Merry Christmas from Hegel
Anne Carson
It was the year my brother died, I lived up north and had few friends or they all went away. Christmas Day I was sitting in my armchair, reading something about Hegel. You will forgive me if you are someone who knows a lot of Hegel or understands it, I do not and will paraphrase badly, but I understood him to be saying he was fed up with popular criticism of his terrible prose and claiming that conventional grammar, with its clumsy dichotomy of subject and verb, was in conflict with what he called ‘speculation’. Speculation being the proper business of philosophy. Speculation being the effort to grasp reality in its interactive entirety. The function of a sentence like ‘Reason is Spirit’ was not to assert a fact (he said) but to lay Reason side by side with Spirit and allow their meanings to tenderly mingle in speculation. I was overjoyed by this notion of a philosophic space where words drift in gentle mutual redefinition of one another but, at the same time, wretchedly lonely with all my family dead and here it was Christmas Day, so I put on big boots and coat and went out to do some snow standing. Not since childhood! I had forgot how astounding it is. I went to the middle of a woods. Fir trees, the teachers of this, all around. Minus twenty degrees in the wind but inside the trees is no wind. The world subtracts itself in layers. Outer sounds like traffic and shoveling vanish. Inner sounds become audible, cracks, sighs, caresses, twigs, birdbreath, toenails of squirrel. The fir trees move hugely. The white is perfectly curved, stunned with itself. Puffs of ice fog and some gold things float up. Shadows rake their motionlessness across the snow with a vibration of other shadows moving crosswise on them, shadow on shadow, in precise velocities. It is very cold, then that, too, begins to subtract itself, the body chills on its surface but the core is hot and it is possible to disconnect the surface, withdraw to the core, where a ravishing peace flows in, so ravishing I am unembarrassed to use the word ravishing, and it is not a peace of separation from the senses but the washing-through peace of looking,listening, feeling, at the very core of snow, at the very core of the care of snow. It has nothing to do with Hegel and he would not admire the clumsily conventional sentences in which I have tried to tell about it but I suspect, if I hadn’t been trying on the mood of Hegel’s particular grammatical indignation that Christmas Day, I would never have gone out to stand in the snow, or stayed to speculate with it, or had the patience to sit down and make a record of speculation for myself as if it were a worthy way to spend an afternoon, a plausible way to change the icy horror of holiday into a sort of homecoming. Merry Christmas from Hegel.
来自黑格尔的圣诞祝福
[加]安·卡森 Dori-min译
我的哥哥去世的那年，我住在北方，没什么朋友，仅有的几个朋友也已经离开了。圣诞那天我在躺椅上读黑格尔。我对他的了解有限，所以如果你十分熟悉黑格尔的话，请原谅我可能讲得不对，我知道他对于大众评论的厌倦，那些老套的的语法，简单粗暴的主谓二分法，和他所说的“思辨”截然不同，“思辨”是恰如其分的哲学过程，人通过“思辨”把握相互作用的整体事实。他说“存在即合理”这句话的目的（按照他的说法）不是为了确认事实，而是为了让理性和存在两个概念在思辨里彼此交缠。一想到这些哲学概念是飘荡的词汇在互相下定义，我就喜出望外，但是与此同时我的家人都去世了，而我在寂寥凄惨中过圣诞节，于是我穿上了宽大的靴子和外套，出门站在雪里。上次这么做还是在小时候！我来到树林中，被冷杉包围。零下二十几度的簌簌冷风没有吹进林子，世界分成几层，外界像车水马龙的呼啸渐行渐远，内部的声音于是变得清晰，破碎声、叹息声、安抚声、枝桠声、鸟鸣声和松鼠的脚步声。冷杉剧烈摇曳，震落白雪的曲线简直无瑕。缕缕冰雾和金黄腾起，雪地上的阴翳有的不为所动，有的彼此交错重叠，频次恰到好处。这寒气逼人也开始分层，表皮打着寒战，而内心炙热如火，甚至能够和表面分离，褪至只剩内心，令人迷醉的平和涌入，迷醉到我大胆称之为迷醉，这种平和并不是剥离了五感，而是在大雪纷飞中、在心系落雪的正中，被视觉、听觉和感觉的平和洗刷。这和黑格尔没有多大关系，他估计也不会欣赏我粗糙的陈词滥调，但是我又在想，如果我没有在圣诞节这天揣测黑格尔字里行间的愤慨，我就不会出来站在雪地里，也不会伫立着对其思辨，更不会有耐心坐下来记录我思辨的历程，仿佛这件事果真值得我耗费一个下午，仿佛这样就能把年末的耸人寒冰变得像家一样温馨。这是来自黑格尔的圣诞祝福。