Q：“孤独是一种怎样的感觉？”
A1: “它就像是经历一场丧亲之痛。你失去许多东西。它也像是一种令人无法呼吸的窒息感，紧紧地把你勒住，尽管并不存在什么实体真的在勒你。”
A2:“它就像是一朵乌云。你不想让别人看见你，所以你就在孤独的漩涡中越陷越深：这就是一个恶性循环。”
A3:“就像是被一个漆黑的空间所笼罩，你根本走不出去。”
A4:“就像是在你面前摆了一桌好吃的，但你却没有能力享用。”
孤独时分，幸福难觅
作者：Maggie Fergusson
译者：倪凌晖
校对：唐 萧
编辑：
唐 萧
In solitude what happiness?
孤独时分，幸福难觅
Loneliness is silent, invisible and as deadly as a smoking habit.
孤独是静寂的，无形的，和吸烟一样致命。
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I remember his words when the Samaritans put me in touch by phone with James, an IT entrepreneur and property dealer, now in his mid-40s. Looking back, James explains, he reckons he had begun to distance himself from his parents and their bitterly unhappy marriage when he was about six. By the time they divorced, when he was nine, he was “completely separate” from them: “I was living in the same house as my mother and sister, but I probably wouldn’t spend more than 15 minutes a day in their company. I routinely had meals alone, then went back up to my room and stayed there, alone.” He was solitary at school and university; but it wasn’t until he was in his early 20s, and in his first job, that he realised how completely ill-equipped he was to deal with other human beings: “I didn’t fit in, and I didn’t understand why not. Slowly but surely self-doubt came into play, along with anger and anxiety. It was loneliness in the sense of real deprivation, complete lack of human contact.”
40来岁的James是一名IT创客兼房地产开发商，但他的另一个身份则是撒玛利亚会的救助对象。撒玛利亚会帮我接通了James的电话，我到现在还记得他当时说的话。James说，回首过往，他其实早在六岁时，就开始疏远自己的父母和他们失败的婚姻了。一直到他九岁父母离异，和父母也完全没有交流。“尽管我当时和母亲、姐姐住在一起，但是我和他们呆在一起的时间一天不会超过15分钟。我每天就一个人吃饭，然后回自己的房间一个人呆着。”他在初高中和大学里也是独来独往，但直到20出头，刚走上工作岗位的时候，他才意识到自己在与人相处方面毫无能力可言。“我没办法融入集体。我不明白为什么自己就不能和他人相处呢？慢慢地，我开始自我怀疑，心中伴随着愤怒和紧张。这是一种被剥夺感所引发的寂寞，完全与他人隔绝。”
相对剥夺感 (Relative deprivation)
最早由美国学者S．A．斯托弗（S．A．Stouffer）提出，其后经R．K．默顿（R．K．Merton）的发展，成为了一种关于群体行为的理论。它是指当人们将自己的处境与某种标准或某种参照物相比较而发现自己处于劣势时所产生的受剥夺感，这种感觉会产生消极情绪，可以表现为愤怒、怨恨或不满。简单而言，相对剥夺是一种感觉，这感觉是我们有权享有但并不拥有。例如，某人看着邻居家买了一辆新车，他认为他也能有这辆车。但实际他并不拥有。
“And what does loneliness feel like?”
“孤独是一种怎样的体验？”
“Loneliness is worthlessness. You feel you don’t fit in, that people don’t understand you. You feel terrible about yourself, you feel rejected. Everyone goes to the pub, but they don’t invite you. Why? Because there’s something wrong with you.”
“孤独是一种觉得自己毫无价值的感觉。你感到自己没办法融入他人，别人不能理解你。你觉得自己怎么可以这么糟糕，你感到被他人所拒绝。每个人都去酒吧玩了，但唯独没有邀请你。为什么要这样对我？或许是因为我哪里做错了。”
It was when he came to the point of feeling “highly suicidal” that James reached out to the Samaritans, ringing them as often as eight times a day. They helped him to “feel human”, and have been a lifeline to him for over 20 years, including seeing him through a “complete mental breakdown” 13 years ago. He expresses his gratitude to them in substantial financial gifts. Because, for all his awkwardness and isolation, James is a self-made multi- millionaire. Along with Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe and President Trump – described by his biographer Tim O’Brien as “one of the loneliest people I know” – he is proof that you can’t buy your way out of loneliness. “However much money you have, you remain constrained by your mental processes,” he says.
一直到他已经抑郁到有自杀的念头时，他才向撒玛利亚会求助。那时，他一天要给撒玛利亚会打八次电话。他们让James觉得自己还是人。在之后的二十年，给撒玛利亚会打电话成为了支撑James活下去的救命稻草。13年前，他一度陷入精神崩溃，当时也是撒玛利亚会陪着他度过了难关。为了表达对撒玛利亚的感激之情，James向它提供了经济上的资助。虽然他生性害羞，人也孤僻，但他是一名拥有数百万资产的富豪。为他写传记的Tim O’Brie将James描述为他所知道的最孤独的人之一，从他身上，你就能明白什么叫：就算你再有钱，也不能摆脱寂寞。黛安娜王妃、玛丽莲·梦露、唐纳德·特朗普也是如此。“无论你多富有，你仍然受困于自己的精神，无法自拔。"
It may be that affluence is making things worse. We prize space, privacy and independence, and the richer we get the more of these we can afford, yet their corollary is being alone. Our economy works better if people move around to find work, yet mobility stretches and breaks the bonds of family and community. Phillips told me that “capitalism and a mobile labour market make connections between people very precarious and difficult. In so far as people feel that what they’ve got to do is get on, they are, as it were, encouraged to sacrifice relationship and intimacy.”
或许，富有会使情况更加糟糕。我们重视空间、隐私、以及独立，你越富有，你就会得到越多的空间和隐私，也会越独立。但这必然也会让你变得越孤独。当人们四处流动寻找工作时，经济才会越来越好。但是，随着人口流动性的增加，人与人之间在家庭和社区内的联系也会随之破裂。Phillips告诉我，“资本主义和流动的劳动力市场会使人与人之间的联系变得脆弱且难以维系。人们觉得自己就应该到处找工作，但这样他们牺牲了爱情和亲密关系。”
But if money can’t shield you from loneliness, poverty can exacerbate it. I met Euan at a soup kitchen in Soho on a chilly evening before Christmas. He used to manage a betting shop, but after a mental breakdown ended up on the streets. “I’m an only child and I’ve always been a loner,” he told me. “To be alone is just what my life is. I feel I don’t deserve to be with people, or to have a relationship.”
但是，如果说金钱不能帮助你免于孤独之苦，那贫穷则会让你在孤独的漩涡中越陷越深。我是在伦敦Soho区的一家救济所遇到Euan的。那是一个圣诞节前的寒冷晚上。他曾经经营一家彩票销售店，但是因为精神奔溃，最后只能流落街头。“我是家中的独子，我一直都是一个人。孤独就是我生活的全部。我觉得自己不值得被陪伴，也不值得被爱。”
“What does loneliness feel like?”
“孤独是一种怎样的感觉？”
“It’s like being offered a full meal, and not being able to eat it.”
“就像是面前摆了一桌好吃的，但你却没有能力享用。”
Chris Mahoney is a senior co-ordinator at Home Start, a charity that offers practical and emotional support to families with small children in crisis. “Lots of our mums are terribly lonely,” she says, “especially if they are refugees or asylum-seekers. In fact I would say that probably most of their suffering comes from loneliness.”
Home Start是一家慈善机构，致力于帮助那些遇到困难，并且有幼童的家庭。Chris Mahoney是这家慈善机构的高级协调员。她说：“我们帮助的许多妈妈都十分孤独，特别是那些难民和寻找庇护的人。事实上，甚至可以说她们大部分的痛苦都来源于孤独。”
At Chris’s office in East Sheen I met Alice and her toddler son, Tom. Alice’s husband works 12-hour shifts as a concierge in a smart block of flats, but his income is low, and Alice has been unable to claim Jobseeker’s Allowance because of mental-health problems. So for several months after Tom was born they were stuck in a tiny studio flat above a restaurant, exposed to carbon-monoxide poisoning. “I couldn’t invite people over,” says Alice. “I thought they’d be thinking, ‘Jeez! How can you let your child live in these conditions?’ At three months Tom hadn’t met another baby, and I was desperately lonely.”
在Chris位于East Sheen的办公室，我遇到了Alice和她蹒跚学步的儿子Tom。她的丈夫在一个小公寓楼中当门卫，两班倒，一天工作12小时，但是收入微薄。而且因为Alice有精神方面的问题，所以她还不能领取求职津贴。因此，在Tom出生后的数个月里，他们一家三口只能勉强住在餐厅楼上的一室户房间中，每天经受着一氧化碳的毒害。Alice说：“我根本没办法请人来家里坐坐。如果他们看到我家的情况，一定会想：天呐！你怎么可以让孩子住在这种环境里？一直到三个月大，小Tom都没见过其他宝宝。我真的孤独到绝望。”
East Sheen，或称为Sheen，是伦敦泰晤士河畔里士满的郊区。
“What does that feel like?”
“孤独是一种怎样的感觉？”
“It feels like a dark cloud. You don’t want anyone to see you and so you get lonelier: it’s a vicious circle.”
“它就像是一朵乌云。你不想让别人看见你，所以你就在孤独的漩涡中越陷越深：这就是一个恶性循环。”
Alice is OK, you might think: at least she has a husband and child. But loneliness in marriage can be bitter. Caroline, now 47 and a successful writer, was married for 12 years to a man who, though never cruel, felt increasingly absent. “He was very
gregarious
,” she says, “always the life and soul of the party, but really very insecure. When we were alone, he would disappear into himself. He didn’t really either talk or listen. There was nothing I could put my finger on, but in a way that was the trouble: there was nothing.” She remembers sitting on the lawn with him one summer’s day, with their children playing nearby. “I was feeling a little melancholy, and said, ‘it’s the tenth anniversary of my father’s death.’ There was a pause, which I thought perhaps was a sympathetic one; but then he said something about flying to New York the following week, and I realised that, as usual, he just wasn’t listening.”
你可能会觉得Alice的处境还算可以，最起码她还有老公和孩子。但是婚姻中的孤独真的很痛苦。47岁的Caroline是一位成功的作家。结婚12年来，尽管她的老公谈不上冷酷，但是她越来越觉得自己的老公不在身边。Caroline说“他曾经是个
交际花
，一直出没于各种聚会场所，但是他的心里相当没有安全感。我们两个人的时候，他会沉浸在自己的世界里，旁若无人。他虽然人在那里，但不说话也不听别人说话。我不知道究竟哪里出了问题，但是我知道：他根本不在我身边。”她记得有一年夏天，她和老公坐在草坪上，他们的孩子在旁边玩耍。“那时，我有一点感伤，说‘今天是我爸去世十周年的忌日。’ 他没说什么话，我一开始还以为这是他对我表示同情的一种方式。但是他后来说下周要飞去纽约。我当时就意识到，和往常一样，他根本没在听我说话。”
gregarious
/grɪˈgeəriəs; NAmE -ˈger- / adj. liking to be with other people 交际的；合群的 SYNSOCIABLE
Caroline’s husband started drinking seriously, and things got worse: “He was never, really, fully, with me. His head was either in the office or full of alcohol. If I hadn’t loved him, maybe it wouldn’t have mattered, but I did, so it was very painful.” Caroline had had a stiff-upper-lip upbringing, and she wanted the marriage to work, so she spoke to no one. “I thought that the more visible the cracks, the likelier it was that the whole thing would crumble. So we went around, for several years, looking like the perfect family, with lovely children and good jobs, but all the time I was feeling so alone.” She put her friendships on ice, because she felt unable to tell the people closest to her how much pain she was in. Then, finally, the marriage broke up, and she was able to talk – “and this awful gulf between me and everybody I cared for closed up, and I wasn’t so lonely any more.”
Caroline的丈夫开始喝酒喝的很厉害，情况也随之变糟。“他从来没有真正在我身边。他脑子里要么是想着工作，要么就是想着酒。如果我不曾爱过他，或许这对我来说根本不重要。但是，事实是我爱过，所以我相当痛心。Caroline从小被教育要懂得沉着缄默，她想让婚姻重回正轨，所以她没对任何人说过丈夫的问题。“我曾经认为裂缝越显而易见，那它就越可能会断裂。所以，几年来我们一直都在假装成一个幸福的家庭，有可爱的孩子，不错的工作。但是，我却一直感到十分孤独。”她将朋友冷落在一边，因为她根本不知道怎么和自己最亲近的人说她到底有多痛苦。最后，婚姻还是走向了终结。这下子，她终于能说出实情了。“我和所有我在乎的人之间的那条鸿沟终于闭合了。我终于不再孤独了。”
“What does loneliness feel like?”
“孤独是一种怎样的感觉？”
“Like being surrounded by a dark void that you have no way of crossing.”
“就像是被一个漆黑的空间笼罩，你根本走不出去。”
I met Fiona, a sharply intelligent psychotherapist, last autumn, and when I told her what I was working on, she swiftly volunteered that she was “desperately lonely” and would be happy to talk about it. “How old are you?” I asked. “I’m 57,” she replied, “or, as the dating sites would have it, ‘I’m 57 but I feel 27’.” So one quiet afternoon we met for lunch and a walk by the Thames. I sensed that what she had to tell me was going to be painful, so for a good while we talked of anything but loneliness. But eventually, sitting on a bench, I switched on my recorder, and we bit the bullet.
去年秋天，我遇到了Fiona。她是一位非常有才的心理治疗师。当我告诉她我在研究“孤独”时，她马上说她自己就曾有一段非常孤独的经历，很愿意和我聊聊。我问她：“你今年多大了？”她说：“57岁。或者，按照交友软件上写的：虽然实际年龄57岁，但是我觉得我只有27岁。”所以在一个安静的中午，我们一起吃了中饭，然后在泰晤士河畔散了会儿步。我觉得她要告诉我的经历对她来说一定相当痛苦。所以，好一会儿，我们都在聊孤独以外的其他话题。但当我们坐在长凳上时，我打开了我的录音笔，我们便直奔主题，开始了这段关于孤独的谈话。
It’s not easy, Fiona conceded, to talk about being lonely: “Mental-health problems and depression are quite fashionable now, but loneliness is not fashionable. There’s something shameful about it – ‘it’s my fault, there’s something wrong with me, I’m a horrible person.’” I mentioned that at a recent dinner in Oxford, a brisk American woman had suggested to me that the solution lay in keeping friendships in good shape: “lonely people need to frexercise.” But Fiona explained that, as loneliness gets a grip, this becomes more and more difficult. “It took me a very long time to actually think of myself as someone who’s lonely,” she reflected, “and I feel I’ve only really done that in the last four years or so. If you have a good social life, and you have people in your life you’ve known a long time, and you make friends easily – which I do – it’s very easy to feel un-lonely because you’re quite busy and you’re not short of interactions with people. But I have found, for whatever reason, that I don’t socialise any more in that way.” It’s partly that friends seem so
immersed
in their own lives – some are now retiring, moving out of London, becoming grandparents – “so the circle has really narrowed. I just spend an awful lot more time on my own.” And it’s partly that she has come to accept that
hectic
socialising will never satisfy her deepest longings. “What you really need are people that know you very well, and care about you and are available to you,” she says, “and that you can just contact about anything at any time and I don’t have that, and that’s very lonely. I can’t just pick up the phone and say, ‘Do you want to come over? Do you want to go to the cinema? What are you doing at the weekend?’ That simply doesn’t exist now. I didn’t really notice it happening, but it has. So I’m caught in a vicious circle. If you feel you’re unlovable, you feel you can’t be around people, and this enforces feelings of isolation, and so it goes on.”
Fiona说，要和别人说出自己的孤独并不容易。“精神问题和精神抑郁现在已经成为人们经常谈起的话题。但是孤独不一样。人们对于谈论孤独，会有一种羞耻感。‘这是我的错，一定是我哪里出问题了。我是一个糟糕的人’这时我提到，最近一次在牛津的晚餐中，一位非常干练的美国女士说，孤独的解药是和朋友保持良好的关系。她说“孤独的人就要好好练练怎么交朋友。”但是，Fiona解释说：当孤独感把你完全掌控时，和朋友保持良好关系就会变得非常困难。“我花了很长时间才承认自己其实是孤独的。我感觉我是从四年前才开始有孤独的感觉的。如果你有良好的社交生活，有交往很久的朋友，而且也很善于交朋友，那你很难感到孤独。话说，我就是这样的人。因为在这种情况下，你的生活会非常充实，并不缺少和他人交流。但是，我发现，不知道是因为什么原因，我的社交生活再也没有像从前那样丰富。”部分原因可能是朋友们全都
忙于
自己的生活。一些人退休了，搬出了伦敦，做了爷爷奶奶。“所以，我的朋友圈就变得越来越小。我独处的时间突然就变多了，真的很痛苦。”部分原因可能是Fiona意识到这种
交际花般
忙碌的社交生活其实并不能安抚她内心深处的孤独。“你真正需要的是那种了解你，关心你，可以花时间陪你的朋友。你可以随时联系，交流任何事情的朋友。但是我没有这样的朋友。这让我非常的孤独。我没办法给谁打个电话说：’你想来我这吗？你想去看电影吗？你周末在做什么？’我突然就没有这么亲密的朋友了。我都没反应过来。所以我就陷入了一个死循环。如果你感觉自己没有被爱，你就会觉得你的身边不会有什么人陪你。这又会造成一种孤立无援的感觉，然后你就会在孤独的漩涡中越陷越深。”
immerse
/ɪˈmɜ:s; NAmE ɪˈmɜ:rs / verb [VN] ~ sb/ sth (in sth) to put sb/ sth into a liquid so that they or it are completely covered 使浸没于
hectic
/ˈhektɪk/ adj. very busy; full of activity 忙碌的；繁忙的
Going past childbearing age had brought no relief: “Oh God, it wasn’t a relief to me. It’s an ongoing grief. I thought it would go away after my 30s – I thought, ‘if it doesn’t make biological sense, it won’t make psychological sense’. But in fact it just got worse.”
就算度过了那一段带小孩的特殊时期，你的孤独感也不会因此得到缓解。“噢，上帝。我的孤独感丝毫没有得到缓解。我反而越陷越深，越来越痛苦。我曾经以为这种孤独感会在30多岁后消失。我曾经是这么想的：如果这种说法在生物学上没有办法说得通，那在心理学上它也不可能成立。但，事实上，情况却变得更糟了。”
All she wants now, she says, is to share her life, “in very ordinary ways”, with one other person: “I think the whole meaning of life is sharing and relationships and
companionship
. It’s almost as if doing things on your own isn’t really doing them. If there’s no one to reflect you or relate to you, it’s almost as if you stop existing.”
Fiona说，她现在想要的就是以一种日常的方式和他人分享自己的生活。“在我看来，生活的全部意义就在于分享生活，在于爱情和
友情
。这就像是独自做一件事情不算是真正在做它。如果你的生活中没有可以倾诉的对象或和关系亲密的人，那你好像就不存在了。”
companionship
/kəmˈpæniənʃɪp/ noun [U]the pleasant feeling that you have when you have a friendly relationship with sb and are not alone 友情；交谊；友谊
“What does your loneliness feel like?” I ask Fiona.
“孤独是一种怎样的感觉？”我问Fiona。
“It feels like a
bereavement
– like an enormous loss of something. And it also feels suffocating suffocating – tight and strangling and
suffocating
, even though it’s an absence.”
“它就像是经历一场
丧亲之痛
。你失去许多东西。它也像是一种
令人无法呼吸的
窒息感，紧紧地把你勒住，尽管并不存在什么实体真的在勒你。”
bereavement
/bɪˈri:vmənt/ noun [U] the state of having lost a relative or close friend because they have died 丧失亲人；丧亲之痛
suffocating
/ˈsʌfəkeɪtɪŋ/ adj. making it difficult to breathe normally 令人呼吸困难的；闷的；使人窒息的 SYNSTIFLING
“And what do you do when these feelings become overwhelming?”
“当你的孤独感超级强烈时，你会做点什么来缓解呢？”
“Nothing. I used to make myself go on bike rides and
stuff.
Now I just try to put up with it. I think, ‘this is it, then. This is what loneliness is’.”
“什么都做不了。我曾经逼着自己去骑车，
吃东西
。现在，我就试着忍受它。我想：就是这样的，这就是孤独的感觉。”
stuff
[VN] ~ sb/ yourself (with sth) ~ your face (informal) to eat a lot of food or too much food; to give sb a lot or too much to eat （使）吃撑，吃足，吃得过饱
As old age hovers on the horizon, the loneliness strengthens. “I don’t really have anything good to remember,” Fiona says, “I think about not having done any marvellous things, and that’s a sickening thought. I notice tiny things begin to go wrong with me physically – and I think, ‘there’s nobody who cares or knows what I’m doing now. If something bad happened to me, who would know?’”
