Hippopotamus Post

第五章 第7段 The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has health to do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In special and abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarly unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless. If we are doctors we are speaking to exceptionally sick men, and they ought to be told to be careful. But when we are sociologists we are addressing the normal man, we are addressing humanity. And humanity ought to be told to be recklessness itself. For all the fundamental functions of a healthy man ought emphatically to be performed with pleasure and for pleasure; they emphatically ought not to be performed with precaution or for precaution. A man ought to eat because he has a good appetite to satisfy, and emphatically not because he has a body to sustain. A man ought to tak...

 第5段 Now, this arresting, mental humility in Mr. H. G. Wells may be, like a great many other things that are vital and vivid, difficult to illustrate by examples, but if I were asked for an example of it, I should have no difficulty about which example to begin with. The most interesting thing about Mr. H. G. Wells is that he is the only one of his many brilliant contemporaries who has not stopped growing. One can lie awake at night and hear him grow. Of this growth the most evident manifestation is indeed a gradual change of opinions; but it is no mere change of opinions. It is not a perpetual leaping from one position to another like that of Mr. George Moore. It is a quite continuous advance along a quite solid road in a quite definable direction. But the chief proof that it is not a piece of fickleness and vanity is the fact that it has been upon the whole an advance from more startling opinions to more humdrum opinions. It has been even in some sense an advance from unconventio...

誠實的說，我不知道我翻了什麼。 若我有機會遇到Chesterton，我真心想問他，到底書中哪些段落是認真的，哪些是諷刺，哪些是考試，為了篩選讀者，刷掉像我這類智力不足、語言能力不佳的人XD 第3段 And this gay humility, this holding of ourselves lightly and yet ready for an infinity of unmerited triumphs, this secret is so simple that every one has supposed that it must be something quite sinister and mysterious. Humility is so practical a virtue that men think it must be a vice. Humility is so successful that it is mistaken for pride. It is mistaken for it all the more easily because it generally goes with a certain simple love of splendour which amounts to vanity. Humility will always, by preference, go clad in scarlet and gold; pride is that which refuses to let gold and scarlet impress it or please it too much. In a word, the failure of this virtue actually lies in its success; it is too successful as an investment to be believed in as a virtue. Humility is not merely too good for this world; it is too practical for this world; I had almost said it is too worldly for this world...

第五章  第1段 V. Mr. H. G. Wells and the Giants We ought to see far enough into a hypocrite to see even his sincerity. We ought to be interested  in that darkest and most real part of a man in which dwell not the vices that he does not display, but  the virtues that he cannot. And the more we approach the problems of human history with this keen  and piercing charity, the smaller and smaller space we shall allow to pure hypocrisy of any kind.  The hypocrites shall not deceive us into thinking them saints; but neither shall they deceive us into  thinking them hypocrites. And an increasing number of cases will crowd into our field of inquiry,  cases in which there is really no question of hypocrisy at all, cases in which people were so  ingenuous that they seemed absurd, and so absurd that they seemed disingenuous. 第五章 H. G. 威爾斯與巨人 如要檢視一個偽君子，應詳閱細讀到甚至可清楚看到他的真實誠懇。關於人，我們應好奇他最隱藏、最真實之處，而那不是他藏匿隱而未顯之惡的角落，而是深存未昭顯之善的地方。我們愈以這熱誠、敏銳的善意面對人類歷史的問題，我們容讓任何純粹偽善生存的空間也就愈發縮小...