Lonliness是一种病，当你感觉自己是一个lonely的人时，你生病了，你这个时候需要的是药方啊！这个药方是什么？是人群，是喧闹，是有人陪着你，或者说是社交。对于一个lonely的人来说，社交是他最需要的。但是，在这里我也要非常冷酷的提醒大家：社交其实是非常廉价的。虽然对于很多大学生来说社交是很吸引人的：它意味着酒会，意味着精英，意味着优雅的微笑，意味着法式的问候。社交其实是很廉价的，为什么这么说呢？廉价并不代表他没有价值，它有价值，只是它的价值不高。
——《复旦大学陈果老师：孤独论》
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。
本文选自
1843
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Nothing about Rebecca’s life looks sad. She’s strikingly attractive and professionally successful. I met her in her comfortable split-level flat in Fulham, just after she had started a new job, another rung up the ladder of career and income. Four years ago, when she was 31, a long-term relationship that she had thought would lead to marriage came to a sudden end. She still looks wistfully over her shoulder, but at the same time desperately wants to settle down and have children before it’s too late. “Lots of people can’t understand why I’m lonely,” she says. “I’ve got a good job, a lovely family and lots of close friends. But most of them now are married and taken up with babies. I try to be happy for them, but there’s no one I can ring if I’ve had a bad day; there’s no one for whom I’m the most important one. Things like filling out forms make me feel acutely lonely. Who’s my
next of kin
? My dad.”
在外人看来，Rebecca的生活一点也不悲哀。她外形迷人，事业成功。我们是在她舒适的复式公寓里见的面。那时，她刚刚换了一份新工作/跳槽，升职加薪，好不快乐。四年前，31岁的她结束了一段爱情长跑。她本来以为这段恋情会修成正果，但最终却事与愿违。受了伤的她对于感情仍然提心吊胆，但同时，她又极其想找个人安顿下来，并且趁年轻生下宝宝。她说：“很多人都不能理解我为什么孤独。我有一份令人艳羡的工作，一个可爱的家庭以及许多密友。但是，我的大部分朋友都结婚生子了。我试着替他们开心。但是想想自己的境况，我做不到。生活不如意时，我没有人能打电话倾诉。也没有人把我放在那个最重要的位置。填写个人信息这样的事情更会让我感到异常孤独。猜猜我在
直系亲属
一栏填了谁？居然是我的父亲。”
next of kin
n. your closest living relative or relatives 直系亲属；最近亲
Rebecca has joined the 7m other people in Britain who are trying to find love through the internet. She reckons she’s been on at least 100 dates so far. Every time, she makes an effort – gets “frocked up” as Australians say – but it’s never yet been successful, and she travels home from each assignation feeling “more lonely than if I’d never tried”. Her
distaste
for the whole business is palpable. Still, faute de mieux, she
bash
es
on
.
Rebecca和其他七百万英国人一样，正试着通过网络寻找爱情。她说，她已经过至少约过100次会了。每次，她都尽力打扮自己，但是都没有牵手成功。每每约会完回家，她都感到“比之前更加孤独了”。她对约会平台的
厌恶
显而易见，但苦于没有更好的选择，只能
继续使用
它。
distaste
/dɪsˈteɪst/ noun ~ (for sb/ sth) a feeling that sb/ sth is unpleasant or offensive 不喜欢；反感；厌恶
bash on
to continue doing something that is difficult, boring or takes a long
“How does it feel?” I ask, as she opens her page on the Guardian Soulmates website (which shows that, to date, 1,305 people have viewed her and 356 people liked her).
我问“使用交友平台是种怎样的体验？”这时，她打开了自己在Guardian Soulmates上的主页，拿给我看：截止目前，有1305人阅览过她的主页，其中256个人对她点了“喜欢”。
“It feels pragmatic, and sad. I’m admitting, ‘I’m lonely, and I want to have a family’, and there’s a kind of shame in that.”
“它让我感觉非常有目的性，而且悲伤。我在承认自己很孤独，想要一个家庭。对此，我甚至觉得有点羞愧。”Rebecca说。
She takes me through the profiles of men who have recently joined the site, most with cheeky-chappy nick-names: Curbychup, FoodieGeoff, LieutenantGrey. She shows me how she’s built her own profile, presenting herself as a happy-go-lucky woman who’s well read and widely travelled. “There’s a loneliness in having to present yourself in a certain way, definitely. The distance between the image I give and the reality is getting wider and wider. But if I were to write the truth – that I’m lonely and worried I might not have a family – it would be just the most off-putting thing.”
她给我看了下最近刚刚使用这个网站的男士的资料。他们中大部分都取了很有挑逗性的名字：Curbychup, 吃货杰夫（FoodieGeoff）, 中校格雷（LieutenantGrey）。她给我看自己是怎么创建主页的；她把自己描述为一个随遇而安的女人，爱读书、爱旅游。“显然，当你填资料时，不得不将自己描述成一个特定的形象，这时你就会感到孤独。你会发现，现实中的自己和描述中的自己差得越来越远。但是，如果我把真实的情况写下来，那这可能会变成最不吸引人的个人介绍了：我很孤独，并担心自己会孤独终生。”
“So people think of loneliness almost as an infectious disease?”
“所以，人们把孤独视为传染病，避而远之？”
“Yup. Something like that. Most people find it very, very unattractive.”
“是的，类似的一些东西吧。大部分人认为孤独的人非常没有吸引力。”
“Does anyone on the Guardian site ever admit to loneliness in their profile?”
“在这个约会平台上，有没有人在自己的资料里承认自己很孤独？”
“NEVER!”
“没有！”
“Are you sure?”
“你确定？”
Rebecca taps the word “lonely” into the search box that allows you to seek out potential partners with particular qualities – Hindi speakers, Old Etonians.
Rebecca把“孤独”打入搜索框。通过这个搜索工具，你可以找到符合特定条件的对象，比如“会说印地语的人”或“
伊顿佬
”。
译者注：伊顿公学的校友都被称为“伊顿佬” （Old Etonians），包括前首相戴维·卡梅伦。
Instantly, it returns the message “No soulmates found”.
结果立即显示“没有找到您的灵魂伴侣”。
According to the Office for National Statistics, Britain is the “loneliness capital of Europe”. For the novelist Deborah Moggach, loneliness is “the last taboo: we talk about everything else, even death, but nobody likes to admit that they’re lonely”. And while loneliness has no physical manifestations, it can be an affliction more harrowing than homelessness, hunger or disease. “The greatest suffering is being lonely, feeling unloved, just having no one,” Mother Teresa wrote. Loneliness is the leprosy of the 21st century, eating away at its victims and
repel
ling those who encounter it.
根据英国国家统计局统计，英国是“欧洲的孤独之都”。对于小说家Deborah Moggach来说，孤独是“最后的禁忌。人们会谈论除了孤独之外的所有事情，甚至死亡。但是，没有人会承认自己孤独。”由于孤独是没有实物体现的，所以它对人所造成的折磨，要比无家可归、饥饿或疾病更加可怕。修女特蕾莎曾写到：对人最大的折磨就是孤独，它使人感到没有人关爱自己，孤孤零零。孤独就是21世纪的麻风病，侵蚀着感染它的人，也
威胁
着
还未受到感染的人。
repel
/rɪˈpel/ verb (-ll-) [VN] (formal) to successfully fight sb who is attacking you, your country, etc. and drive them away 击退；驱逐
In Britain 7.7m people live alone. “Thank God London property is so
extortionate
,” a single, 30-something woman said to me. “I can’t afford to buy alone, so I’m forced to carry on sharing.” The number of baby-boomers– people aged 45 to 64 – living alone is increasing year on year. Seventeen million adults in Britain are unattached. More than 1m older people feel lonely all or most of the time, and most of them do not feel able to admit their loneliness to family and friends. Loneliness is one of the chief reasons people contact
the Samaritans
, though often callers find it hard to admit it. “People who call us sometimes feel that loneliness is not a good enough reason for calling,” says Nick, a long-term Samaritans volunteer. “They feel ashamed or embarrassed, as though feeling lonely isn’t something serious.” Three out of four GPs say that they see between one and five lonely people a day; only 13% feel equipped to help them, even though loneliness has a detrimental effect on health equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Only 22% of us have never felt lonely.
英国的独居人口高达770万。“感谢上帝，伦敦的房价
超级贵
。”一位三十来岁的独身女子说。“我根本不可能买得起房，所以只能和人合租。”在婴儿潮出生的那一代人，现在大概45-64岁，每年，他们中都有越来越多的人开始独居。1700万的英国成年人和其他人是没有接触的。超过100万的老年人一直或在大部分时间感到孤独。他们中大部分都觉得，无法在亲友面前承认自己的孤独。孤独是人们联系英国
撒玛利亚会
（the Samaritans）的主要原因之一，虽然他们很难承认自己的孤独感。撒玛利亚会的一位长期志愿者Nick说：“那些给我打电话的人有时会觉得孤独并不是一个能让他们打电话给我们的理由。他们感到羞耻或尴尬，好像感到孤独不是什么严重的问题似的。”四分之三的全科医生表示，自己每天都会见到一个至五个孤独的人；只有13%的医生觉得自己有能力帮助他们，尽管孤独最终会对健康产生致命损害，相当于每天抽15根烟。只有22%的人从来不觉得孤独。
译者注：撒玛利亚会 (Samaritans) 是一间注册志愿机构，以英格兰和爱尔兰为基地，为情绪受困扰和企图自杀的人提供支援。“撒玛利亚会”的名称源自圣经好撒玛利亚人的故事，但它本身并没有宗教立场。
extortionate
/ɪkˈstɔ:ʃənət; NAmE -ˈstɔ:rʃ- / adj. (disapproving) (of prices, etc. 价格等) much too high 过于昂贵的；过高的
I wanted to discover who these shoals of lonely people were and to get a sense of the texture of their suffering. And I wanted to understand the psychology of loneliness. What does it feel like? Can it be cured? Is it the product of low incomes – or, indeed, of prosperity?
我想知道那群孤独者到底是谁，想去感受他们的痛苦。我还想理解孤独的心理学原理。它到底是一种怎样的感受？它能被治愈吗？导致孤独的原因是低收入，或者甚至是社会的繁荣？
In a street off Portobello Road in London, a battered grey door leads into a hallway adrift with junk mail. Up three flights of stairs, in a book-infested eyrie, the psychologist Adam Phillips – once described as the “
Martin Amis
of British psychoanalysis” for his razor-sharp intellect and often unsettling work – writes his bestselling books and treats his patients. Most of these, he says, suffer some degree of loneliness and the frantic search for romance may exacerbate the problem. “If one’s living in a culture where a lot of people are lonely,” he says, “there’s going to be a tremendous idealisation of relationships. People are going to want more from each other than they can give. It’s going to produce a compensatory dream of unbelievable ecstatic intimacy. And lots of things can be used to appease this – sex, for example. I think in our culture there’s a lot of sexualisation of loneliness. I think that’s what pornography is, in a sense: a despair about relationship, a despair about real exchange. And loneliness is fundamentally about someone’s belief in the power of exchange: whether we can give each other things that make a difference, whether we can make each other feel better.”
在伦敦波多贝罗大街拐下来的一条小街上，一扇灰色破旧的门通向一条铺满垃圾广告的走廊。在一家书巢，走上三层楼梯，心理学家Adam Phillips正在写他的畅销书，并接待他的病人们。他曾被称之为英国心理学家中的
Martin Amis
。Aims说，他的大部分病人都忍受着某种程度上的孤独，而对于爱情的疯狂寻觅会加重他们的病情。“如果一个人生活在许多人都很孤独的文化中，那他对爱情会有种极端的理想主义。人们会想要从对方那里得到更多，自己却不愿意付出那么多。这种对爱情的理想主义会让人们产生对极其狂热恋情的弥补性梦想。人们需要许多事物来安抚内心对狂热恋情的梦想，比如性。我认为，在我们的文化中存在许多由孤独驱使的性关系。在某种意义上，“黄片”就是孤独的产物：对爱情的绝望，对真正的相互给予的绝望。孤独与否根本上在于人们是不是相信“相互给予的力量”：我们是否能够给予彼此有影响的东西，是否能够让彼此都感觉更好。”
