纽约时报 黑人男孩寻找柏拉图 改变几代人命运(1)（在线收听）

    When my father was a small boy in Galveston, Texas, with no siblings to play with or anything like a helicopter parent regimenting his time, he roamed the inscrutable world of adults all around him.

    当我的父亲还是小男孩时，他住在德克萨斯州加尔维斯顿，他没有兄弟姐妹可以一起玩，也没有“直升机父母”管理他的时间，他游荡在周围成年人的神秘世界里。

    On one such sortie, rummaging behind his neighbor’s property, he found a neglected box of books, the names of which he recalls to this day with awe and precision.

    在一次这样的行动中，他在邻居的房屋后面到处翻寻，发现了一个被人遗忘的箱子，里面装着书，他至今仍心怀敬畏且能精准地回忆起来那天的事情。

    The first and most important was Will Durant’s 1926 classic, “The Story of Philosophy.”

    第一部也是最重要的一部是威尔·杜兰特1926年的经典著作《哲学的故事》。

    In its pages, he was immediately drawn to an image of Socrates, whose features reminded him of his grandmother’s pig.

    他立刻被书中苏格拉底的形象所吸引，他的容貌让他想起了他祖母的猪。

    Far from repulsed, he lingered on the image, longing to comprehend why this funny-looking man who never wrote a word was revered throughout the ages.

    他非但没有憎恶，反而留恋在这个形象上，渴望理解为什么这个长相滑稽、一个字也没写过的人会世世代代受到尊敬。

    Galveston is a port town, and even amid the segregation of the 1940s, the color line fluctuated. There was more cultural and class exchange than contemporary narratives of racial deprivation tend to allow for.

    加尔维斯顿是一个港口城市，即使在20世纪40年代的种族隔离时期，肤色界限也在变化。比起当代关于种族剥削所允许叙述的， 这里有更多的文化和阶级交流。

    My father’s family was not educated, yet the neighbor in question was the principal of the local Black elementary school. The house previously belonged to European immigrants.

    我父亲的家庭没有受过教育，但邻居是当地黑人小学的校长。这栋房子以前属于欧洲移民。

    Ownership of the books was unclear. What my father knew was that he needed whatever was inside them, and so he asked to keep them. His neighbor’s generosity that day sparked a passion for reading and inquiry that would shape his entire life, alter its trajectory.

    这些书的所有权尚不清楚。我父亲知道他需要里面的东西，无论里面有什么内容，所以他要求保存它们。他邻居那天的慷慨激发了他对阅读和探究的热情，这影响了他的一生，改变了他的人生轨迹。

    This story swelled long ago to the dimensions of a foundational myth. My father is our family’s First Man, a figure who created himself from scratch, initiating patterns of behavior and taste that did not exist before him but will outlast him now.

    这个故事在很久以前就膨胀成了一个基本的神话。我的父亲是我们家的第一人，一个从零开始创造自己的人物，开创了在他之前不存在的行为和审美模式，但现在将比他更持久。

    If this were fiction, the symbolism would be heavy-handed: The fatherless Black boy stumbles upon Wisdom itself, is transformed by the Socratic injunction to know thyself and through sheer imagination and willpower weaves together an intellectual and ethical lifeline stretching back to Attica.

    如果这是虚构的，那么其象征意义包含过多: 这个失去父亲的黑人男孩偶然发现了智慧本身，通过苏格拉底的训令，他了解了自己，通过纯粹的想象和意志力，编织了一条可以追溯到阿提卡的智慧和道德生命线。

    Yet this story is essentially true, and it reverberated throughout my own childhood, guiding my course of study in college and throughout my adulthood.

    然而这个故事基本上是真实的，它在我的童年时代一直回荡着，指引着我在大学和成年后的学习过程。

    That story was very much on my mind as our delayed Air France flight landed in Athens in July, for the first vacation out of the country that my wife, Valentine, and our two children, Marlow and Saul, 7 and 3, had taken together since the novel coronavirus upended the seasonal habits I’d grown so fond of since moving to Paris a decade earlier.

    当降落在雅典的法国航空公司的航班延误时,我的脑海中填满了这个故事。此时是7月的第一个假期, 我的妻子瓦伦丁和我们的两个孩子——7岁的马洛和3岁的索尔——由于新型冠状病毒，一起颠覆了我十年前搬到巴黎后养成的季节性习惯。