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One Vote for This Age of Anxiety
投焦虑时代一票
Margaret Mead
玛格丽特·米德
When critics wish to repudiate the world in which we live today, one of their familiar ways of doing it is to castigate modern man because anxiety is his chief problem. This, they say, in W. H. Auden's phrase, is the age of anxiety. This is what we have arrived at with all our vaunted progress, our great technological advances, our great wealth — everyone goes about with a burden of anxiety so enormous that, in the end, our stomachs and our arteries and our skins express the tension under which we live. Americans who have lived in Europe come back to comment on our favorite farewell which, instead of the old goodbye (God be with you), is now "Take it easy," each American admonishing the other not to break down from the tension and strain of modern life.
当批评家们想要否定我们现在生活的社会时，他们常用的一种方法就是指责现代人，说焦虑成了他的主要问题。他们说，如今的时代，用W·H·奥登的话来说，是一个焦虑的时代。尽管我们自吹自擂取得了多少进步，我们的技术获得了多大的进展，我们积累了多么巨大的财富，但是到头来我们得到的却是一个焦虑的时代——所有人都背着巨大的焦虑的重负，以致最后我们的胃、我们的动脉和我们的皮肤都显示出我们生活的重压。在欧洲生活过的美国人回来后评论我们最爱用的告别语说，过去是"再见"（goodbye——原意为"上帝与你同在"），如今却说“多保重”（take it easy——原意为“放松些”），美国人都在相互告诫，别让紧张劳累的现代生活搞垮身体。
Whenever an age is characterized by a phrase, it is presumably in contrast to other ages. If we are the age of anxiety, what were other ages? And here the critics do a very amusing thing. First, they give us lists of the opposites of anxiety: security, trust, self-confidence, self-direction. Then, without much further discussion, they let us assume that other ages, other periods of history, were somehow the ages of trust or confident direction.
每当人们用一个词儿概括一个时代的特征的时候，想必那是将它与别的时代相对照而言。如果我们的时代是焦虑的时代，那么其他时代又是什么呢？在这儿，批评家们的行为非常有趣。首先，他们给我们开出一长串焦虑的反义词：安全、信任、自信、自主。然后，未经进一步讨论，他们就让我们认定其他时代、其他历史时期，似乎就是信任的时代或自信、自主的时代。
The savage who, on his South Sea island, simply sat and let breadfruit fall into his lap, the simple peasant, at one with the fields he ploughed and the beasts he tended, the craftsman busy with his tools and lost in the fulfillment of the instinct of workmanship — these are the counter-images conjured up by descriptions of the strain under which men live today. But no one who lived in those days has returned to testify how paradisiacal they really were.
南太平洋岛屿上未开化的人，就这么坐着等待面包果掉到他的怀里；纯朴的农民，和他耕种的田地和饲养的家畜一起和谐地生活着；手工匠人忙碌地工作，沉湎于自己的手艺制作——这些就是他们描述当今人们生活的压力时勾起的与之相反的形象。但是，生活在那些年代中的人们，没有人回来作证说他们的生活果真有那么美好。
