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The Mind's Theatre
心灵的"万象共生的剧场"
艺术既不能增加你的德行也不会让你变得聪颖，但我却义无反顾地视它们为信仰，把它当作生命的一部分，如同一些人将宗教作为自己生命的部分一样。
可惜，伟大的艺术有时却被野兽所爱，最恰当的例子非纳粹莫属。杰出的评论家乔治.斯坦纳道出了这个不尽人意的事实：“我们知道这样的人，他会弹奏巴赫和肖邦，也会在每天早上去奥斯维辛开始他的工作。”
但是这些有教养的死亡营的看守者并未伤害德国的文化。确实，他们彻底消除了那些愚蠢的想法，即认为伟大的艺术是与民族如影随形的。但是当纳粹大屠杀结束的时候，德国的文化却得以幸存。
从更小一点的层面上说，我们也不能宣称终日沉浸在艺术之中便能创造出一个鲜活的思想。艺术教育同样造就出了一群有学识却令人生厌的人。我认识一个人，他请来当时最好的演奏家日复一日的为他演奏莎士比亚，威尔地，贝多芬及其他大家的作品。但所有这些对他来说都毫无效果。他依旧阴郁，险隘，无可救药地醉心于传统的智慧中。
对于那些创造艺术的人而言，如果我们认为他们的作品使得他们的私人生活也让人羡慕，那我们就错了。上世纪的著名记者丽贝卡.韦斯评论到，“创造一幅艺术品的力量如同一个绝妙的表情，通常都是无意间进行的。”所以我的信仰，就像基督教一样，并不会允诺我好的德行或更高的智力。
那么究竟它有什么用处呢？那些将时间与感情投注于艺术之上的人们被给予了更多的机会享受比他人更加丰富更加深刻的人生。他们可以学着与音乐，绘画，书籍这些长存了许多世纪的财富零距离接触。他们可以跨越空间距离，企及各式音乐，影像和他们自己想要谱写的故事。最绝的是，艺术模糊了时间的界限，只有通过艺术作品我们才能一瞥古希腊或中世纪西班牙或现代化之前的日本的样子。
人类的心灵（按照威廉.詹姆士在《心理学的原则》中的说法）是万象众生的剧场。艺术为那个内在的剧场布局，又为舞台充盈进鲜活而又值得回味的人物角色，那些角色与我们生活中的人物混合在了一起。即使我们是孤独的，我们都在这个不断扩大的社会陪伴之下走完了一生，而其中的艺术家，角色与影像都是由我们自己挑选的。
艺术同样让我们得以在它们创造的世界里充满想象地生活。它们给予我们另外一种叙述人类的方式，也许这是它们最慷慨的礼物了。纵观历史，艺术从未将蛊惑民心的领导者或士兵描绘为伟大的人物。艺术使得那些精致，充满魅力的传统代
The arts won't make you virtuous and they won't make you smart, but they are nevertheless my faith, firmly installed in the part of me where some people put religion.
Great art, alas, has sometimes been loved by monsters, famously the Nazis. George Steiner, the eminent critic, delivers the bad news: "We know that a man can play Bach and Schubert and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning."
But cultured death-camp guards didn't destroy German culture. True, they eliminated any foolish belief that great art comes with ethics attached. But when the Holocaust ended, German culture remained.
On a more trivial level, we also can't claim that immersion in the arts will create a lively mind. Art education has produced armies of learned bores. I knew a man who had Shakespeare, Verdi, Beethoven and the rest of the gang played at him by the greatest performers of his time, night after night for a lifetime. Did no good. He remained gloomy, narrow and hopelessly addicted to conventional wisdom.
As for those who create art, we get it all wrong if we imagine their work makes them admirable in private life. Rebecca West, a great journalist of the last century, remarkedthat "the power to create a work of art, like a good complexion, is frequently bestowed on the undeserving." So my faith, rather like Christianity, comes with no guarantees of virtue or enhanced intelligence.
What, then, does it guarantee? Those who give it their time and love are offered the chance to live more expansive, more enjoyable and deeper lives. They can learn to care intimately about music, painting and books that have lasted for centuries or millennia. They can reach around the globe for the music, the images and the stories they want to make their own. At its best, art dissolves time; only through art can we catch a glimpse of what life was like in ancient Greece or medieval Spain or pre-modern Japan.
The human mind (according to William James, in Principles of Psychology) is "a theatre of simultaneous possibilities." The arts build the sets for that interior theatre and fill the stage with vivid, memorable characters who mingle in memory with the people of our lives. Even if we are otherwise lonely, we go through life in the company of this ever-expanding society of artists, characters and images, each of them chosen by us.
The arts also let us live, imaginatively, within the world where they are produced. They give us an alternative human narrative - and perhaps that's their most generous gift to us. History as seen through the arts doesn't portray demagogues and soldiers as the greatest figures. It's a history where delicate, fascinating traditions are handed down the generations, developed, subverted, forgotten and rediscovered, all within a drama that makes reality created by politicians seem pale and predictable.
Art gives us, as well, the opportunity to look at everything around us in a slightly different light. It changes our perspective. As Schopenhauer says, "The artist lets us peer into the world through his eyes." The eyes of the best artists see wonderful surprises.
[责编：朱静]
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