I have mixed feelings looking back on those five years of study. I feel the same ambiguity I feel whenever I visit a university anywhere in the world to lecture on literature, give a sociology seminar, or simply talk to faculty members and their enthusiastic students. Gaining an overview of an entire field of study, having the chance to study all day 一整天学习的机会 (a chance that may never return later in life 在以后的生活中可能不会再有的机会) , agonizing in preparation for examinations, recognizing personal capacities and limits 意识到个人能力与限制, worshiping some professors and disparaging others, thinking through the strategies for turning knowledge to use思考各种策略以将知识化入应用, living the excitement of first love, conversing with friends deep into the night, entering ignorant and exiting relatively well educated—no, we did... (查看原文)
Looking around me, I saw nothing but strategists. How did they deal with the issues, the obstacles他们是如何应对问题的，那些障碍? The patterns they assumed, born of compulsion, appealed to me, comical though they were他们所设想的那些模式，由强迫症产生，吸引着我，尽管很滑稽. Every social type, after all, is a complex of clichés每一种社会类型，无论怎样，都是一系列陈词滥调的复杂组合. Caricature needs recurrent elements讽刺漫画需要相互对应的元素. Life here abounded in provocations and hardships directly traceable to schematic thought这里的生活充满着被触怒与艰难困苦可以直接追溯到程式化思考. Psychic sprains were never far from our door.
What interested me was how thinking becomes reality not from habit or sober practicality or tradition but from the exertions of the willful mind, from bold dreams, from seeking the truth and then announcing it—how the noble turn base, ideals become a hell, and how, in th... (查看原文)
What has changed over the past forty years? Poverty is lasting; only the faces change. But poverty is more than a condition; it is a blow, a disaster, a pit you fall into. How can you expect a person in dire straits to have the patience of a saint? When the well-to-do go off the rails, they may or may not pay a price当富人(的生活)脱离常轨，他们可能会付出代价也可能不会; the poor have no choice: they kick, they scratch, they torture one another.
Reviewers found the world of my first novel, The Case Worker, hellish. I found it quite normal: one’s imperfections make one mortal, hence real. Moral philosophy must be built on human frailty, and our acceptance of it. Behave outlandishly and you scare people. They take you for a criminal or a lunatic who belongs in a prison or asylum, as if humans were cars and could be ta... (查看原文)
After the fall of the Revolution, in the “consolidated sixties团结坚实的六十年代,” I encountered the touchiness of tyranny专政的暴躁 wherever I looked. The police captain and the concierge were the state’s patron saints. They were granted practically nothing else but the right to high-minded rage and to vengeance on their fellow citizens in the name of the state以国家之名. Do not imagine that people who appear intelligent, good-natured, and civilized will not go wild when presented with a chance to take umbrage in the name of the state. (查看原文)
The latent elegance of the city transcended all obstacles这座城市一种潜在的优雅超越了所有障碍. You could still find white-haired watchmakers in nineteenth-century workshops and elderly, elegantly dressed Jewish salesmen in state-owned fabric shops. Waiters with prewar manners still served you in restaurants that still featured prewar pianists. (查看原文)
Faith, answers Tolstoy. He first settles on religious faith, then searches for something personal. Faith and intelligence are unrelated. One cannot use the one to verify or support the other. After intelligence has done its work, faith demands its rights at the outer limit of our helplessness. (Faith and not God, Who is a consequence of faith, faith as one of the vital functions.) The concept of infinity does not arise from the circle of the finite. Faith carries us beyond the limits of the finite to a state of humility in the face of the infinite, a humility that releases us by undoing our very selves.
At this point his train of thought gives way to an apostolic brand of speech, which I did not follow in its stark moralizing tendencies直白的说教倾向, its idealization of the peasants and the poor... (查看原文)
I prize what is with all its fortune and misfortune. I have no desire to break with this world or merge with it. For the time being I hope the world and I will keep staring each other down.
All I can assume about the future is that human life on earth will eventually disappear我能设想到的未来就是地球上的人类生命会最终消失. This likelihood offers me no moral choice. I have always been amazed at how simpleminded religious concepts of the afterlife and communist-inspired (or other invented) utopias tend to be.
Both earthly and heavenly utopias presuppose a rejection of the world, of the here and the now. Any exaltation of the future entails a vilification of the present. Whatever my present existence may be like, I cannot wish for something radically and elementally different, because I do not believe in the possib... (查看原文)
Just after I lost my job a thick-browed colleague stuck his head into my office and whispered, “You sealed your own fate.” But I despised the idea of begging my way back into the fold. Officially sanctioned normality contains all the symptoms of neurosis官方认可的正常包括所有的神经症症状. Only the free are healthy只有自由者是健康的, and the healthy are their own masters健康是他们自己的主人. The sick are directed by others病患者受他人指挥: they are dependent, they cannot take care of themselves, stand on their own two feet, make decisions, see things as they are. They see what they want to see—or what they fear.他们是依赖的，无法照顾自己，无法凭自己的双腿站立，无法做决定，无法看到事物的本真。他们只看到他们想要看到的，或者他们害怕看到的。 (查看原文)
作者: George Konrad 副标题: A Hungarian Life isbn: 1590511395 书名: A Guest in My Own Country 页数: 308 定价: GBP 13.80 出版社: Other Press 出版年: 2007-4-17 装帧: Paperback
