天翼按：以下内容是去年去世的法国人类学，结构主义学大师克洛德·列维-施特劳斯（Claude Levi-Strauss）名著《忧郁的热带》（Tristes Tropiques）中最优美的一段描写。

顺便说一句，我最喜欢他这本书的开篇语：“我讨厌旅行，我很探险家。”（Travel and travellers are two things I loathe.）

To the scholars, dawn and twilight are one and the same phenomenon; and the Greeks thought the same, since they used the same word for both, qualifying it differently according to whether morning or evening was in question. This confusion is an excellent illustration of our tendency to put theory first and take no account of the practical aspect of the matter. That a given point on the earth should shift its position in an indivisible movement between the zone of incidence of the sun s rays and the zone in which the light vanishes or returns to it is perfectly possible. But in reality no two things could be more different than morning and evening. Daybreak is a prelude, and nightfall an overture but an overture which comes at the end, and not, as in most operas, at the beginning. The look of the sun foretells what the next hours will bring; dark and livid, that s to say, if we are in for a wet morning, and pink, frothy, and insubstantial if the weather is to be fine. But as to the rest of the day, the dawn makes no promises. It simply sets the meteorological stage and adds a direction: Fine 9 or 1 Wet . The sunset, on the other hand, is a complete performance, with a beginning, a middle, and an end: a synopsis of all that has happened during the previous twelve hours. Dawn is simply the day s beginning; sunset the day run through again, but fifty times as fast.

That is why people pay more attention to sunset than to sunrise. Dawn merely adds a footnote to what they have already learnt from barometer and thermometer or, in the case of the less civilized , from the phases of the moon, the flight of birds, and the oscillations of the tide. Whereas a sunset reunites within its mysterious configurations the twists and turns of wind and rain, heat and cold, to which their physical being has been exposed. Much else may be read into those fleecy constellations. When the sky is first lit up by the setting sun (just as, in the theatre, the sudden blaze of the footlights indicates that the play is about to begin) the peasant stops dead in his tracks, the fisherman ties up his boat, and the savage winks an eye as he sits by a fire that grows pale. Remembrance is a source of profound pleasure though not to the extent that it is complete, for few would wish to live over again , literally, sufferings and exhaustions which are, none the less, a pleasure to look back upon. Remembrance is life itself, but it has another quality. And so it is that when the sun lowers itself towards the polished surface of a flat calm at sea, like a coin thrown down by a miser in the heavens, or when its disc outlines the mountain-tops like a metal sheet at once hard and lacy, then Man has a brief vision a hallucination, one might say of the indecipherable forces, the vapours and fulgurations whose obscure conflicts he has glimpsed vaguely, within the depths of himself, from time to time during the day.

These inner spiritual struggles must have been sinister indeed, for the day had not been marked by any outward event that might have justified an atmospheric upheaval. It had, indeed, been featureless.

Around four in the afternoon just at that moment when the sun is half-way through its run and is becoming less distinct, though not, as yet, less brilliant, and the thick golden light pours down as if to mask certain preliminaries the Mendoza had changed her course. A light swell had set her rolling, and with each oscillation the heat had become more apparent, but the change of course was so small that one might have mistaken the change of direction for a slight increase in the ship s rolling. Nobody had paid any attention to it, for nothing is so much like a transfer in geometry as a passage on the high seas. There is no landscape to point up the transition from one latitude to the next, or the crossing of an isotherm or a pluviometric curve. Thirty miles on dry land can make us feel that we have changed planets, but to the inexperienced eye each of the three thousand miles at sea is much like the last. The passengers were preoccupied neither with our position, nor with the route we had to follow, nor with the nature of the countries which lay out of sight behind the horizon. It seemed to them that if they were shut up in a confined space, for a number of days that had been decided in advance, it was not because a distance had to be covered but because they had to expiate the privilege of being carried from one side of the world to the other without making, themselves, the smallest exertion. They d gone soft: he-abed mornings, to begin with, and indolent meals which had long ceased to be a pleasure and were now merely a device (and one that had to be made to last as long as possible) for getting through the day.

Nowhere on the ship was there any visible sign of the efforts which, somewhere and on someone s part, were being made. The men who were actually running the ship did not want to see the passengers any more than the passengers wanted to see them. (The officers, too, had no wish for the two groups to mingle.) All that we could do was to drag ourselves round the great carcase of the ship; a sailor retouching the paintwork, or a steward in blue overalls swabbing down the first- class corridors these are much as we saw, or would ever see, in token of the thousands of miles that we were covering.

At twenty to six in the evening the sky in the west seemed encumbered with a complicated edifice, horizontal at its base, which was so exactly like the sea that one would have thought it had been sucked up out of it in some incomprehensible way, or that a thick and invisible layer of crystal had been inserted between the two. Attached to its summit suspended, as it were, to the very top of the sky as if by some heaviness in reverse were flimsy scaffoldings, bloated pyramids, vapours arrested in the act of boiling not clouds, one would have said, but sculptured imitations of clouds; and yet clouds have themselves that same quality, the polished and rounded look of wood that has been carved and gilded. The whole mass masked the sun and was dark, with occasional highlights, except towards the summit, where it was beginning to break into little flames.

Higher still in the sky were mottled shapes that came apart in insubstantial and fugacious wisps and curls: pure light, they seemed, in

Following the horizon round towards the north one could see the main edifice grow thinner and vanish in a complication of clouds behind which, in the far distance, a lofty strip of vapour could be discerned; it was effervescent along its top, and on the side nearest the still-invisible sun the light gave its outline a heavily modelled hem. Farther to the north the element of modelling disappeared and nothing remained but the strip itself, flat and lustreless, as it merged with the sea. To the south this same strip re-emerged, this time with great massive blocks of cloud above it that stood like cosmological dolmens on the smoky crests of their understructure.

When one turned one s back on the sun and gazed eastwards there could be seen two long thin superimposed groups of cloud that stood out as if in their own light against a background of ramparts: battle ments heavy-breasted and yet ethereal, pearly and soft with reflections of pink and silver and mauve.

Meanwhile the sun was gradually coming into view behind the celestial reefs that blocked the view to the west; as it progressed downwards inch by inch its rays would disperse the mists or force their way through, throwing into relief as they did so whatever had stood in their way, and dissipating it in a mass of circular fragments, each with a size and a luminous intensity all its own. Sometimes the light would gather together, as one might clench one s fist, and through the sleeve-end would appear, at most, two or three stiff and glittering fingers. Or else an incandescent octopus would come forward momentarily from the vaporous grottoes.

Every sunset has two distinct phases. At the beginning the sun plays the role of architect. Later, when its rays no longer shine directly and are merely reflections, it turns into a painter. As soon as it disappears behind the horizon the light weakens and the complexity of the planes becomes ever greater and greater. Broad daylight is the enemy of perspective, but, between day and night, there is a moment of transition at which the architecture of the skies is as fantastic as it is ephemeral. When darkness comes, everything flattens down again, like some marvellously coloured Japanese toy.

At exactly a quarter to six the first phase began. The sun was already low, but had not yet touched the horizon. At the moment when it appeared beneath the cloud-structure, it seemed to break open like the yolk of an egg and its light spilled over the forms to which it was still attached. This burst of bright light was soon followed by a withdrawal; the sun s surroundings lost all brilliance and in the empty space that marked off the topmost limit of the sea from the bottom of the cloud-structure there could be seen a cordillera of vapours, which had but lately been so dazzling as to be indecipherable and was now darkened and sharp-pointed. At the same time it began to belly out, where originally it had been quite flat. These small objects, black and solid, moved to and fro, lazy-bodied migrants, across a large patch of reddening sky which marked the beginning of the colour-phase and was slowly mounting upwards from the horizon.

Gradually the evening s constructions-in-depth began to dismantle themselves. The mass which had stood all day in the sky to the west seemed to have been beaten flat like a metal leaf, and behind it was a fire first golden, then vermilion, then cerise. This fire was beginning to work on the elaborate clouds melting, disintegrating, and finally volatilizing them in a whirlwind of tiny particles.

Network after network of fine vapours rose high in the sky; they seemed to stretch in all directions horizontal, oblique, perpendicular, even spiral. As the sun s rays went down (like a bow that must be tilted this way or that, according to which string we seek to use) they caught one after another of these and sent them flying in a gamut of colour which one would have thought to be the exclusive and arbitrary property of each one in turn. When it appeared, each network seemed as exact, as precise, and as rigid in its fragility as fine-spun glass, but gradually they all dissolved, as if their substance had been over-heated by exposure in a sky which was everywhere in flames; their colour lost its brightness and their outline its individuality, until finally each vanished from the scene, giving place to a new network, and one freshly spun. In the end it was difficult to distinguish one colour from the next just as liquids of different colour and density will at first seem to keep their individuality when they are poured into the same glass, only to mingle later for all their apparent independence.

After that it became difficult to follow a spectacle which seemed to be repeating itself in distant parts of the sky, at intervals sometimes of several minutes, sometimes of a second or two. When the sun s disc cut down into the western horizon we suddenly saw, very high up in the east, clouds acid-mauve in tonality which had hitherto been invisible. After a rapid efflorescence and enrichment these apparitions vanished slowly, from right to left, at their moment of greatest subtlety, just as if someone were wiping them away firmly and unhurriedly with a piece of cloth. After a few seconds nothing remained but the cleaned slate of the sky above the nebulous cloud-rampart. And this rampart was turning to white and grey while the rest of the sky went rose-pink.

Over towards the sun the old strip of cloud had receded into a shapeless block of cement, and behind it a new long strip was flaming in its turn; when its rednesses turned pale the mottled patches at the zenith, whose turn had not yet come, began to take on weight. Below there was a great burst of gold; above, where the summit had glittered, it turned first to chestnut, then to violet. At the same time we seemed to be scrutinizing its texture through a microscope; and it turned out to be made up of a thousand little filaments, each supporting, like a skeleton, its plump little forms.

The sun no longer shone directly. The colour-range of the sky was pink and yellow; shrimp-pink, salmon-pink, flax-yellow, straw- yellow; and this unemphatic richness was, in its turn, disappearing, as the celestial landscape re-formed in a gamut of white and blue and green. Yet a few corners of the horizon were still enjoying a brief independence. To the left, the atmosphere was suddenly veiled a whim, one would have thought, on tike part of a mysterious combination of greens. And these greens merged progressively into a group of reds intense to begin with, then darker, then tinged with violet, then smudged with coal, and evolving at the very end into the tracery of a stick of charcoal on granulated paper. The sky behind was an Alpine yellow-green and the strip of cloud, still firmly outlined, remained opaque. In the westerly sky little horizontal stripes of gold glimmered for an instant, but to the north it was almost dark; the full- breasted rampart had dwindled to a series of whitish swellings beneath a chalky sky.

Nothing is more mysterious than the ensemble of procedures, always identical and never predictable, by which night succeeds day. The first portent of these procedures is always a matter for doubt and anxiety. No one can tell what forms will be adopted, on this one particular occasion, by the night s insurrection. Impenetrable is the alchemy by which each colour transforms itself into its complementary colour, whereas, on the palette, as we all know, we should have to open another tube of paint to achieve this same result. Where night is concerned there is no limit to the minglings and comminglings which may be achieved; for night comes to us as a deceiver. The sky turns from pink to green; but it does so because I have failed to liotice that certain clouds have turned bright red and, in doing so, make the sky look green by contrast. The sky had, in effect, been pink; but a pink so pale that it could no longer struggle against the very high-keyed red; and yet I had not seen that red come into being, since a modulation from gold to red is less startling to the eye than a modulation from pink to green. It was by a trick, therefore, that night made its entrance into the sky.

And so night began to deny the sky its golds and purples; warmth of tone gave place to whites and greys. The set stage of night began to reveal a sea landscape above the sea: an immense screen of clouds filing by like an archipelago of long thin islands in front of an ocean-wide sky; or like a flat sandy shore as it might look to a traveller in an aeroplane flying low on its side with one wing almost in the sea. The illusion was all the stronger for the fact that the last glimmers of day fell obliquely on these cloud-forms and gave them, in high relief, the air of solid rocks rocks too, at other times, are as if sculpted from light and shadow and it was as if the sun, no longer able to exercise its etching-needle on granite and porphyry, was lavishing its day-time skills on these vaporous and insubstantial subjects.

The cloud background, therefore, was like the edge of an unnamed coast. And as the sky cleared we could see beaches, lagoons, islets by the hundred, and sandbanks overrun by the inactive ocean of the sky. Fjords and inland lakes appeared where all had been flat and smooth. And because the sky which surrounded these arrowy shapes was like an ocean, and because the sea normally reflects the colours of the sky, the scene was like the reconstruction of some distant landscape in which the sun was setting all over again. We had only to look at the real sea, far below, to escape from the mirage; that real sea had no longer either the white-hot flatness of noonday or the curling prettiness of after-dinner. No longer did the all-but-horizontal rays of daylight illuminate the tops of the little waves that looked towards them, leaving the rest in darkness. The water, too, was now seen in relief, and its precise and heavy shadows were as if cast in steel. All transparency had gone.

And so, by a process at once unvarying and imperceptible, evening gave place to night. All was changed. The sky on the horizon was opaque, and above it the last clouds that had been brought into being by the day s end were scattering across a ground that was livid yellow at its base and turned blue towards its zenith. Soon they were but lean and weakly shadows, like scenery-frames seen without stage-lights; the performance over, we see them for what they are poor, fragile, ephemeral and owing the illusion of reality which they had helped to create not so much to their own nature as to some trickery of lighting or perspective. Only a few moments earlier they had been alive and in continual transformation; now they seem set fast in a form as sad as it is unalterable, in the middle of a sky which will soon merge them within its gathering darkness.

【公告】：如果您对本人博客有些兴趣，麻烦您重新订阅一下本博客，谢谢！

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  此人必火，驻足留观。日盛亲笔

  陈日盛 @ 2010年02月13日 | 回复

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