OWNED BY PARROT01

And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea?

我今天想问在座各位的是：你们大家都对此毫无异议吗？

Are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know — I’m not at all comfortable with that assumption.

你们都觉得这一观点毫无问题吗? 哪怕稍稍离远点看这个观点，我也不能同意这种臆断。

I think it’s odious. And I also think it’s dangerous, and I don’t want to see it perpetuated into the next century.

这个观点不但可憎，而且可怕，我不希望这样的想法一直延续到下个世纪。

I think it’s better if we encourage our great creative minds to live.

我觉得鼓励我们伟大的创作天才们继续活下去会更加好。

And I definitely know that, in my case — in my situation — it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption,

而且就我自己来说，持这一观点必然将我引入黑暗的绝境，

particularly given the circumstance that I’m in right now in my career.

尤其是在我目前的事业阶段。

Which is — you know, like check it out, I’m pretty young, I’m only about 40 years old.

你看，我还年轻，我才四十来岁。

I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me.

我今后还有大约四十年的创作生涯。

And it’s exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right?

而且很有可能的是，从这一刻起，我所写的每一部作品，都会被用来和我上一本轰动一时的巨作进行比较，不是吗？

I should just put it bluntly, because we’re all sort of friends here now — it’s exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me.

坦率地说吧，看在我们都聊了这么久，我就说句朋友间的掏心话吧，极有可能的是，我这辈子最大成功已经过去了。

So Jesus, what a thought! That’s the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o’clock in the morning, and I don’t want to go there.

天啊，这是何种的想法！就是这种想法，让人踏上了一大清早就喝琴酒的不归路啊，我可不想变成那样。

I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love.

我希望继续从事我所热爱的写作事业。

And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection,

所以问题就变成：我应该怎么办呢？经过一番深入思考，

that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right?

在我看来，要想继续写作，我必须要创造出某种心理保护机制。

I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing,

我必须以某种方式，建立起一个安全距离，区别开写作本身，

and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on.

以及我对于作品反响的极度焦虑。

And, as I’ve been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I’ve been sort of looking across time,

前一年，我到处找寻可以参考的模式，在历史中找，也在不同文化中找

and I’ve been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better

看他们是否有比我们更好、更理智的观点。

and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity.

来帮助艺术工作者处理艺术创作所固有的内在情感风险。

演讲简介：

对于那些不可思议的伟大艺术作品，当代社会常将之归功于创作者本身，人们从而对艺术天才抱有超乎寻常的期望，伊丽莎白.吉尔伯特对这一点进行了探索和思考，提出了对于创造天才的独到观点：与其认为某个个人是“天才”，不如说他/她在创作中获得了“天才”的帮助。这一演讲生动有趣、充满个人色彩、令人感动而充满启发。