《经济学人》常被视作英语学习的范本，文章中常见的优秀文章也是英文学习者进阶的重要工具。为此我们青藤语培开通了「经济学人Day」栏目每周不定时推送《经济学人》文章及其详解，包括官方精选例句、重难点单词释义、写作积累等。每日坚持早日分托！
导读
鸭兔图
美国心理学家贾斯特罗（Joesph Jastrow）设计出这张“鸭兔图”，指人们第一眼看到的是鸭或兔并不重要，反而是发现第二只动物的时间，可反映出该人的大脑“思考速度”。发现两种动物后，愈快能够交替想像它是鸭或兔的人，创意思维则愈发达，并愈能看到事物的关连性。
维特根斯坦因主要观点：凡是能够说出来的东西都是可以说清楚的，而且都是不重要的；凡是不能说出来的东西反而是更为重要的。因为无法说出来，所以也就是无法表达的，因而也就是无法思想的。
作者：无心道人无耻之徒
2
Intention and accident
被艺术耽误了的神经学家
英文部分选自经济学人191207逝者版块
Obituary: Jonathan Miller
讣告：乔纳森·米勒
Intention and accident
被艺术耽误了的神经学家
Jonathan Miller, alternately pillar and goad of the British cultural scene, died on November 27th, aged 85
乔纳森·米勒，英国文化界的中坚力量与革新者，于11月27日去世，享年85岁
Whenever he erupted onto a set or into a studio, Jonathan Miller made an instant impression. Part came from his height and gawkiness, the tweed jacket, the excessively angular elbows and knees (since the body was not only possesssed by him but also possessed him, making up a large part of what he actually was, including his notions of effort and success). But he also drew attention because, as often as not, he had a book of neuroscience in his hand.
无论在舞台还是制作室，但凡乔纳森·米勒（Jonathan Miller）一出场，总能引人注目。一方面因为他身型高大、体态笨拙；粗花呢短上衣总在手肘与膝盖处被撑的棱角分明，显出他的削瘦——身体即是他的栖息地，也是他的主宰者，在很大程度上决定了他究竟是个怎样的人，包括他对努力和成功的看法。但是，他吸引眼球还有另一个原因，那就是他总是捧着本神经学的书。
The point he was making was this. Science was hard, and needed constant application. But the sort of thing he spent five decades doing, putting on plays, making television documentaries, directing more than 50 operas, he could achieve with his left hand behind his back. Art was easy, ridiculously so. Most television was utter banality; most opera forgettable, vulgar and sentimental. So it took very little originality to make them memorable. He liked to invoke the psychologists’ duck-rabbit sketch, in which the seeing of the duck precluded the alternative seeing of the rabbit, and vice versa; to bring to the fore “aspects” of a work, as Wittgenstein said, that had previously been invisible, so that audiences would perceive it in a completely different way.
在他看来，科学之路布满荆棘，需要坚持不懈的努力。但是，导演戏剧、制作电视纪录片、执导50多部歌剧，这些50年来他做的事情，则易如反掌。彼时的艺术过于简单，简单得令人难以置信。多数电视节目索然无味；多数歌剧俗不可耐、无病呻吟，让人过目即忘。因此，他不需要多少创意就能制作出令人难忘的艺术作品。他常常援引心理学中的“鸭兔图”——第一眼看到鸭子会妨碍你发现兔子，反之亦然——他喜欢如维特根斯坦所言，将作品中原本隐藏的一面呈现出来，让观众耳目一新。
For the BBC in 1966, for example, he turned “Alice in Wonderland”, which had been horribly Disneyfied, into a Victorian child’s dream of a hot Oxford summer in which all the characters were prating or dozing dons. That was what the story was about: Oxford, childhood. (People who said it was Freudian clearly knew nothing about Freud.) In 1982 he set Verdi’s “Rigoletto” in Little Italy in New York, with mobsters swaggering and “La Donna è Mobile” kicked out of a jukebox, because Verdi’s duke was clearly a hoodlum too, and the atmosphere that of “The Godfather”. His “Così fan Tutte” in 1995 had costumes by Armani, huge mirrors and mobile phones, a comment on the narcissism of the modern age. His “St Matthew Passion” took the performers out of their tuxedos and inert choirs and put them in a circle, in their own clothes, acting out the drama; his film of “The Symposium”, called “The Drinking Party”, put the actors into dinner jackets as old boys at a school reunion, reading Plato’s discourse on love in one of the temples at Stowe.
1966年，乔纳森与英国广播公司（BBC）合作，重拍了《爱丽丝梦游奇境》，并将这部严重迪士尼化了的影片改为维多利亚时代的孩童梦见炎热的牛津夏日的故事，剧中人物有的喋喋不休，有的昏昏欲睡。可那才是原著的真实面貌——牛津和童年。那些认为该片是弗洛伊德式故事的人，显然对弗洛伊德一无所知。1982年，他将威尔第歌剧《弄臣》的场景设在纽约的小意大利——暴徒招摇过市，自动点唱机里播放着威尔第的《女人善变》——因为威尔第笔下的公爵本就是个无赖。他还为《弄臣》设计了像黑帮电影《教父》一样的氛围。1995年，在歌剧《女人心》中，他通过阿玛尼服装、大幅镜面、移动电话，讽刺了摩登年代的自恋。他导演的《圣马太受难曲》没有让演员穿着燕尾服参加死气沉沉的唱诗班，而是让他们穿着日常服饰，围成一圈，表演戏剧。他导演的电影《飨宴篇》（也称《会饮篇》）中，演员们像参加同学聚会一样，穿着小礼服，在斯陀园的神庙里吟诵柏拉图的爱情名言。
All those were great successes, cementing his reputation as the most brilliant mind on the British cultural scene, and yet even then he agonised over why he was doing this. He had meant to be a doctor, specifically a neurologist. Instead, probably out of weak-mindedness, he always said “yes” whenever anyone turned up at his door and asked if he would like to play. (It was almost involuntary, like blushing or sneezing, and he could never identify the point at which the conscious exercise of intention occurred.) The first of these accidents happened when he was lured away from his medical training by three Cambridge friends, Alan Bennett, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, to write and perform in “Beyond the Fringe” in 1960, a revue which pilloried everything the English held dear, from the Battle of Britain to tea to Shakespeare. After this had electrified both London and New York, it was hard to go back to hospital work. But he would have done, had he not been invited to direct a play at the Royal Court…then to direct opera for Sadler’s Wells…then to the National Theatre…and so it went. He fell into work as he fell into long-lasting love, accidentally.
所有这些都大获成功，他因此成为英国文化界最睿智的人，名声大噪。即便如此，他仍为自己的作为苦恼不已。他本想成为医生，确切地说，是神经科医生。然而，或许因为他意志不够坚定，但凡有人登门来访，问他是否愿意参演，他总会回答“行”。（就好像是脸红或打喷嚏，不受人的主观控制。他自己也分不清楚究竟是无心还是有意。）这样的情形首次发生是在1960年，当时他正参加医学培训，他在剑桥的三个朋友阿兰·本奈特(Alan Bennett)、彼得·库克(Peter Cook)和达德利·摩尔(Dudley Moore)邀他编写并参演喜剧《边缘之外》（Beyond the Fringe）。那是一部讽刺时事的滑稽剧，将英国人珍视的一切事物都嘲讽了个遍，从不列颠之战到饮茶再到莎士比亚。该剧在伦敦和纽约都引起了轩然大波。那之后，乔纳森·米勒再也难以回到医院工作了。如果他没有受邀去皇家宫廷剧院导演戏剧，没有去沙德勒之井剧院导演歌剧，也没有去国家剧院，以及等等接下来一系列的编剧，他本可以回医院工作的。而他却沉迷于这项工作，仿佛陷入长久的恋爱一般，其原初却纯属偶然。
Yet he should have stayed intentionally with medicine. First, because what he was doing was ephemeral, even when his “Rigoletto” and his “Mikado”(translated to the Marx Brothers’ Fredonia, and with the Japanese stripped out) were both in the repertoire for decades. By contrast, originality in medicine could bring lasting benefit. And second, because in science one was either right or wrong, and one’s work was peer-reviewed by people who at least knew the topic. Instead he had to put up with critics, snivelling pipsqueaks who knew 100% less than he did about the piece in question but whined that he was messing it around. When they called him a polymath, a term he loathed, they really meant he was a jack of all trades and master of none. What idiot invertebrates they all were, like the sea slugs he had collected as a boy and then had the greatest pleasure dissecting and slicing for his microscope. God (though it had never occurred to him that there might be a God) could rot the lot of them.
即使这样，要从事医学，他本可以有意为之。首先，他所做艺术方面的工作带来的影响都是短暂的，尽管他编导的《弄臣》和歌剧《天皇》（删除了日本部分，改成美国喜剧团体马克斯兄弟版的Fredonia）几十年来一直是经典剧目。但相比之下，医学创新带来的好处更持久。其次，科学领域里非对即错，评论者至少对该领域有所了解。而身在文化艺术圈，他面对的不仅有那些批评家，就连完全不懂他创作意图却满腹牢骚的下里巴人也来抱怨他一无是处。他们称他为“博学家”（他厌恶这一称呼），暗指他是“万金油”，什么都略知一二，却无一精通。这些人真如无脊椎动物一样无知，像极了他小时候收集的海蛞蝓。他最喜欢把那些海蛞蝓拿来解剖，做显微镜切片，乐此不疲。上帝（尽管他从不相信有上帝）会让他们化归尘土。
As some consolation, he could bring his medical expertise to bear on art. For the bbc he produced a television series, “The Body in Question”, in which among a firework display of observations he compared red blood cells clotting to Duchamp’s “Nude descending a staircase” and the movement of cilia on cells to Van Gogh’s “Wheatfield with Lark”. His radio series on madness featured the voices of both experts and those being treated. In opera, too, he applied the knowledge gained from listening to, and watching, patients. In “La Traviata” he asked Violetta to twist her hair as she sang, another almost involuntary gesture, and strictly made her stay in bed for her death aria. It was a full-time business, dying.
为了安慰自己，他把所学的医学专业知识运用到艺术上。他为英国广播公司（BBC）制作了电视剧《解密人体》（The Body in Question），在剧中将自己地观察所得呈现得如烟花般绚烂，例如他把红细胞凝结块比作杜尚画的《下楼梯的裸女》（Nude Descending a Staircase），把细胞纤毛运动比作梵高画的《麦田与云雀》（Wheatfield with Lark）。他编制的关于精神失常的电台节目，同时聚焦专家和接受治疗的患者的声音。在歌剧中，他同样运用了聆听和观察患者所获得的知识。在歌剧《茶花女》（La Traviata）中，他让维奥莱塔（Violetta）边唱边拨弄头发，又是一例无意识动作的表演；还要求她必须躺在床上演唱她的死亡咏叹调。毕竟死亡可容不得三心二意。
The incremental world
逐渐构建起来的世界
England he found difficult, with its snobberies and condescensions. His knighthood (though of course he said yes to it, weakly, as ever) made him shrivel up. He could have lived in New York, where he briefly worked for the New Yorker and where, for the first time, he felt Jewish. But he stayed put, moving all of a mile from Park Crescent nw1, where he was born, to Gloucester Crescent nw1, with Alan Bennett over the road. He lived among countless books, the notebooks in which he recorded his curiosity about everything, and his photographs of bits of buildings and superimposed layers of posters on walls, the discrete instalments from which his perception of the world incrementally emerged.
英格兰人势利又傲慢，让米勒觉得很难对付。他的爵士头衔（像往常一样，他还是勉强接受了这一身份）另他很不自在。米勒本可以住在纽约，他曾在那里为《纽约客》工作了一段时间，也是在纽约，他第一次感觉到自己是犹太人。但他还是留在了伦敦，只是从他出生的帕克新月街（Park Crescent nw1）搬到了格洛斯特新月街，相距约1600多米，路对面就住着英国剧作家阿兰·本奈特。米勒与群书为伴，笔记本上记录着对万事万物的好奇，拍的照片里是各种建筑物的局部，墙壁上，满满当当贴了好几层海报。他对世界的认知就是从这些零碎的部分中慢慢构建起来的。
注：Miller grew up in St John's Wood, London, in a well-connected Jewish family of Lithuanian descent.
Did all this add up to a triumphant life? Many would have thought so. In moments of relaxation and satisfaction he would rock his long frame back and clasp his hands behind his head. But Wittgenstein’s nagging question remained: exactly what made the difference between “I lift my arms,” and “My arms go up”?
所有这些加起来就算人生赢家了吗？很多人都认为算。在休息放松、心满意足的时候，米勒会来回晃动修长的身躯，同时双手抱在脑后。但维特根斯坦那磨人的问题此刻又会浮上心头： “我举起手臂”与“我的手臂举起来了”区别究竟何在？
