Carson McCullers - Loneliness—An American Malady 汉译

This city, New York – consider the people in it, the eight million of us. An English friend of mine, when asked why he lived in New York City, said that he liked it here because he could be so alone. While it was my friend’s desire to be alone, the aloneness of many Americans who live in cities is an involuntary and fearful thing. It has been said that loneliness is the great American malady. What is the nature of this loneliness? It would seem essentially to be a quest for identity.

To the spectator, the amateur philosophy, no motive among the complex ricochets of our desires and rejections seems stronger or more enduring than the will of the individual to claim his identity and belong. From infancy to death, the human being is obsessed by these dual motives. During our first weeks of life, the question of identity shares urgency with the need for milk. The baby reaches for his toes then explores the bars of his crib; again and again he compares the difference between his own body and the objects around him, and in the wavering, infant eyes there comes a pristine wonder.

Consciousness of self is the first abstract problem that the human being solves. Indeed, it is this self consciousness that removes us from lower animals. This primitive grasp of identity develops with constantly shifting emphasis through all our years. Perhaps maturity is simply the history of those mutations that reveal to the individual the relation between himself and the world which he finds himself.

After the first establishment of identity there comes the imperative need to lose this new-found sense of separateness and to belong to something larger and more powerful than the weak, lonely self. The sense of moral isolation is intolerable to us.

In The member of the Wedding the lovely 12-year-old girl, Frankie Adams, articulates this universal need:” The trouble with me is that for a long time I have just been an I person. All people belong to a. We except me. Not to belong to a We makes you too lonesome.” Love is the bridge that leads from the I sense to the We and there is a paradox about personal love.

Love of another individual opens a new relation between the personality and the world. the lover responds in a new way to nature and may even write poetry. Love is affirmation; it motivates the yes responses and the sense of wider communication. Love casts our fear, and in the security of this togetherness we find contentment, courage. We no longer fear the age-old haunting question: “Who am I?” “Where am I going?”—and having cast out fear we can be honest and charitable.

For fear is a primary source of evil. And when the question “Who am I?” recurs and is unanswered, then fear and frustration project a negative attitude. The bewildered soul can answer only: “Since I do not understand ‘Who I am,’ I only know what I am not.” The corollary of this emotional incertitude is snobbism, intolerance, and racial hate. The xenophobic individual can only reject and destroy, as the xenophobic nation inevitably makes war.

The loneliness of Americans does not have its source in xenophobia; as a nation we are an outgoing people, reaching always for immediate contacts, further experience. But we tend to seek out as individuals, alone. The European, secure in his family ties and rigid class loyalties, knows little of the moral loneliness that is native to us American .Whole the European artists tend to form little of the moral loneliness that is native to us American artist is the eternal maverick – not only from society in the way of 60 all creative minds, but within the orbit of this own art.

Thoreau took to the woods to seek the ultimate meaning of this life. His creed was simplicity and his modus vevendi the deliberate stripping of external life to the Spartan necessities in order that his inward life could freely flourish. His objective, as he put it, was to back the world into a corner. And in that way did he discover “What a man thinks to himself, that is which determines, or rather indicates, his life.”

On the other hand, Thomas Wolf turned to the city, and in his wanderings around New York he continued his frenetic lifelong search for the lost brother, the magic door. He too backed the world into a corner, and as he passed among the city’s millions. Returning their stares, he experienced “That silent meeting is the summary of all the meetings of men’s lives.”

Whether in the pastoral joys of country life or in the labyrinthine city, we Americans are always seeking We wander, question. But the answer waits in each separate heart – the answer of our own identity and the way by which we can master loneliness and feel that at last we belong.