TED | 关于写作，慢读教会了我什么？

演讲简介

 

慢读——用手指点着一字一句地读，甚至被告知不能这么做的时候——让杰奎琳·伍德森（Jacqueline Woodson）带我们进入了一个品味写书的生活。在这场生动的演讲中，她邀请我们放慢速度，欣赏那些故事——能够带领我们去到从未想过的地方、介绍我们认为不可能认识的人的故事。“这难道不就是找到了在一天即将结束时，不再感到孤单的方法，一种在我们离开之前创造改变的方法吗？”她这么说道。

 

 

 

演讲精彩片段（节选）欣赏

  

As technology moves us faster and faster through time and space, it seems to feel like story is getting pushed out of the way, I mean, literally pushed out of the narrative. But even as our engagement with stories change, or the trappings around it morph from book to audio to Instagram to Snapchat, we must remember our finger beneath the words.

当科技推动着我们在时间和空间中越行越快的时候，故事仿佛逐渐被我们所遗忘，我的意思是，从叙述中被挤了出来。但即使我们对故事的互动方式发生了改变，或者故事的载体从书本变成了音频、Instagram、Snapchat 诸如此类的社交软件，我们也应该记得用我们的手指逐一阅读。

 

Remember that story, regardless of the format, has always taken us to places we never thought we’d go, introduced us to people we never thought we’d meet and shown us worlds that we might have missed. So as technology keeps moving faster and faster, I am good with something slower. My finger beneath the words has led me to a life of writing books for people of all ages, books meant to be read slowly, to be savored.

记住那个故事，不管它的形式如何，总是会把我们带到我们从没想过要去的地方，让我们认识我们从没想过要去认识的人，向我们展示我们可能会错过的世界。所以即使技术推着我们越来越快地向前走，我也可以和一些慢的事情相处愉快。我的逐字阅读让我进入为所有年龄层用户写书的生涯，写这些需要慢慢读的书，意味深长的书。

 

My love for looking deeply and closely at the world, for putting my whole self into it, and by doing so, seeing the many, many possibilities of a narrative, turned out to be a gift, because taking my sweet time taught me everything I needed to know about writing.

我喜欢深入和密切地观察这个世界，喜欢全身心地投入其中，凭此，去看到一个故事中的许多可能性，这是一份馈赠，因为我所花的这些时间教给了我写作所需要了解的所有事情。

 

And writing taught me everything I needed to know about creating worlds where people could be seen and heard, where their experiences could be legitimized, and where my story, read or heard by another person, inspired something in them that became a connection between us, a conversation.

而写作教会了我创造人们可听见和看到的世界所需要了解的知识，在那里他们的经历可以合理化，在那里，我的故事可以被另一个人阅读和听到，激发他们身上的东西从而在我们之间建立连接，和对话。

 

And isn’t that what this is all about - finding a way, at the end of the day, to not feel alone in this world, and a way to feel like we’ve changed it before we leave? Stone to hammer, man to mummy, idea to story - and all of it, remembered.

这难道不就是它的本意——找到一种方式，在一天结束的时候，在这个世界不会感到孤单，一种在我们离开之前感觉我们已经改变它的方式？石对锤，人对木乃伊，想法到故事——所有这些，被记住。

 

Sometimes we read to understand the future. Sometimes we read to understand the past. we read to get lost, to forget the hard times we’re living in, and we read to remember those who came before us, who lived through something harder. I write for those same reasons.

有时候我们通过阅读来理解未来。有时候我们通过阅读来理解过去。我们通过阅读来迷失，来忘记生活中的艰难，我们通过阅读来记住前人，那些经历更艰难的人。我写作也是出于同样的理由。

 

Before coming to Brooklyn, my family lived in Greenville, South Carolina, in a segregated neighborhood called Nichol town. All of us there were the descendants of a people who had not been allowed to learn to read or write. Imagine that: the danger of understanding how letters form words, the danger of words themselves, the danger of a literate people and their stories.

在来到布鲁克林之前，我的家人住在南卡罗来纳州的格林维尔里一个叫尼科尔敦的种族隔离社区。我们的祖先从来不被允许去学习阅读和写作。想象那个时候：了解字母如何构成话语的危险，话语本身的危险，文化人和他们故事的危险。

 

But against this backdrop of being threatened with death for holding onto a narrative, our stories didn’t die, because there is yet another story beneath that one. And this is how it has always worked. For as long as we’ve been communicating, there’s been the layering to the narrative, the stories beneath the stories and the ones beneath those. This is how story has and will continue to survive.

但是在这样因为坚持叙述而受到死亡威胁的背景下，我们的故事没有消失，因为这个故事下面还有另一个故事。这是它一直以来的运作方式。只要我们保持沟通，故事就会有层次，一个故事孕育另一个故事，一个故事接着一个故事。这是故事过去和未来的生存之道。

 

As I began to connect the dots that connected the way I learned to write and the way I learned to read to an almost silenced people, I realized that my story was bigger and older and deeper than I would ever be. And because of that, it will continue.

当我开始连接那些我习得的写作方式、和阅读方法的小圆点，并将其带给那些沉默寡言的人们时，我意识到我的故事比我格局更大、更加悠远、更加深入。而正因为如此，故事得以延续。