Between Solitude and Loneliness

来源: http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/double-solitude

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[1] At eighty-seven, I am solitary. I live by myself on one floor of the 1803 farmhouse where my family has lived since the Civil War. After my grandfather died, my grandmother Kate lived here alone. Her three daughters visited her. In 1975, Kate died at ninety-seven, and I took over. Forty-odd years later, I spend my days alone in one of two chairs. From an overstuffed blue chair in my living room I look out the window at the unpainted old barn, golden and empty of its cows and of Riley the horse. I look at a tulip; I look at snow. In the parlor’s mechanical chair, I write these paragraphs and dictate letters. I also watch television news, often without listening, and lie back in the enormous comfort of solitude. People want to come visit, but mostly I refuse them, preserving my continuous silence. Linda comes two nights a week. My two best male friends from New Hampshire, who live in Maine and Manhattan, seldom drop by. A few hours a week, Carole does my laundry and counts my pills and picks up after me. I look forward to her presence and feel relief when she leaves. Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over. I am grateful when solitude returns.

• solitary 独自的、孤独的、喜欢独处的
• forty-odd 四十几
• overstuffed 塞得慢慢的、又厚又软的（枕头或家具）
• tulip 郁金香
• parlor 起居室（现在用的少）
• dictate 口述（在这里是只给让别人把自己说的东西写下来）
• pick up after 替别人捡起来和整理放在地上的东西
• now and then 偶尔
• solitude 独处

[2] Born in 1928, I was an only child. During the Great Depression, there were many of us, and Spring Glen Elementary School was eight grades of children without siblings. From time to time I made a friend during childhood, but friendships never lasted long. Charlie Axel liked making model airplanes out of balsa wood and tissue. So did I, but I was clumsy and dripped cement onto wing paper. His models flew. Later, I collected stamps, and so did Frank Benedict. I got bored with stamps. In seventh and eighth grade, there were girls. I remember lying with Barbara Pope on her bed, fully clothed and apart while her mother looked in at us with anxiety. Most of the time, I liked staying alone after school, sitting in the shadowy living room. My mother was shopping or playing bridge with friends; my father added figures in his office; I daydreamed.

• only child 独生子
• siblings 兄弟姐妹
• from time to time 偶尔
• balsa wood 轻木
• tissue 纸巾（这里指的很轻很薄的纸，更多的时候是指用来醒鼻子的纸）
• shadowy 幽暗的
• bridge 桥牌
• figures 数字

[3] In summer, I left my Connecticut suburb to hay with my grandfather, on this New Hampshire farm. I watched him milk seven Holsteins morning and night. For lunch I made myself an onion sandwich—a thick slice between pieces of Wonder Bread. I’ve told about this sandwich before.

• hay 干草（在这里当动词用，指收干草）
• Holstein 一种黑白的奶牛的品种
• Wonder Bread 一种白面包的牌子

[4] At fifteen, I went to Exeter for the last two years of high school. Exeter was academically difficult and made Harvard easy, but I hated it—five hundred identical boys living two to a room. Solitude was scarce, and I labored to find it. I took long walks alone, smoking cigars. I found myself a rare single room and remained there as much as I could, reading and writing. Saturday night, the rest of the school sat in the basketball arena, deliriously watching a movie. I remained in my room in solitary pleasure.

• Exeter 美国最好的寄宿高中之一，全名为Phillips Exeter Adademy
• two to a room 两人一间
• deliriously 极度兴奋的、神经错乱的

[5] At college, dormitory suites had single and double bedrooms. For three years, I lived in one bedroom crowded with everything I owned. During my senior year, I managed to secure a single suite: bedroom and sitting room and bath. At Oxford, I had two rooms to myself. Everybody did. Then I had fellowships. Then I wrote books. Finally, to my distaste, I had to look for a job. With my first wife–people married young back then; we were twenty and twenty-three–I settled in Ann Arbor, teaching English literature at the University of Michigan. I loved walking up and down in the lecture hall, talking about Yeats and Joyce or reading aloud the poems of Thomas Hardy and Andrew Marvell. These pleasures were hardly solitary, but at home I spent the day in a tiny attic room, working on poems. My extremely intelligent wife was more mathematical than literary. We lived together and we grew apart. For the only time in my life, I cherished social gatherings: Ann Arbor’s culture of cocktail parties. I found myself looking forward to weekends, to crowded parties that permitted me distance from my marriage. There were two or three such occasions on Friday and more on Saturday, permitting couples to migrate from living room to living room. We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night.

• senior 四年级
• secure 获得
• fellowship 研究职位或研究基金
• cherish 真爱
• flirt 调情

[6] After sixteen years of marriage, my wife and I divorced.

[7] For five years I was alone again, but without the comfort of solitude. I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon. I dated a girlfriend who drank two bottles of vodka a day. I dated three or four women a week, occasionally three in a day. My poems slackened and stopped. I tried to think that I lived in happy license. I didn’t.

• misery 痛苦
• bourbon 波旁威士忌
• slacken 变松弛、慢下来
• license 放纵

[8] Jane Kenyon was my student. She was smart, she wrote poems, she was funny and frank in class. I knew she lived in a dormitory near my house, so one night I asked her to housesit while I attended an hour-long meeting. (In Ann Arbor, it was the year of breaking and entering.) When I came home, we went to bed. We enjoyed each other, libertine liberty as much as pleasures of the flesh. Later I asked her to dinner, which in 1970 always included breakfast. We saw each other once a week, still dating others, then twice a week, then three or four times a week, and saw no one else. One night, we spoke of marriage. Quickly we changed the subject, because I was nineteen years older and, if we married, she would be a widow so long. We married in April, 1972. We lived in Ann Arbor three years, and in 1975 left Michigan for New Hampshire. She adored this old family house.

• frank 坦率的
• housesit 代为照顾房子
• libertine 放荡不羁的人（在这里当形容词用）
• adore 敬爱、宠爱、喜爱

[9] For almost twenty years, I woke before Jane and brought her coffee in bed. When she rose, she walked Gus the dog. Then each of us retreated to a workroom to write, at opposite ends of our two-story house. Mine was the ground floor in front, next to Route 4. Hers was the second floor in the rear, beside Ragged Mountain’s old pasture. In the separation of our double solitude, we each wrote poetry in the morning. We had lunch, eating sandwiches and walking around without speaking to each other. Afterward, we took a twenty-minute nap, gathering energy for the rest of the day, and woke to our daily fuck. Afterward I felt like cuddling, but Jane’s climax released her into energy. She hurried from bed to workroom.

• retreat 撤退、隐退
• cuddle 搂住、搂抱
• climax 高潮

[10] For several hours afterward, I went back to work at my desk. Late in the afternoon, I read aloud to Jane for an hour. I read Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” twice, the Old Testament, William Faulkner, more Henry James, seventeenth-century poets. Before supper I drank a beer and glanced at The New Yorker while Jane cooked, sipping a glass of wine. Slowly she made a delicious dinner—maybe veal cutlets with mushroom-and-garlic gravy, maybe summer’s asparagus from the bed across the street—then asked me to carry our plates to the table while she lit the candle. Through dinner we talked about our separate days.

• the Old Testament 旧约
• veal cutlets 小牛排
• gravy 肉汁
• asparagus 芦笋

[11] Summer afternoons we spent beside Eagle Pond, on a bite-sized beach among frogs, mink, and beaver. Jane lay in the sun, tanning, while I read books in a canvas sling chair. Every now and then, we would dive into the pond. Sometimes, for an early supper, we broiled sausage on a hibachi. After twenty years of our remarkable marriage, living and writing together in double solitude, Jane died of leukemia at forty-seven, on April 22, 1995.

• mink 水貂
• beaver 河狸
• canvas sling chair 看图
• broil 烤
• hibachi 看图
• leukemia 白血病

[12] Now it is April 22, 2016, and Jane has been dead for more than two decades. Earlier this year, at eighty-seven, I grieved for her in a way I had never grieved before. I was sick and thought I was dying. Every day of her dying, I stayed by her side—a year and a half. It was miserable that Jane should die so young, and it was redemptive that I could be with her every hour of every day. Last January I grieved again, this time that she would not sit beside me as I died.

• grieve 感到悲伤、哀悼
• miserable 痛苦的、悲惨的
• redemptive 救赎的（在这里指的是让不好的情况好一些）

重点词汇

solitary 独自的、孤独的、喜欢独处的
dictate 口述（在这里是只给让别人把自己说的东西写下来）
solitude 独处
only child 独生子
siblings 兄弟姐妹
tissue 纸巾（这里指的很轻很薄的纸，更多的时候是指用来醒鼻子的纸）
shadowy 幽暗的
figures 数字
deliriously 极度兴奋的、神经错乱的
senior 四年级
secure 获得
fellowship 研究职位或研究基金
cherish 真爱
flirt 调情
misery 痛苦
slacken 变松弛、慢下来
license 放纵
frank 坦率的
housesit 代为照顾房子
libertine 放荡不羁的人（在这里当形容词用）
adore 敬爱、宠爱、喜爱
retreat 撤退、隐退
cuddle 搂住、搂抱
climax 高潮
grieve 感到悲伤、哀悼
miserable 痛苦的、悲惨的
redemptive 救赎的（在这里指的是让不好的情况好一些）

重点表达法

pick up after 替别人捡起来和整理放在地上的东西
now and then 偶尔
from time to time 偶尔
forty-odd 四十几
two to a room 两人一间

与文章内容相关的词汇

parlor 起居室（现在用的少）
overstuffed 塞得慢慢的、又厚又软的（枕头或家具）
tulip 郁金香
balsa wood 轻木
bridge 桥牌
hay 干草（在这里当动词用，指收干草）
Holstein 一种黑白的奶牛的品种
Wonder Bread 一种白面包的牌子
Exeter 美国最好的寄宿高中之一，全名为Phillips Exeter Adademy bourbon 波旁威士忌
the Old Testament 旧约
veal cutlets 小牛排
gravy 肉汁
asparagus 芦笋
mink 水貂
beaver 河狸
canvas sling chair 看图
broil 烤
hibachi 看图
leukemia 白血病

金句

I look forward to her presence and feel relief when she leaves.

Now and then, especially at night, solitude loses its soft power and loneliness takes over.

We lived together and we grew apart. 

We flirted, we drank, we chatted–without remembering on Sunday what we said Saturday night.

I exchanged the miseries of a bad marriage for the miseries of bourbon.

Later I asked her to dinner, which in 1970 always included breakfast.

Through dinner we talked about our separate days.

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