so unreasonable to assume that our "great handwriting" will be scrawled by some other means tomorrow? How could it not?

维克多-雨果曾经写道，书取代了建筑，成为 "人类的伟大手笔"。假设我们的 "伟大的笔迹 "明天会被其他方式涂抹，这有那么不合理吗？怎么可能不呢？

What we'll have to look out for is how cynical – how efficient and ruthlessly algorithmic – that next thing is going to be. "A book," one author told me, "is really just a reverse-engineered TED Talk, right? It's a platform that lets you do a speaking tour."

我们要注意的是，下一个东西会有多大的嘲弄性--多大的效率和无情的算法。"一本书，"一位作者告诉我，"实际上只是一个反向工程的TED演讲，对吗？它是一个让你进行巡回演讲的平台。"

For many writers, this is the new wisdom. A cynical style of reading gives way to a cynical style of writing. I've watched my own books become "useful" as they made their way into public conversation. I never meant them to be useful – in a self-help sense – but that was how they were often read. I say this with less reproach than surprise: Almost every interviewer has asked me for tips and practical life advice, despite the fact my books offer neither.

对许多作家来说，这是新的智慧。愤世嫉俗的阅读方式让位于愤世嫉俗的写作方式。我看到我自己的书在进入公众谈话时变得 "有用"。我从未想过它们是有用的--在自助的意义上--但它们经常被这样阅读。我这样说与其说是惊讶，不如说是责备：几乎每一个采访者都向我询问技巧和实用的生活建议，尽管我的书没有提供这两种建议。

Meanwhile, I admit it: The words I write now filter through a new set of criteria. Do they grab; do they anger? Can this be read without care? Are the sentences brief enough? And the thoughts? It's tempting to let myself become so cynical a writer because I'm already such a cynical reader. I am giving what I get.

同时，我承认这一点：我所写的文字现在通过一套新的标准进行过滤。它们是否吸引人；它们是否激怒人？能否无忧无虑地阅读？句子是否足够简短？思想呢？我很想让自己成为一个如此愤世嫉俗的作家，因为我已经是一个如此愤世嫉俗的读者。我在付出我所得到的。

In Silicon Valley, they have a saying that explains why an algorithm starts producing unwanted results: Garbage in, garbage out. The idea is that an algorithm can only work with the information you feed it. Aren't writers – all creators – algorithmic in that way? Our job is to process what we consume. Beauty in, beauty out. Garbage in, garbage out.

在硅谷，他们有一个说法，解释了为什么一个算法开始产生不需要的结果：垃圾进，垃圾出。这个想法是，一个算法只能用你提供的信息工作。作家--所有创作者--不都是这样的算法吗？我们的工作是处理我们所消费的东西。美的进来，美的出去。垃圾进，垃圾出。

So maybe that change into a cynical writer can be forestalled – if I can first correct my reading diet, remember how to read the way I once did. Not scan, not share, not excerpt – but read. Patiently, slowly, uselessly.

因此，也许可以阻止我变成一个愤世嫉俗的作家--如果我能够首先纠正我的阅读习惯，记住如何以我曾经的方式阅读。不是扫描，不是分享，不是摘录--而是阅读。耐心地，慢慢地，无用地。

Books have always been time machines, in a sense. Today, their time-machine powers are even more obvious – and even more inspiring. They can transport us to a pre-internet frame of mind. Those solitary journeys are all the more rich for their sudden strangeness.

从某种意义上说，书籍一直是时间机器。今天，它们的时间机器的力量更加明显--甚至更加鼓舞人心。它们可以将我们带到互联网之前的思维框架中。那些孤独的旅程因其突然的陌生感而更加丰富。

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原文链接：https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/i-have-forgotten-how-toread/article37921379/