林语堂用英语写出的旷世之作.doc

林语堂用英语写出的旷世之作 2008-04-16 16:51 《生活的艺术》（The Importance of Living）是林语堂用英语写出的旷世之作。林语堂在该书中将旷怀达观， 陶情遣兴的中国人的生活方式，和浪漫高雅的东方情调予以充分的传达，向西方人娓娓道出了一具可供仿效的“生活最高典型”的模式，以致有书评家称：“读完这书后，我真想跑到唐人街，一遇到中国人，便向他行个鞠躬礼。”? ?? ?? ?? ? —摘自《生活的艺术》出版说明 THE ENJOYMENT OF LIVING On Lying in Bed By Lin Yutang IT seems I am destined to become a market philosopher, but it cant be helped. Philosophy generally seems to be the science of making simple things difficult to understand, but I can conceive of a philosophy which is the science of making difficult things simple. In spite of names like materialism, humanism, transcendentalism, :pluralism, and all the other longwinded isms, I contend that these systems are no deeper than my own philosophy, Life after all is made up of eating and sleeping, of meeting and saying good-by to friends, of reunions and farewell parties, of tears and laughter, of having a haircut once in two weeks, of watering a potted flower and watching ones neighbor fall off his roof, and the dressing up of our notions concerning these simple phenomena of life in a kind of academic jargon is nothing but a trick to conceal either an extreme paucity or an extreme vagueness of ideas on the part of the university professors. Philosophy therefore has become a science by means of which we begin more and more to understand less and less about ourselves. What the philosophers have succeeded in is this: the more they talk about it, the more confused we become. It is amazing how few people are conscious of the importance of the art of lying in bed, although actually in my opinion nine-tenths of the worlds most important discoveries, both scientific and philosophical, are come upon when the scientist or philosopher is curled up in bed at two or five oclock in the morning. Some people lie in the daytime and others lie at night. Now by lying I mean at the same time physical and moral lying, for the two happen to coincide. I find that those people who agree with me in believing in lying in bed