2021年经济学人 《周》书评（在线收听）

Books & Arts

文学与艺术

Book Review

书评

Marking time -- The seven-day itch

标记时间——七天之痒

The Week. By David Henkin.

《周》，作者：大卫·亨金。

In the autumn of 1853 Thomas Butler Gunn got lost -- temporally rather than physically.

1853年秋天，托马斯·巴特勒·葛恩迷失了——只是暂时的，不是根本上的。

On a visit to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky, and isolated from the outside world, his diary quickly slipped the moorings of chronological reality.

在一次访问肯塔基州的猛犸洞穴时，由于与外界隔绝，他的日记很快就脱离了现实中的时间秩序。

Wednesdays are repeated and days go mislabelled.

重复的星期三，标错的日期。

It took around a fortnight, and renewed contact with civilisation, for Gunn to restore his weekly bearings.

葛恩花了大约两个星期的时间，重新与文明世界连结，才恢复了按周生活的时间方向。

The episode, says David Henkin, suggests how fragile a sense of time can be -- especially when it comes to weeks.

大卫·亨金说，这段经历表明时间意识是如此的脆弱——尤其是在“周”这个概念上。

Unlike months or years, these seven-day groupings have no real basis in astronomy.

与月或年不同，这些七天的分组在天文学上没有实际的存在依据。

People from Nigeria to China have thrived without them.

从尼日利亚到中国，人们曾在没有它的情况下过得很好。

And yet the week has become the measure not only of routine, but even of sanity.

然而，“周”不仅成为了衡量生活日程的标准，甚至也成了衡量精神健全程度的标准。

"Weekly rhythms have become so thoroughly absorbed into ordinary human experience", Mr Henkin writes, "that forgetting what day it is constitutes a singular symptom and feeling of disorientation."

亨金写道：“‘周’的节奏已经彻底融入了普通人类的经验中，以至于忘记这一天是星期几被视为一种独特的症状和方向感迷失。”

His new book shows how the week came to rule the world.

他的新书指出了“周”是如何统治世界的。

Until the 19th century, he explains, the other days were a preamble to the Sabbath for many Protestants.

他解释道，直到19世纪，对许多新教徒来说，其他日子都只是安息日的前奏。

Catholics followed a cycle of feast days and fasts.

天主教徒遵循一个进食和禁食的循环周期。

When newspapers, factory schedules and weekly paydays were all rarer, the weekly structure was less important.

当报纸、工厂时间表和每周发薪日都很少见的时候，“周”的结构也就不那么重要了。

People got muddled, not just underground.

人们都被搞糊涂了，不仅仅在地下会糊涂。

As late as 1866, the Louisville Courier mentioned a man getting drunk on Friday because he thought it was Saturday.

直到1866年，《路易斯维尔信使报》还提到过有一个人在星期五喝醉了，因为他以为那天是星期六。

In outline, the story is one of urban development.

概括来说，这是一个关于城市发展的故事。

As towns grew and society became more sophisticated, citizens "became differently and more intensely week-oriented, in ways we can now recognise as modern".

随着城镇的发展，社会变得越来越复杂，市民们“变得不同，更加强烈地以周为导向，以我们如今认为是现代的方式”。

When his local benevolent society met on Wednesdays in 1859, and choral concerts were scheduled for Fridays, James Fiske of Massachusetts couldn't afford to mix up his days.

1859年，马萨诸塞州的詹姆斯·菲斯克的本地慈善协会每周三聚会，每周五有合唱音乐会，他可不能打乱自己的日程。

When Every Saturday magazine landed in New York each weekend in 1866, Bayard Taylor was expecting it.

1866年，当《每周六》杂志于周末到达纽约，贝亚德·泰勒正期待着它的到来。

Later anecdotes illustrate the "distinctive air" that individual days came to develop -- the particular associations each subliminally carries.

后来的一些趣闻轶事说明了每一天都在发展出“独特的气氛”——每一天都被赋予潜意识里的特定联想。

Philadelphians once used chains to block horse traffic on Sundays.

费城人曾在周日用铁链阻断马匹运输。

The advent of washing machines disrupted the weekly cleaning schedule.

洗衣机的出现打乱了每周的清洁计划。

In due course Westerners exported these feelings to the world.

在适当的时候，西方人向世界输出了这些情感。

Japan formally adopted the seven-day system only in 1873; all the same, a character in a novel by Haruki Murakami is as sure of something "as I am that today is Wednesday".

日本直到1873年才正式采用七天制；尽管如此，村上春树小说中的一个人物在表达对某件事非常确定时却说，“就像我对今天是星期三一样有把握”。

That sort of conviction is now crumbling.

这种信念如今正在瓦解。

French and Russian revolutionaries ultimately failed in their attempts to abolish the seven-day week, but for many people the pandemic has squashed the weekly rhythm into an interminable present.

尽管法国和俄罗斯革命者试图废除7日星期制的努力最终以失败告终，但对许多人来说，新冠疫情把“周”的节奏挤压成了一个没完没了的现在。

Monday, runs the joke, has been replaced by Noneday.

有个笑话是这样讲的，“星期一”已经被“星期零”取代。

As Netflix offers entertainment on a whim, and morning newspapers become obsolete, Mr Henkin argues that "the hold of the week on our lives loosens, and our place in the cycle becomes in turn less memorable."

随着网飞公司心血来潮提供娱乐节目，早报变得过时，亨金认为，“‘周’对我们生活的控制开始松动，我们在周循环中的位置也变得不再那么值得记住。”

Everyone may soon start to feel a bit like Thomas Butler Gunn.

每个人可能很快就会开始觉得自己有点像托马斯·巴特勒·葛恩了。