Beauty and the Beast
Phil Donahue Compared to the animals around us, there’s no doubt we are a remarkable phenomenon.Someone referred to us the ―superdeluxe model‖: we walk, we talk, we smile, we taste, we touch, we think.All this is in a relatively small and attractive package.We’re also very good with our hands.In the comparatively brief time we’ve been available in the current formthe tightening in the throat, the tingle up the spine, the tear of pride-is unique to the human animal.Throughout most of our history, that feeling belonged exclusively to religion.When most people’s lives were ―solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,‖ religion was the only thing that made them feel dignified, special, and proud of being human. 我们能想象，当站在月球上肯定会这么想：凝视着地球，仿若悬停在太空中的一颗蓝白相间的大理石球；想人类在这么短的时间内做到了这步。这种感觉本身——喉咙紧缩，脊柱发麻，自豪的眼泪奔涌而出——是人类独一无二的。纵观人类历史，这种感觉是宗教专有的。当大部分的人生活陷入―孤独，贫穷，低劣，粗野和短浅‖时，宗教是唯一能让他们感到做为人类的尊严、特殊和骄傲。
The peasants who gazed for the first time at the stained gla in the cathedral at Chartres undoubtedly experienced that same feeling-the most human of emotions-wonder.Most of them had never been inside anything bigger than a thatched hut and never seen anything more colorful than a piece of dyed cloth.Even today, the sight of this huge, arched space with those luminous windows suspended high in the darkne is almost enough to make a believer of even the most skeptical.In 1260, when the church was consecrated, the peasants who shuffled through those doors must have thought they had died and gone to heaven. 第一次凝视Chartres大教堂彩色玻璃的农民们无疑会有经历同样的感受——人类最多的情感——惊奇。他们中的很多人从来没在比茅草小屋更大的建筑中住过，从来没见过比花布色彩更多的颜色。甚至今天，在黑夜中看到这个巨大的有着明亮窗户高高悬挂的拱形空间，足以让一个怀疑者变成一个信徒。在1260年，教堂开始祭祀时，流连于其中的农民们一定会觉得他们已经逝去，进入了天堂。
In fact, Chartres cathedral, like dozens of other cathedrals built in the same period, is the medieval equivalent of the modern effort to put a man on the moon.Both represent the perfect combination of individual achievement and group cooperation in the pursuit of something beautiful and lasting.The space program would never have gotten off the ground if Wernher von Braun hadn’t made his discoveries in the field of jet propulsion, and the arches of Chartres would never have soared if an anonymous French architect hadn’t devised a system of buttrees to support a two-ton block of stone 120 feet in the air and keep it there for a thousand years.But there would have been no stones to support if the wealthier townspeople hadn’t dug deep into their pockets and come up with the money needed for construction.The gla in the openings would be clear instead of stained if merchant guilds, members of the nobility, and even the French king hadn’t contribute money for the windows.And all the money would have been worthle if legions of craftsmen hadn’t been willing to dedicate their skills and often their lives to making this not just another building, but a monument to human achievement.
实际上，Chartres大教堂，和当时同时期建成的很多教堂一样，是中世纪的登月工程。同样是人类在追求美丽和永恒过程中，个人成就和群体劳作的完美结合。如果沃纳·冯·布劳恩没有在火箭推进领域取得成就，空间工程根本无法开展；同样，如果某个不知名的法国建筑师没有设计加固系统来支撑2吨重的巨石离地120英尺长达1000年，Chartres大教堂的拱形结构将不会高高耸立。如果没有富足的城镇居民掏腰包为工程凑钱，那么将没有一木一石来搭建教堂。如果没有商业行会，没有贵族阶层甚至法国国王来为教堂的窗户提供资金的话，教堂外面的窗户将是透明的，而不是彩色的。如果众多手艺人不愿将它们的才能和部分时间奉献给Chartres大教堂，人类文明的创举，而是其他建筑，那么所有的钱将毫无意义。
Bees get together and build hives, termites build mounds, beavers build dams, and spiders spin webs, but what other animal can change stone and gla into poetry? Other animal can alter their environment at the margins, but only we can transform our environment so completely that we reshape our destiny.Alone in the animal kingdom, we can set goals for ourselves and then pursue them.The dream of the medi craftsmen who built Chartres was to secure a place for themselves in heaven.By lavishing love on this stone and gla, they glorified God and hoped to be rewarded in the next life.But in the proce, they changed this life, made it more beautiful and more worth living. 蜜蜂聚在一起建造蜂巢，白蚁搭建土丘，河狸建造堤坝，蜘蛛织网，但是什么动物能把石头和玻璃变成诗歌？其他动物能够预警周边环境的微小变化，但是只有我们人类可以如此彻底地改变我们周边的环境以至于重塑了人类的命运。我们能为自己设定目标，然后去争取实现它，这在动物王国中是独一无二的。建造Chartres大教堂的中世纪工匠的梦想是为自己在天堂获得一个地方。通过将自己的爱无私慷慨地献给教堂的石头和玻璃，他们赞美上帝并且希望在来生得到奖赏。但在这个过程中，他们改变了自己的生活，将其变得更加美好，更加有意义。
A place like Chartres makes us proud to be human.We can stand tall and hold our heads high.Certainly no other creature could conceive and create something of such sublime beauty, Case closed? Hardly.There is, unfortunately, another side to the human animal that’s nothing to be proud of.At places like Chartres, it’s easy—and tempting—to overlook this other side, the ugly side, of our nature.But we can’t begin to understand the human animal without it.Surely there’s beauty inside us—but there’s also a beast, a part of us that we’d like to deny but can’t, a part that gives us a knot in the stomach instead of a lump in the throat. Chartres大教堂这样的地方让我们为作为人类而自豪。我们能昂起头高高站着，当然，没有任何一种生物能够构想和创造美得如此高尚的事物。然后，事情到此为止了吗？没有。很不幸，人类作为一种动物，存在着不值得骄傲的另一面。在Chartres大教堂这样地方，很容易，应该说引诱我们忽略人性丑恶的另一面。但是没有这一面，我们将无法去理解人这种动物。当然，我们心中有美好的一面，但是也存在丑恶的一面，我们很想去否定它，但是不能。作为我们内心组成的一部分，它不再使我们因感动而哭泣，相反，它让我们心里纠结如麻。
Even the God-loving people who fashioned the soaring vaults and delicate windows of Chartres had murder on their minds.Some of the workers may well have been veterans of the First Crusade, an expedition to save the Holy Land from the infidel Muslims that was part religious frenzy, part military adventure, and part social fad.On that excursion, begun four years after work in Chartres began, the Crusaders slaughtered thousands of noncombatants, leveled whole communities, and finally ―saved‖ the holy city of Jerusalem by maacring all its inhabitants-men, women, children, Muslims, Jews: everybody.Muslims, after all, were only infidels, not humans, so it wasn’t like killing your next door neighbor.
甚至连建造高耸拱形和致力于大教堂窗户设计的热爱上帝的人们也曾经在他们的思想中进行过谋杀。工人中的一些是第一次十字军东征时的老兵。十字军东征，是一次为了将圣地从穆斯林异教徒手中拯救过来而进行的一次远征，它带有部分宗教狂热，部分军事冒险，部分社会流行时尚。这次远征在Chartres开始修建四年后展开，十字军屠杀了成千上万的非战斗人员，夷平了整个社区，以屠杀了所有的居民——包括男人，女人，儿童，穆斯林，犹太人：所有人的方式，最终将圣城耶路撒冷拯救回来。毕竟，穆斯林仅仅是异教徒，不是人类，这和杀死你的隔壁邻居是不一样的。
After the shrines of Christianity were in ―safe‖ hands, many Crusaders returned home and turned their attention to other things, like the cathedral at Chartres.
在基督教圣坛被拯救回来后，许多十字军士兵返回家园，开始做其他的一些事情，比如修建Chartres大教堂。
How could the same hands that carved these stones and stained this gla have wielded swords and butchered women and children? How could so much beauty and so much brutality exist side by side? This is the great contradiction of the human animal.We can pray one minute and kill the next, create one minute and destroy the next, even love and hate simultaneously.We like to think that our erratic behavior is a thing of the past, that we’ve outgrown the excees of the Crusades.But nothing could be further from truth.There are people in Belfast today who will repeat the catechism, then go to a bomb into a crowded pub; people who grieve for the victims of crime, then pay good money to see it reenacted on a movie screen.The same technological wizardry, individual bravery, and group effort that put us on the moon have also given us weapons that can blow our whole planet into permanent winter.雕刻石头，给玻璃上色的同一双手怎么会拿起刀剑屠杀妇女和儿童？如此多的美和丑恶怎么会同时存在呢？这是人类最大的矛盾之处。我们会在前一分钟祈祷，紧接着拿起屠刀，在前一分钟创造而紧接着去毁灭，甚至爱和恨同时存在。我们愿意这样认为，人类这种奇怪的行为只存在于过去，我们已经从十字军的极端行为中走出来。但是，事实并非如此。在贝尔法斯特，人们在学习完教义后，将炸弹扔进了拥挤人群中；人们会为犯罪受害人感到哀伤，之后却发很多钱去电影院观看犯罪过程的重演。科学技术、个人勇气和群体努力将人送上月球的同时，也给我们带来能将整个地球陷入核冬天的可怕武器。
Far from having disappeared with the last Crusade, the human animal’s strange capacity for contradictory behavior still affects our daily lives.As parents, we desperately want our kids to grow up emotionally healthy, able to love and be to loved; then our culture teaches them that sex is dirty and they should be ashamed of their sexual desires.Women say they want to marry a nice person who will respect them and communicate with them; then they melt for machismo and fall for the strong, silent type.They want a man who will share the housework and feed the baby at three in the morning, but they live in a society in which few boes grant time off to men who want to share parenting.Cops throw drunken drivers in jail while television sells beer as though it were an American entitlement.The meage to teenage males:‖You’re not a man without a beer can in your hand.‖ But there are millions of teenage drivers and thousands of cloverleaves out there, and the phone rings every day, in homes acro America, and it’s the hospital calling—or the morgue.
人类这种矛盾的行为远没有随着最后一次十字军东征而消失，今天它依然影响着我们的日常生活。作为父母，我们不顾一切希望自己的孩子能够在情感上健康成长，能够去爱，也能够被爱；但是我们的文化告诉孩子性是肮脏的，他们应该对他们的性欲感到羞愧。女性都说她们希望与尊重她们能够与她们交流的好男人结婚，然而她们却沉醉于大男子主义，痴痴迷恋上强壮，冷俊的男人（类似于《别和陌生人说话》中的安嘉和）。她们希望自己的丈夫都能分担家务并且在凌晨3点起来喂婴儿，但是她们生活在一个几乎没有老板愿意让自己员工花费时间去承担父母角色的环境中。警察将酒后驾车的司机关进监狱的同时，电视里疯狂播放买酒广告仿佛它是美国人应保障的基本权利。它给未成年男孩的信息是：―如果你手中没有酒瓶的话，你就不是男人。‖但是现实中有千百万未成年驾驶者和数千立交交叉路口，于是美国境内，每天都会有父母接到电话，来自医院，或者太平间。
Why do we do the things we do? Why, after thousands of years of personal tragedies and group catastrophes, do we continue to make the same mistake? Why do we persist in the same contradictory behavior day after day, century after century, alternating between Chartres and the Crusades, between grief and gore, between moonwalks and megatons?
为什么我们要做这些我们做过的事？在千百万年中无数的个人悲剧和社会灾难后，为什么我们还要继续犯同样的错误？为什么我们日复一日，一个世纪又一个世纪地坚持同样矛盾的行为？交替往返于Chartres大教堂和十字军东征，于悲痛和冲突流血，于月上行走和曼哈顿工程。
These questions aren’t just for the historians and the sociologists.They’re for everyone who wrestles with these contradictory drives in his or her own life.The impulse that sends a society back to war, despite the knowledge that children will die and mother will grieve, is the same impulse that leads you to light up another cigarette or have ―one more for road,‖ despite the knowledge that it may kill you.We live with contradictions in our own behavior—and the behavior of others—every day.Are they a permanent part of the human condition, or can we do something about them?
这些问题并不仅仅是留给历史学家和社会学家的。他们是留给挣扎于被这些矛盾困扰的每个人。这种动力将世界拖入战争，尽管人们知道母亲会因为失去孩子而悲伤；同样是这种动力驱使你点燃了另一只香烟，或者在上路前―更进一杯酒‖，尽管你明白会因此而失去生命。我们每天生活在自己和他人的矛盾行为中。难道它们是人类状况永恒的一部分？或者，我们能为此做些什么吗？
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