Writer Jane Howard offers this consideration of families ...
作者Jane Howard做出的有关家庭的思考……
Families
家庭
Each of us is born into one family not of our choosing. If we're going to go around devising new ones, we might as well have the luxury of picking their members ourselves. Clever picking might result in new families whose benefits would surpass or at least equal those of the old. The new ones by definition cannot spawn us – as soon as they do that, they stop being new – but there is plenty they can do. I have seen them work wonders. As a member in reasonable standing of six or seven tribes in addition to the one I was born to, I have been trying to figure which earmarks are common to both kinds of families.
我们每一个人出生的家庭都是无法选择的。如果我们即将组建新的家庭，我们也许同样会有自己挑选家人的这个难得的机会。一个明智的选择能使得新的家庭的受益超过或者至少等同于过去的家庭。一个新建的家庭按理来说是不能再生我们了——一旦它做到了，它就不再是新的了——但他们仍有很多可为之事。我就曾经见识过他们发挥的奇妙作用。作为生来就是六到七伙人中的一名成员，我曾经试着找出各种类型家庭的共通之处。
(1) Good families have a chief, or a heroine, or a founder – someone around whom others cluster, whose achievements as the Yiddish word has it, let them kvell, and whose example spurs them on to like feats. Some blood dynasties produce such figures regularly; others languish for as many as five generations between demigods, wondering with each new pregnancy whether this, at last, might be the messianic baby who will redeem us. Look, is there not something gubernatorial about her footstep, or musical about the way he bangs with his spoon on his cup? All clans, of all kinds, need such a figure now and then. Sometimes clans based on water rather than blood harbor several such personages at one time. The Bloomsbury Group in London six decades ago was not much hampered by its lack of a temporal history.
（1）优秀的家庭有一位领导者，或者是女主人，或者是创始人——他身边总簇拥着人们，他的成就用犹太语来说，让他身边的人洋洋得意，他的榜样激励身边的追求伟业。一些家族经常诞生这样的人物;其他的则在伟人之间会衰落5代之多,每次怀上了孩子都好奇会不会就是这个人，至少，有可能就是这个救世主似的孩子即将解救我们。看吧，这些成就难道不是多多少少继承了她的足迹，或者是因为她用勺子敲咖啡杯的乐曲般的清音吗？所有的家族，不管何种类型，都时不时的需要这样的一位大人物。从前一度有一些家族基于养育而非血缘收养几个这样的人物。在伦敦的布鲁姆伯利文化圈［1］在六十年前亦并没有因为其缺少世俗的历史受到多少阻碍。
(2) Good families have a switchboard operator – someone like my mother who cannot help but keep track of what all the others are up to, who plays Houston Mission Control to everyone else's Apollo. This role, like the foregoing one, is assumed rather than assigned. Someone always volunteers for it. That person often also has the instincts of an archivist, and feels driven to keep scrapbooks and photograph albums up to date, so that the clan can see proof of its own continuity.
（2）优秀的家庭有一位交换台操作员——就像我的妈妈，虽然她帮不上忙但对所有人正在做什么了若指掌，充当休斯敦任务控制中心对于所有阿波罗飞船们的角色。这个职能，如前所述，主动承担总是比指定好些。有的人总是很愿意充担它。这样的人总是有着档案报关员的天赋，有制作最新的剪贴簿和照片集的欲望，如此家族就可以看到自己连续的不同时期的证明。
(3) Good families are much to all their members, but everything to none. Good families are fortresses with many windows and doors to the outer world. The blood clans I feel most drawn to were founded by parents who are nearly as devoted to whatever it is they do outside as they are to each other and their children. Their curiosity and passion are contagious. Everybody, where they live, is busy. Paint is spattered on eyeglasses. Mud lurks under fingernails. Person-to-person calls come in the middle of the night from Tokyo and Brussels. Catchers' mitts, ballet slippers, overdue library books and other signs of extra-familial concerns are everywhere.
（3）优秀的家庭对她的成员们来说意味着许多，但并不是一切。一个的家庭是由门窗隔离外部世界的堡垒。一个家族我感到最疲累的莫过于由父母几乎奉献了所有在外辛劳为了彼此以及他们的孩子们从而撑起的家庭。他们的好奇心和激情会传染。每一个人，不管他们住在哪，都是忙碌的。眼镜被颜料涂上颜色，泥土潜藏在指甲缝间。午夜接到来自东京和的布鲁塞尔的长途电话。接球手手套、芭蕾舞鞋、逾期未还的图书馆的书以及其他额外的家庭事务的麻烦到处都是。
(4) Good families are hospitable. Knowing that hosts need guests as much as guests need hosts, they are generous with honorary memberships for friends, whom they urge to come early and often and to stay late. Such clans exude a vivid sense of surrounding rings of relatives, neighbors, teachers, students and godparents, any of whom at any time might break or slide into the inner circle. Inside that circle a wholesome, tacit emotional feudalism develops: you give me protection, I'll give you fealty. Such treaties begin with, but soon go far beyond, the jolly exchange of pie at Thanksgiving for cake on birthdays. It means you can ask me to supervise your children for the fortnight you will be in the hospital, and that however inconvenient this might be for me, I shall manage to. It means I can phone you on what for me is a dreary, wretched Sunday afternoon and for you is the eve of a deadline, knowing you will tell me to come right over, if only to watch you type. It means we need not dissemble. ("To yield to seeming," as Buber wrote, "is man's essential cowardice, to resist it is his essential courage... one must at times pay dearly for life lived from the being, but it is never too dear.")
（4）优秀的家庭是好客的。很清楚主人是多么的需要客人，一如客人需要主人那般，他们对待朋友像荣誉会员般慷慨，极力希望朋友们常常做客并且早来久留。此般家族给周围的人以自然散发出一种生动活泼的感觉，无论是亲属圈、邻居、老师们、同学们以及教父们，无论谁在任何时刻都可以进入他们的圈子。在这个圈子里一个有益健康的、心照不宣的传统情感的建立:你给我保护，我回报忠诚。这样的协议一开始，就广泛的流传开来，为了生日时的蛋糕在感恩节交换派的快乐。这意味着如果你住院了可以请我为你照看两个星期的孩子，不管我有多么的不方便，我都会设法做到。这意味着我可以在一个痛苦的、沮丧的星期天的下午打电话给你即使那是你最后期限的前夜，也知道你会让我过来你身边，只要在你身旁看你打字就好。这意味着我们不需要任何掩饰。（"屈服于所见"正如Buber所写"人生来怯懦，反抗它只能靠我们生来的勇气……一个人从生来就必须为生存付出昂贵的代价，但它永远不会太贵。"）
(5) Good families deal squarely with direness. Pity the tribe that doesn't have, and cherish, at least one flamboyant eccentric. Pity too the one that supposes it can avoid for long the woes to which all flesh is heir. Lunacy, bankruptcy, suicide and other unthinkable fates sooner or later afflict the noblest of clans with an undertow of gloom. Family life is a set of givens, someone once told me, and it takes courage to see certain givens as blessings rather than as curses. Contradictions and inconsistencies are givens, too. So is the war against what the Oregon patriarch Kenneth Babbs calls malarkey. "There's always malarkey lurking, bubbles in the cesspool, fetid bubbles that pop and smell. But I don't put up with malarkey, between my stepkids and my natural ones or anywhere else in the family."
（5）优秀的家庭公正的对待糟糕的事情。认为那些没有经历过糟糕的事情，并因此庆幸，至少有夸耀的怪毛病是可怜的。认为那些期望能自己可以长久的躲过终将到来的灾难。疯狂的、破产的、自杀的以及其他的想象不到的天意迟早会以忧郁的回潮折磨家族的尊贵。家庭生活是一系列的给予，曾经有人告诉我，真正的将他人的给予看成恩赐而非诅咒是需要勇气的。反驳和矛盾同样也是给予。那场反对Oregon的族长Kenneth Babbs称之为说大话的战争也是如此。"大话总是潜伏着无处不在，污水中的气泡，恶臭的气泡破裂臭气满溢。但我绝不容忍大话，无论是在我的继子、亲生儿子或者是在这个家庭中的任何人之间。"
(6) Good families prize their rituals. Nothing welds a family more than these. Rituals are vital especially for clans without histories, because they evoke a past, imply a future, and hint at continuity. No line in the Seder service at Passover reassures more than the last: "Next year in' Jerusalem!" A clan becomes more of a clan each time it gathers to observe a fixed ritual (Christmas, birthdays, Thanksgiving, and so on), grieve at a funeral (anyone may come to most funerals; those who do declare their tribalness), and devises a new rite of its own. Equinox breakfasts and all-white dinners can be at least as welding as Memorial Day parades. Several of us in the old Life magazine years used to meet for lunch every Pearl Harbor Day, preferably to eat some politically neutral fare like smorgasbord, to "forgive" our only ancestrally Japanese colleague Irene Kubota Neves. For that and other reasons we became, and remain, a sort of family. "Rituals," a California friend of mine said, "aren't just externals and holidays. They are the performances of our lives. They are a kind of shorthand. They can't be decreed. My mother used to try to decree them. She'd make such a goddamn fuss over what we talked about at dinner, aiming at Topics of Common Interest, topics that celebrated our cohesion as a family. These performances were always hollow, because the phenomenology of the moment got sacrificed for the idea of the moment. Real rituals are discovered in retrospect. They emerge around constitutive moments, moments that only happen once, around whose memory meanings cluster. You don't choose those moments. They choose themselves." A lucky clan includes a born mythologizer, like my blood sister, who has the gift of apprehending such a moment when she sees it, and who cannot help but invent new rituals everywhere she goes.
（6）优秀的家庭珍视他们的传统。没有什么比这更能增加一个家庭的凝聚力了。传统是必不可少的尤其对于缺少历史的家族来说，因为它能回顾过去，指明未来，并且不断的暗示着。家系的人没什么比在逾越节那天家宴上的礼拜更能得到安慰："来年去到耶路撒冷"。一个家族每次聚集起来过固定传统（圣诞节、生日、感恩节等等）都将这个家庭变得更像一个家庭，在葬礼上的悲伤（每个人都将参加几乎所有的葬礼，那些宣布他们的族落的人）,以及他们自己创造的传统。昼夜平分时刻的早餐还有素食晚餐至少和纪念日的游行有着同样重要的凝聚意义。我们一些人在过去的老旧杂志的年代曾经在每个珍珠港日相聚一起共进晚餐，宁可吃些政治上中立的食物像是瑞典式自助餐，来"原谅"我们中唯一一个祖先是日本人的同僚Irene Kubota Neves。因为这样那样的原因我们成为了，并且一直都是，一个特殊形式的家庭。"传统"我的一个加里福利亚的朋友说："不仅仅是外在的、假日的。他们是我们生活的表现，他们是一种浓缩，他们不能被强制的命令。我的妈妈曾经试着颁布传统。她该死的小题大作的限定我们餐桌上谈话的内容，只能针对大家都感兴趣的话题，庆祝我们家庭团结在一起的话题。这样表观永远都是空洞的，因为这个时刻必须表现得像它原本设计的一样。而真正的传统却是在做了之后回顾得来。他们唯有出现在这样的时刻，那些只此一次，回忆中意味着团聚的时刻。这个时刻，不是你选择的它，是它自己选择了自己。"一个幸运家族会有这样的神话人物的诞生，比如我的亲姐姐，她总有这样的天赋能立刻意识这样的时刻一旦她遇到了，无论她去到哪里总能创造出许多传统。
(7) Good families are affectionate. This of course is a matter of style. I know clans whose members greet each other with gingerly handshakes or, in what pass for kisses, with hurried brushes of side jawbones, as if the object were to touch not the lips but the ears. I don't see how such people manage. "The tribe that does not hug," as someone who has been part of many ad hoc families recently wrote to me, "is no tribe at all. More and more I realize that everybody, regardless of age, needs to be hugged and comforted in a brotherly or sisterly way now and then. Preferably now."
（7）优秀的家庭充满温情。这当然事关各自的风格。我知道一个家族每次家庭成员们见面都小心翼翼的握手问候对方，没有亲吻，只用下颚快速的碰一下，好似用来接触对方的不是嘴唇而是耳朵。我不知道人们如何解决。"这个家族的人并不热烈的拥抱"，作为一个曾经成为这个临时家庭的成员最近写信给我，"这根本不是个家族，我越来越感到每个人，不管什么年纪，都时不时的需要彼此以一种兄弟姐妹式的方式的拥抱和安慰。最好是现在。"
(8) Good families have a sense of place, which these days is not achieved easily. As Susanne Langer wrote in 1957, "Most people have no home that is a symbol of their childhood, not even a definite memory of one place to serve that purpose... all the old symbols are gone." Once I asked a roomful of supper guests who, if anyone, felt any strong pull to any certain spot on the face of the earth. Everyone was silent, except for a visitor from Bavaria. The rest of us seemed to know all too well what Walker Percy means in The Moviegoer when he tells of the "genie-soul of the place which every place has or else is not a place [and which] wherever you go, you must meet and master or else be met and mastered." All that meeting and mastering saps plenty of strength. It also underscores our need for tribal bases of the sort which soaring real estate taxes and splintering families have made all but obsolete.
（8）优秀的家庭有一个住着记忆的地方，这不是一两天就能简单的做到的。正如Susanne Langer在1957年写到，"没有家是许多人的童年的一个标志，甚至没有一个满足这个目的的地方的明确记忆……所有的旧时的象征都消失了。" 曾经我问一屋子共进晚餐的客人们，有谁，感觉到被地球表面上的某个地方强烈的牵引着。每个人都沉默了，除了一位来自Bavaria的客人。我们剩下的人似乎都能很深的理解到Walker Percy在The Moviegoer中想表达的当他讲述关于"任何地方都有各自的气息和灵魂，否则就不成为一个地方，你必须不断的遇见然后熟悉或者被遇见然后被熟悉。"所有的这一切遇到和熟悉不断的消耗着我们的气力。它同样表明了我们的需求基于家族的高涨的遗产税以及将家庭分裂使一切都过时了。
So what are we to do, those of us whose habit and pleasure and doom is our tendency, as a Georgia lady put it, to "fly off at every other whipstitch?" Think in terms of movable feasts, for a start. Live here, wherever here may be, as if we were going to belong here for the rest of our lives. Learn to hallow whatever ground we happen to stand on or land on. Like medieval knights who took their tapestries along on Crusades, like modern Afghanis with their yurts, we must pack such totems and icons as we can to make short-term quarters feel like home. Pillows, small rugs, watercolors can dispel much of the chilling anonymity of a sublet apartment or motel room. When we can, we should live in rooms with stoves or fireplaces or anyway candlelight. The ancient saying still is true: Extinguished hearth, extinguished family. Round tables help, too, and as a friend of mine once put it, so do "too many comfortable chairs, with surfaces to put feet on, arranged so as to encourage a maximum of eye contact." Such rooms inspire good talk, of which good clans can never have enough.
我们到底该怎么做？我们的爱好、欢乐、厄运都是必然趋势。最为一名Georgia女性的说明，"在每个其他的锁缝中飞走？"想想就移动的盛宴而言，总要有一个开始。活在这，不管这是哪，我们都即将在我们的余生属于这里。学会把我们所有即将站上或躺下的土地视为神圣。一如中世纪的骑士将他们的绣帷沿着圣城的城墙，一如现代的阿富汗和他们的圆顶帐篷，我们必须拾起这样的图腾或是偶像如此我们才能有短暂的片刻感受到家的感觉。枕头、小地毯、水彩画能有效驱散一个不知名的公寓或是汽车旅馆房间的冰冷感。如果可以，我们应该住在一个有火炉或壁炉或者至少有烛光的房间。古人说的确实有理：没有健康，就没有家庭。圆桌同样有作用，并且我的一个朋友曾经安置了一个，导致"太多舒适的椅子，有放脚的椅面，这样安排是为了最大限度的眼神交流。"这样的房间能刺激怡人的谈话，对于一个优秀的家族来说永远也不会太多。
(9) Good families, not just the blood kind, find some way to connect with posterity. "To forge a link in the humble chain of being, encircling heirs to ancestors," as Michael Novak has written, "is to walk within a circle of magic as primitive as humans knew in caves." He is talking of course about babies, feeling them leap in wombs, giving them suck. Parenthood, however, is a state which some miss by chance and others by design, and a vocation to which not all are called. Some of us, like the novelist Richard P. Brickner, "look on as others name their children who in turn name their own lives, devising their own flags from their parents' cloth." What are we who lack children to do? Build houses? Plant trees? Write books or symphonies or laws? Perhaps, but even if we do these things, there still should be children on the sidelines, if not at the center, of our lives. It is a sadly impoverished tribe that does not allow access to, and make much of, some children. Not too much, of course: it has truly been said that never in history have so many educated people devoted so much attention to so few children. Attention, in excess, can turn to fawning, which isn't much better than neglect. Still, if we don't regularly see and talk to and laugh with people who can expect to outlive us by twenty years or so, we had better get busy and find some.
（9）优秀的家庭，不仅仅是通过血缘与子孙建立关系。"为了锻造一条存在的谦逊之链，晚辈围绕在长辈周围，"如Michael Novak所写"是沿着一个我们的祖先在山洞里时知道的原始的神奇的圈前行。"他在说的当然是婴儿，感受他们在子宫的跳动，喂允他们。为人父母，不管怎样，是一个或偶然或有意为之的身份，不是每一个人都必需承担的使命。我们一些人，比如小说家 Richard P. Brickner "将他们孩子的继承自己的名字视为继承他们的生活，将父母的衣服做成自己的旗帜。"那些没有孩子的人们该怎么办呢？修房子？种树？写小说、谱交响乐曲、编写法律？也许吧，但是即使我们做了，我们的生命中仍然需要孩子陪在身边，哪怕不在中心。有许多的孩子却不能亲近将使一个家族可悲的枯竭。不需要太多，当然：确实有这样的说法在历史上不曾有这么多受教育过的人将注意力都献给这么少的孩子。关注，过激了的话，就会适得其反，这样比忽视好不了多少。诚然，如果我们不常常和能比我们多活20多年的人（比我们年轻20多岁）见面、交谈、欢笑，那么最好赶快找一个。
(10) Good families also honor their elders. The wider the age range, the stronger the tribe. Jean-Paul Sartre and Margaret Mead, to name two spectacularly confident former children, have both remarked on the central importance of grandparents in their own early lives. Grandparents now are in much more abundant supply than they were a generation or two ago when old age was more rare. If actual grandparents are not at hand, no family should have too hard a time finding substitute ones to whom to give unfeigned homage. The Soviet Union's enchantment with day care centers, I have heard, stems at least in part from the state's eagerness to keep children away from their presumably subversive grandparents. Let that be a lesson to clans based on interest as well as to those based on genes.
优秀的家庭同样很尊重家中的年长者。年龄的跨度越大，这个家族的力量就越大。 Jean-Paul Sartre 和 Margaret Mead，以此命名的两个有着惊人自信的昔日孩子，都在他们早期时有过关于年老者在家庭中的中心重要地位的言论。比起过去年老者十分少有的年代，那时只有一到两代，现在祖父母隔的代数要多了许多。如果实际生活中祖父母不在身边，没有哪个家庭会艰辛的为了找到替代祖父母们让我们给以真诚的尊敬。苏维埃共和国的魅力在于日常照顾中心，我曾听说，阻止了至少一部分的政府将孩子带离可能具有危险性的祖父母身边。让这成为不管是因为兴趣还是因为遗传而组建的家族的一课。
［1］英国伦敦中北部的居住区, 因在20世纪初期与知识界的人物, 包括弗吉尼亚·沃尔夫、E.M.福斯特及约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯的关系而闻名于世。（译者加，哈利波特也是该出版社出版的哦）
Jane Howard, editor, teacher and writer, wrote Families in 1978. A later book was Margaret Mead: A Life (1984).
Orignal From: Writer Jane Howard offers this consideration of families ...
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