美食祈祷与恋爱意大利文化 《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 36 (78):再见,意大利!

《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 36 (78):再见,意大利!  

To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty
then
can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality
but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into . . . rhetoric and plot. Not too long ago
authorities arrested a brotherhood of Catholic monks in Sicily who were in tight conspiracy with the Mafia
so who can you trust? What can you believe? The world is unkind and unfair. Speak up against this unfairness and in Sicily
at least
you'll end up as the foundation of an ugly new building. What can you do in such an environment to hold a sense of your individual human dignity? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing except
perhaps
to pride yourself on the fact that you always fillet your fish with perfection
or that you make the lightest ricotta in the whole town?
I don't want to insult anyone by drawing too much of a parison beeen myself and the long-suffering Sicilian people. The tragedies in my life have been of a personal and largely self-created nature
not epically oppressive. I went through a divorce and a depression
not a few centuries of murderous tyranny. I had a crisis of identity
but I also had the resources (financial
artistic and emotional) with which to try to work it out. Still
I will say that the same thing which has helped generations of Sicilians hold their dignity has helped me begin to recover mine—namely
the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one's humanity. I believe this is what Goethe meant by saying that you have to e here
to Sicily
in order to understand Italy. And I suppose this is what I instinctively felt when I decided that I needed to e here
to Italy
in order to understand myself.
It was in a bathtub back in New York
reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary
that I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian
and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt—this is not selfishness
but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life
no matter how slight.
在纽约的浴缸里大声念出字典里的意大利词句，使我开始修补自己的灵魂。我的生活裂成碎片，让我认不出自己，在警察局任人指认的话，恐怕连我也指认不出自己。可是当我开始读意大利文时，我感觉到一丝快乐；而当你在经历黑暗时期后，感受到丝毫可能的快乐，就得死命抓住这一点快乐，直到它将你拉出土中——这并非自私，而是义务。你被赋予生命；你有责任（也是你身为人类的权利）去寻找生命当中的美，无论多么微不足道。
I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don't fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late—through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures—into somebody much more intact. The easiest
most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person—the magnification of one life—is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life
just this one time
happens to be nobody's but my
Pray
Love