美食、祈祷和恋爱评价 《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 36 (77):意大利,这是怎样一个国家

《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 36 (77):意大利,这是怎样一个国家  

"No town can live peacefully
whatever its laws
" Plato wrote
"when its citizens . . . do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love."
But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life
is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden
in a patch of sunlight
in the middle of the day
right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?
Of course
one can't live like this forever. Real life and wars and traumas and mortality will interfere eventually. Here in Sicily with its dreadful poverty
real life is never far from anyone's mind. The Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries (running the business of protecting citizens from itself)
and it still keeps its hand down everybody's pants. Palermo—a city Goethe once claimed was possessed of an impossible-to-describe beauty—may now be the only city in Western Europe where you can still find yourself picking your steps through World War II rubble
just to give a sense of development here. The town has been systematically uglified beyond description by the hideous and unsafe apartment blocks the Mafia constructed in the 1980s as money-laundering operations. I asked one Sicilian if those buildings were made from cheap concrete and he said
"Oh
no—this is very expensive concrete. In each batch
there are a few bodies of people who were killed by the Mafia
and that costs money. But it does make the concrete stronger to be reinforced with all those bones and teeth."
当然，没有人能够永远过这种日子。真实生活、战争、苦难、道德终将起而干预。在贫困的西西里，真实生活永远走不出任何人的脑海。黑手党是西西里数百年来唯一成功的事业（保护市民免受其害），而它的魔爪仍伸及每个人。巴勒莫（Palermo）——歌德曾称之为拥有无法形容之美的城市——或许是目前西欧唯一能让你走在二战瓦砾堆中感受发展状况的城市。黑手党在20世纪80年代为洗钱操作而建造的丑陋不堪的公寓危楼，使这座城市有计划地遭受不可名状的丑化。我问一位西西里人，这些建筑是否用廉价的混凝土建造而成，他说：“喔不——是很贵的混凝土。每一批混凝土都混有几具遭黑手党杀害的尸体，这可花钱咧。不过用骨头、牙齿加固，的确让混凝土比较坚固。”
In such an environment
is it maybe a little shallow to be thinking only about your next wonderful meal? Or is it perhaps the best you can do
given the harder realities? Luigi Barzini
in his 1964 masterwork The Italians (written when he'd finally grown tired of foreigners writing about Italy and either loving it or hating it too much) tried to set the record straight on his own culture. He tried to answer the question of why the Italians have produced the greatest artistic
political and scientific minds of the ages
but have still never bee a major world power. Why are they the pla's masters of verbal diplomacy
but still so inept at home government? Why are they so individually valiant
yet so collectively unsuccessful as an army? How can they be such shrewd merchants on the personal level
yet such inefficient capitalists as a nation?
His answers to these questions are more plex than I can fairly encapsulate here
but have much to do with a sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by foreign dominators
all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted
misspoken
unstable
exaggerated and unfair
one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses
and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why
Barzini says
Italians will tolerate hideously inpetent generals
presidents
tyrants
professors
bureaucrats
journalists and captains of industry
but will never tolerate inpetent "opera singers
conductors
ballerinas
courtesans
actors
film directors
cooks
tailors . . ." In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud
sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.