| 摘要 | In her section on memoirs here, Eva Brann reflects on her discomfort with at least one type of praise: “How much sweeter,” she writes, “to be serenely sure of having been underestimated than to have to sink through the floor shamed by clueless overpraise.” Hammering the point home, Brann adds: “Respect we deserve to get; adulation we deserve not to get.”
Brann should know. She has been a tutor at St. John’s College for nearly 60 years, published numerous works as author and translator, received the National Humanities Medal in 2005, and continues to work at an extraordinarily productive rate. And public accolades have not been scarce in the past decade: Everywhere she goes, it seems, an honorary doctorate or other prize gets dropped in her lap. One hears in her remarks the frustration of sitting through innumerable speeches of overpraise.
Public praise may prompt, in some, the desire to write memoirs and pass on one’s life story to the next generation. And the memoir is a marvelous form of writing for those who want to reveal the internal complexities of action ex post facto. But as a statesman aims to shed light on past decisions, the thinker seeks to shed light on the deepest questions he has considered in life. If the statesman writes his memoir well, future statesmen can learn prudence from him; if the thinker writes her memoirs well, future thinkers can learn how to pick fundamental questions and seriously consider them. The thinker’s memoir is not a reflection on past events but a demonstration of engagement with recurrent questions about the world. Eva Brann has written not a memoir that sheds light on events but a collection of philosophical aphorisms—or “thought-bits,” as she calls them: “[A]ll this, on these pages, is my life.”
It’s a strange life, this Doublethink/Doubletalk. “Doublethink” means that the thinker has the power to hold two contradictory beliefs at once and “doubletalk” means “antinomies, antitheses, oppositions.” This is a life defined by opposition and contradiction. In Brann’s world, doublethink is “a spontaneous readiness to do mental double-takes” while doubletalk seeks to preserve the integrity of these mental doubletakes, which is often lost when our thoughts are translated into speech.
Is this a life of indecision? Is the thoughtful, philosophic Eva Brann a passionate but paralyzed Hamlet? She denies it: Unlike Hamlet’s, her life has entailed “[n]o fence-sitting (since doublethink plants you firmly on both sides).” Her “mode of mind” is “a flanking approach toward comprehending a pervasively duplex world, a world that sometimes flashes fleeting signs of covert wholeness.” Doublethink and doubletalk allow Brann to plant herself firmly on both sides of the contradictions the “duplex world” presents.
Her attunement to contradiction and the “duplex” nature of the world requires “the spontaneity possible to souls” because the thinker needs the freedom to perform a doubletake. And Brann has found a home for this spontaneity in what she calls the “amateur status” she gained after initially pursuing a career as an archaeologist specializing in Greek pottery of eighth and seventh centuries b.c. In archaeology, she writes, there were “too many pressing questions . . . at the excavation’s tea table.” Spontaneity requires space from such business-like questions, amateur status not professional precision.
Most of the aphorisms here are examples of doublethink, not conclusive answers to life’s great questions but a flurry of further questions that illuminate the territory surrounding the answer. Brann raises questions that briefly illuminate the world and, by removing herself just as quickly, inspires in readers a desire to shed light as well. The aphorisms in Doublethink/Doubletalk are both an example of doublethink and a catalyst of doublethink: By considering Brann’s thought-bits, we are invited to practice spontaneity in response to the world’s complexities and contradictions, to share in her life of doublethink. |
