9
Beauty
美丽的含义
1. Does beauty give birth to love or does love give birth to beauty? Did I love Chloe because she was beautiful or was she beautiful because I loved her? Surrounded by an infinite number of people, we may ask (staring at our lover while they talk on the phone or lie opposite us in the bath) why our desire has chosen to settle on this particular face, this particular mouth or nose or ear, why this curve of the neck or dimple in the cheek has come to answer so precisely to our criterion of perfection? Every one of our lovers offers different solutions to the problem of beauty, and yet succeeds in redefining our notions of attractiveness in a way that is as original and as idiosyncratic as the landscape of their face.是美丽引发了爱情，还是爱情创造了美丽？是因为克洛艾美丽我才爱她，还是因为我爱她她才美丽？在茫茫人海之中，我们（凝视着正在打电话或躺在我们对面沐浴的心上人）也许会发出这样的疑问：为什么这特定的一张脸、一片唇、一弯鼻、一轮耳会满足我们的欲望？为什么她脖子的曲线、颜靥的酒窝正好符合我们给完美定出的标准？每一位心上人都能使我们得到美丽的不同诠释，都能圆满地重释我们各自的情爱美学，其方式既新颖别致，又富有个性，有如她/他们脸上的风景一样。
2. If Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) defined love as 'the desire for beauty', in what ways did Chloe fulfil this desire? To listen to Chloe, in no way whatever. No amount of reassurance could persuade her that she was anything but loathsome. She insisted on finding her nose too small, her mouth too wide, her chin uninteresting, her ears too round, her eyes not green enough, her hair not wavy enough, her breasts too small, her feet too large, her hands too wide, and her wrists too narrow. She would gaze longingly at the faces in the pages of Elle and Vogue and declare that the concept of a just God was ?in the light of her physical appearance ?simply an incoherence.如果马西略·费奇诺把爱情定义为“对美丽的欲望”，那么克洛艾是怎样满足了我的欲望？克洛艾自己说，没法满足。我费尽口舌也不能说服她，她一点也不丑。她执意认为，自己的鼻子太小、嘴巴太大、下颌死板、耳朵太圆、眼睛不够绿、头发不飘洒、胸太小、脚太大、手太粗、腕太细。她会无限向往地盯住《ELLE》和《时尚》杂志里的一张张脸宣称，从她的长相来看，说上帝公平简直就是胡言乱语。
3. Chloe believed that beauty could be measured according to an objective standard, one she had simply failed to reach. Without acknowledging it as such, she was resolutely attached to a Platonic concept of beauty, an aesthetic she shared with the world's fashion magazines and which fuelled a daily sense of self-loathing in front of the mirror. According to Plato and the editor of Vogue, there exists such a thing as an ideal form of beauty, made up of a balanced relation between parts, and which earthly bodies will approximate to a greater or a lesser degree. There is a mathematical basis for beauty, Plato suggested, so that the face on the front cover of a magazine is necessarily rather than coincidentally pleasing.克洛艾相信美丽可以根据一个客观的标准来衡量，而她自己完全不符合这个标准。尽管克洛艾并不承认，但她已经坚定地与柏拉图的美丽观站到了一起，这是她和世界时尚杂志的编辑们都接受的一种美学观点，这观念会令人每天坐在镜子前时产生一种自我厌弃的感觉。根据柏拉图和《时尚》编辑的观点，普通人的身体或多或少有点接近。柏拉图说，任何被认为是美丽的东西都部分具有美的基本形式，因此肯定展示了普遍的特征。从一个美丽的女子身上，可以发现美丽包含数学的基本原理，是一种天生的均衡，比古代神庙建筑中发现的不会少。在柏拉图看来，杂志封面上的脸像更接近完美的形式（克洛艾正为此而崇拜不已。我还记得她坐在床上一边晾头发，一边翻杂志，扭动着脸部肌肉，夸张地模仿模特们轻松自在的姿势。）克洛艾为自己的鼻子与厚薄不一的嘴唇不搭配而感到羞愧。她的鼻子很小，嘴唇过厚，这意味着她的脸的中心部位产生了柏拉图所谓的不和谐。柏拉图曾说，只有各个部分均衡的搭配才能创造一种动态的静止和自在的完满，这正是一般人所缺少的。如果柏拉图说只有“尺寸（计量）和比例（对称）的适宜才能组成美丽和卓越”，那么克洛艾的脸肯定既不美丽也不卓越。
4. Whatever mathematical errors there were in her face, Chloe found the rest of her body even more unbalanced. Whereas I loved to watch soapy water running over her stomach and legs in the shower, whenever she looked at herself in the mirror she would invariably declare that something was 'lopsided' ?though quite what I never discovered. Leon Battista Alberti (1409-72) might have known better, for he believed that any beautiful body had fixed proportions which he spelt out mathematically after dividing the body of a beautiful Italian girl into six hundred units, then working out the distances from section to section. Summing up his results in his book On Sculpture, Alberti defined beauty as 'a Harmony of all the Parts, in whatsoever Subject it appears, fitted together with such proportion and connection, that nothing could be added, diminished or altered, but for the worse'. But according to Chloe, however, almost anything about her body could have been added, diminished, or altered without spoiling anything that nature had not already devastated.除了脸部的不和谐，克洛艾发现自己身体的其他部分更不匀称。虽然洗澡时我乐于欣赏泡沫流过她腹部和腿部的曲线，但每当克洛艾在镜子里看见自己和身材时，总是说“某个部位不匀称”——尽管我从来没有发现有什么不匀称的。莱昂·巴蒂斯塔·阿尔贝蒂也许对此更在行一些，因为在他看来，雕塑家应该明了，美的体型有一些固定的比例，从而找到各部分之间的理想距离。在《论雕塑》一书中，阿尔贝蒂将美丽限定为“无论主体如何呈现，所有部分依照这样的连接比例和谐地组装，分毫不爽，增一分太多、减一分嫌少，任何改变则使其破坏”。但是在克洛艾看来，几乎她身形的任何部位都被增了一分、减了一分或被修改，就此而言，她完整地保存了上帝馈赠给她的一切不完美。
5.Clearly Plato and Leon Battista Alberti had neglected something in their aesthetic theories, for I found Chloe excessively beautiful. Did I like her green eyes, her dark hair, her full mouth? I hesitate to try and pin down her appeal. Discussions of physical beauty have some of the futility of debates between art historians attempting to justify the relative merits of different artists. A Van Gogh or a Gauguin? One might try to redescribe the work in language ('the lyrical intelligence of Gauguin's South Sea skies...' next to 'the Wagnerian depth of Van Gogh's blues...') or else to elucidate technique or materials ('the Expressionist feel of Van Gogh's later years...', 'Gauguin's Cezanne-like linearity...'). But what would all this do to explain why one painting grips us by the collar and another leaves us cold? The language of the eye stubbornly resists translation into the language of words.但是柏拉图和莱昂·巴蒂斯塔·阿尔贝蒂（不论他们计算的多么准确）的美学理论中显然忽视了一些东西，因为在我看来，克洛艾美丽无比。我说.不产出到底是什么如此吸引我。是喜欢她绿色的眼眸、黑色的头发、饱满的嘴唇？我不知道，因为言辞不能描述为何一个人有吸引力而另一个人却没有。我可以说是由于她鼻梁上的雀斑或她脖子的曲线，但是这又怎能说服那些不觉得她有魅力的人呢？美丽毕竟不是可以通过说服别人来接受的啊。美丽不是数学公式，不可以得出一个无可置疑的结论。关于男人和女人魅力的争论，类似于艺术史家试图说明为什么一幅画优于另一幅画的争论。是一幅凡·高的画更优秀、还是一幅高庚的画更优秀呢？惟一的比较方法就是通过语言描述作品（“高庚《南方的海》里的天空展示感情奔放的天才……”逊于“凡·高运用蓝色达到的瓦格纳式的深度……”），或通过绘画技巧和材料来阐释（“凡·高后期作品的表现主义感觉……”“高庚那些塞尚式的直线……”）。然而在解释为何一幅作品能感动我们，令我们感受到美的真谛时，它们又能起到什么真正的作用？如果说画家历来就不屑于艺术史家跟随其后的评论，那么与其说这是出于反向的势利，还不如说是出于一种感觉，即绘画的语言（美丽的语言）无法用人类的话语来表达。
6. It was not beauty that I could hope to describe, only my personal response to Chloe's appearance. I could simply point out where my desire had happened to settle, while allowing the possibility that others would locate comparable perfection in quite other beings. In so doing, I was forced to reject the Platonic idea of an objective criterion of beauty, siding instead with Kant's view, as expressed in his Critique of Judgement, that aesthetic judgements are ones 'whose determining ground can be none other than subjective'.因此我能够描述的不是美丽，而只是我自己对克洛艾外表的一种主观感受。我不能说要建立一个具有普遍效验的美学理论，只能指出我的欲望最终的归宿，同时允许他人认为克洛艾并非十全十美。于是我不得不反对柏拉图的美丽有客观标准的论点，而同意康德的说法（表达在《判断力批评》一书中），即美的判断是一个“决定性的基础只能是主观的”判断。
康德的美学观认为，身体的比例并不像欣赏身体的主观方式那么重要，否则我们怎么解释，对于同一个人，为何有人看来美丽动人，而有人则认为丑陋不堪？
7. The way I looked at Chloe could have been compared to the famous Muller-Lyer illusion, where two lines of identical length will appear to be of different sizes according to the nature of the arrows attached at their ends. The loving way that I gazed at Chloe functioned like a pair of outward arrows, which give an ordinary line a semblance of length it might not objectively deserve.美丽在于观者，这个现象可比作是著名的缪勒-莱尔幻像，由于两端的箭头方向不同，两根相同长度的直线看起来却长短各异。如果把长度比作美丽，那么我注视克洛艾时的情形就像指向直线末端的箭头一样，使得克洛艾的脸看起来与众不同，比那些客观地看几乎是同一张脸的人显得更为美丽（直线更长）。我的爱就像放在同一根直线两端的箭头，它产生了一种与众不同的印象，不论其多么不真实。
8. A definition of beauty that more accurately summed up my feelings for Chloe was delivered by Stendhal. 'Beauty is the promise of happiness,' he wrote, pointing to the way that Chloe's face alluded to qualities that I identified with a good life: there was humour in her nose, her freckles spoke of innocence, and her teeth suggested a casual, cheeky disregard for convention. I did not see the gap between her two front teeth [see figure] as an offensive deviation from an ideal arrangement, but as an original and most love-worthy redefinition of dental perfection. I was not simply indifferent to the gap in between the teeth: I positively adored it.斯汤达曾经给美丽下过一个著名的定义：美丽即“幸福的允诺”，这与柏拉图所谓的部分与部分之间完美和谐的刻板观点实在大异其趣。克洛艾也许不能被认为是完美无缺，但是她依然美丽。是她的美丽令我感到幸福，还是她令我感到幸福才美丽？这是一个自我确认的循环：当克洛艾令我感到幸福时，她是美丽的；她是美丽的，这又令我感到幸福。
我被吸引的特别之处在于，它并非建立在欲望倾注的明确目标之上，同样也不是建立在克洛艾的众多特征——从柏拉图的观点来看，也许并非完美和特征——之上。在克洛艾面部不美丽的特征之中，其他人不会看上一眼的特征之中，我找到了自己渴望看到的东西，这令我油然而生一种自豪感。例如，我并不认为她两颗门齿之间的缝隙不好看，不符合完美的排列，恰恰相反，我觉得它独特无比，是最值得爱的完美牙齿。我不仅对牙齿之间的缝隙漠然处之，相反，我十分欣赏。
9.I took pride in finding Chloe more beautiful than a Platonist would have done. The most interesting faces generally oscillate between charm and crookedness. There is a tyranny about perfection, a certain tedium even, something that asserts itself with all the dogmatism of a scientific formula. The more tempting kind of beauty has only a few angles from which it may be seen, and then not in all lights and at all times. It flirts dangerously with ugliness, it takes risks with itself, it does not side comfortably with mathematical rules of proportion, it draws its appeal from precisely those details that also lend themselves to ugliness. As Proust once said, classically beautiful women should be left to men without imagination.我欣赏自己心中的秘密，崇拜自己欲望的与众不同，以及无人知晓克洛艾的牙齿在我眼中的意义。在柏拉图的信仰者们看来，克洛艾也许并不美丽，甚至会有人认为她很丑，但是在她的美丽之中有些东西并不为那些所谓的柏拉图式的完美脸庞所有。在丑陋和经典式完美之间的地带可以找到美丽。一个让上千艘船只下了水的斜坡从建筑学上看并不一定正规，也许很不牢靠，就像在两种颜色之间旋转的物体一样，只要不停下来，将会产生第三种颜色。完美有一种专横的味道，也有一种枯竭的感觉，它甚至否定在创造完美的过程中观者的作用，它用明确的教条武断地发表评价。真正的美丽并不可测量，因为美丽是流动变化的。美丽只有从某些角度才为人所见，而并非所有的角度，并非永远都能看见。美丽危险地隐现在丑陋之间，有被人当作丑陋的可能。美丽并没有恰当地符合比例的数学原则，美丽产生吸引力的地方正是可能使自己显得丑陋的地方。美丽也许需要承受与丑陋共存的风险。
普罗斯特曾经说过，绝代佳人不会给人们留下想象的空间。
10.My imagination enjoyed playing in the space between Chloe's teeth. Her beauty was fractured enough that it could support creative rearrangements. In its ambiguity, her face could have been compared to Wittgenstein's duck-rabbit, where both a duck and a rabbit seem contained in the same image. Much depends on the attitude of the viewer: if the imagination is looking for a duck, it will find one, if it is looking for a rabbit, it will appear instead. What counts is the predisposition of the viewer. It was of course love that was generously predisposing me. The editor of Vogue might have had difficulty including photos of Chloe in an issue, but this was only a confirmation of the uniqueness that I had managed to find in my girlfriend. I had animated her face with her soul.也许是因为克洛艾的牙齿留给我想象的余地，所以才那么富有吸引力。我的想象力被她齿间的缝隙激发了：合上，分开，要我的舌头伸入。缝隙使我能够重新安排克洛艾的牙齿，她的美丽是断裂的，可以创造性地重新组合。因为她的脸既有美的体现又有丑的特征，于是我的想象需要去这不稳定的美。因为这种美与丑的模棱两可，克洛艾的脸可比作是维特根斯坦的“鸭-兔”图，同一幅画中包含了鸭子和兔子，就如同从克洛艾的身上可以同时看到两张脸孔。
维特根斯坦的例子在很大程度上依赖观者的态度：如果想找的是一只鸭，寻就会找到一只鸭；如果想找的是一只兔，那么同样会出现一只兔。两幅图像都可以找到根据，关键是观者的倾向和意念。当然是爱使我把克洛艾想象成美丽的人（而非鸭子）。我觉得这种爱更为纯真，因为它不是产生于一张按明显确凿的比例分配的脸蛋。《时尚》的编辑也许不愿意把克洛艾的照片登在他们的杂志上，然而，滑稽的是，这反而增强了我的渴望，因为这似乎证实了我一直想从克洛艾身上找到的她与众不同之处。发现一个完全符合比例的人的“美丽”又怎么算得上富有创造性？在牙缝之间发现美丽肯定需要更大的努力、更多的普罗斯特式的想象。我不是从显眼处出发寻找克洛艾的美丽，而是从别人看不到的特征中发现她的动人之处；我已经领悟了她的灵魂，于是觉得她的脸庞生动无比。
11. The danger with the kind of beauty that does not look like a Greek statue is that its precariousness places much emphasis on the viewer. Once the imagination decides to remove itself from the gap in the teeth, is it not time for a good orthodontist? Once we locate beauty in the eye of the beholder, what will happen when the beholder looks elsewhere? But perhaps that was all part of Chloe's appeal. A subjective theory of beauty makes the observer wonderfully indispensable.这种看似不同于希腊雕塑的美丽存在一种危险：过于依赖观者。一旦想象决定从牙缝间移开，岂不就是找一个好的牙科医生的时候了？如果美丽是存在于观者的眼中，那么一旦观者的目光转向别处，又会是怎样的情景？但也许就是克洛艾一切魅力的所在。主观的美学理论使观者真是必不可少啊。