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丰子恺 《秋》
我的年岁上冠用了“三十”二字，至今已两年了。不解达观的我，从这两个字上受到了不少的暗示与影响。虽然明明觉得自己的体格与精力比二十九岁时全然没有什么差异，但“三十”这一个观念笼在头上，犹之张了一顶阳伞，使我的全身蒙了一个暗淡色的阴影，又仿佛在日历上撕过了立秋的一页以后，虽然太阳的炎威依然没有减却，寒暑表上的热度依然没有降低，然而只当得余威与残暑，或霜降木落的先驱，大地的节候已从今移交于秋了。
实际，我两年来的心情与秋最容易调和而融合。这情形与从前不同。在往年，我只慕春天。我最欢喜杨柳与燕子。尤其欢喜初染鹅黄的嫩柳。我曾经名自己的寓居为“小杨柳屋”，曾经画了许多杨柳燕子的画，又曾经摘取秀长的柳叶，在厚纸上裱成各种风调的眉，想象这等眉的所有者的颜貌，而在其下面添描出眼鼻与口。那时候我每逢早春时节，正月二月之交，看见杨柳枝的线条上挂了细珠，带了隐隐的青色而“遥看近却无”的时候，我心中便充满了一种狂喜，这狂喜又立刻变成焦虑，似乎常常在说：“春来了！不要放过！赶快设法招待它，享乐它，永远留住它。”我读了”良辰美景奈何天”等句，曾经真心地感动。以为古人都太息一春的虚度。前车可鉴！到我手里决不放它空过了。最是逢到了古人惋惜最深的寒食清明，我心中的焦灼便更甚。那一天我总想有一种足以充分酬偿这佳节的举行。我准拟作诗，作画，或痛饮，漫游。虽然大多不被实行；或实行而全无效果，反而中了酒，闹了事，换得了不快的回忆；但我总不灰心，总觉得春的可恋。我心中似乎只有知道春，别的三季在我都当作春的预备，或待春的休息时间，全然不曾注意到它们的存在与意义。而对于秋，尤无感觉：因为夏连续在春的后面，在我可当作春的过剩；冬先行春的前面，在我可当作春的准备；独有与春全无关联的秋，在我心中一向没有它的位置。
自从我的年龄告了立秋以后，两年来的心境完全转了一个方向，也变成秋天了。然而情形与前不同：并不是在秋日感到像昔日的狂喜与焦灼。我只觉得一到秋天，自己的心境便十分调和。非但没有那种狂喜与焦灼，直常常被秋风秋雨秋色秋光所吸引而融化在秋中，暂时失却了自己的所在。而对于春，又并非像昔日对于秋的无感觉。我现在对于春非常厌恶。每当万象回春的时候，看到群花的斗艳，蜂蝶的扰攘，以及草木昆虫等到处争先恐后地滋生繁殖的状态，我觉得天地间的凡庸，贪婪，无耻，与愚痴，无过于此了！尤其是在青春的时候，看到柳条上挂了隐隐的绿珠，桃枝上着了点点的红斑，最使我觉得可笑又可怜。我想唤醒一个花蕊来对它说：“啊！你也来反覆这老调了！我眼看见你的无数的祖先，个个同你一样地出世，个个努力发展，争荣竞秀；不久没有一个不憔悴而化泥尘。你何苦也来反覆这老调呢？如今你已长了这孽根，将来看你弄娇弄艳，装笑装颦，招致了蹂躏，摧残，攀折之苦，而步你的祖先们的后尘！”
实际，迎送了三十几次的春来春去的人，对于花事早已看得厌倦，感觉已经麻木，热情已经冷却，决不会再像初见世面的青年少女地为花的幻姿所诱惑而赞之，叹之，怜之，惜之了。况且天地万物，没有一件逃得出荣枯，盛衰，生灭，有无之理。过去的历史昭然地证明着这一点，无须我们再说。古来无数的诗人千遍一律地为伤春惜花费词，这种效颦也觉得可厌。假如要我对于世间的生荣死灭费一点词，我觉得生荣不足道，而宁愿欢喜赞叹一切的死灭。对于死者的贪婪，愚昧，与怯弱，后者的态度何等谦逊，悟达，而伟大！我对于春与秋的舍取，也是为了这一点。
夏目漱石三十岁的时候，曾经这样说：“人生二十而知有生的利益；二十五而知有明之处必有暗；至于三十的今日，更知明多之处暗亦多，欢浓之时愁亦重。”我现在对于这话也深抱同感；有时又觉得三十的特征不止这一端，其更特殊的是对于死的体感。青年们恋爱不遂的时候惯说生生死死，然而这不过是知有“死”的一回事而已，不是体感。犹之在饮冰挥扇的夏日，不能体感到围炉拥衾的冬夜的滋味。就是我们阅历了三十几度寒暑的人，在前几天的炎阳之下也无论如何感不到浴日的滋味。围炉，拥衾，浴日等事，在夏天的人的心中只是一种空虚的知识，不过晓得将来须有这些事而已，但是不能体感它们的滋味。须得入了秋天，炎阳逞尽了威势而渐渐退却，汗水浸胖了的肌肤渐渐收缩，身穿单衣似乎要打寒噤，而手触法郎绒觉得快适的时候，于是围炉、拥衾，浴日等知识方能渐渐融入体验界中而化为体感。我的年龄告了立秋以后，心境中所起的最特殊的状态便是这对于“死”的体感。以前我的思虑真疏浅！以为春可以常在人间，人可以永在青年，竟完全没有想到死。又以为人生的意义只在于生，我的一生最有意义，似乎我是不会死的。直到现在，仗了秋的慈光的鉴照，死的灵气钟育，才知道生的甘苦悲欢，是天地间反覆过亿万次的老调，又何足珍惜？我但求此生的平安的度送与脱出而已。犹之罹了疯狂的人，病中的颠倒迷离何足计较？但求其去病而已。
我正要搁笔，忽然西窗外黑云弥漫，天际闪出一道电光，发出隐隐的雷声，骤然洒下一阵夹着冰雹的秋雨。啊！原来立秋过得不多天，秋心稚嫩而未曾老练，不免还有这种不调和的现象，可怕哉！
作品译文
Autumn
It is now two years since my year of age carried the prefix “thirty”. Never one to take things philosophically, I have felt the influence and intimations of this world in several ways. Though I am fully aware that in health and spirits I am in no way different from what I was at the age of twenty-nine, this notion of “thirty” hangs over my head. It is like the opening of a parasol that casts one in dark shade, or like the tearing off of the page that marks the first day of autumn from the calendar: although the sun’s power has not diminished, and the thermometer’s reading has not dropped, one thinks of it only as fading strength or swan song, or as the prelude to frost and leaf-fall; from now on the natural world has shifted to the autumn season.
In truth my mood over the last two years has been of a kind to harmonize or blend with autumn. This is a change. In years gone by I only hankered after spring. I loved willows and swallows. Especially the young willow wands newly tinged with gosling yellow. I named my lodging “Little Willow Hut”, and did lots of paintings of willows and swallows, and also cut slender willow shoots and mounted them on cartridge paper as different styles of eyebrow, imagined the faces that would go with those eyebrows, and sketched in eyes, nose and mouth below them. At the first signs of spring in those days, around the end of the first month by the lunar calendar, when I saw tiny knobs breaking the smooth lines of the willow branches, with a suggestion of green that seemed to vanish close up, my heart was filled with delirious joy. But this joy immediately turned to anxiety, as if I was always telling myself: “Spring has come! Don’t let it go by! Quick, think how to entertain it, enjoy it, keep it with you for ever.” I had been genuinely moved by such lines as “The golden hour, the beautiful scene, alas the ravages of time”; I took to heart the lesson of our forebears when they sighed over spring passing neglected. Now it was in my hands, I vowed it should not go by in vain! When the Qingming Festival, that time of deepest sorrowing for our forefathers, came around, my anxiety was intensified. I always wanted to make that day an occasion, so as to render fitting tribute to the season. I planned to write poems, do paintings, or go on a binge or an excursion. Although most of those plans were not carried out, or if carried out proved entirely fruitless, resulting adversely in drunken stupor, disturbances, and unhappy memories, yet I was never discouraged, and always felt spring was lovable.
To my mind spring was the only season. The other three were either the preparation for spring, or the interval when spring was awaited. I completely ignored their existence and meaning. I was especially indifferent to autumn, because summer succeeded spring, and I could see it as spring taken to excess; winter preceded spring, and so could be seen as making ready for spring; but autumn had no connection at all with spring, and so had no place in my mind.
In the two years since my year of age reached the start of autumn on life’s calendar my mindset has had an entirely different orientation: it has become autumn too. But my state is different orientation: it has become autumn too. But my state is different from what it was, I do not feel in autumn the extravagant joy and anxiety of former days. I just feel when autumn comes round that my state of mind is perfectly attuned to it. Not only has that joy and anxiety left me, I am often drawn by autumn wind, autumn rain, autumn colors and shades, into melting into the season, and losing for a time my own identity. What’s more, my attitude to spring is not the indifference that I formerly felt for autumn. I now detest spring. Whenever the myriad signs of spring appear, and I see the beauty pageant of flowers, the bustle of bees and butterflies, and everywhere the mad rush of plants, insects and other things to multiply and procreate, it seems to me that nothing could better illustrate the vulgarity, greed, shamelessness and senselessness of this world. Particularly when in the first flush of spring I see the hint of green knobs on the willow branches, and the speckling of red petals on the peach trees, I find it both ridiculous and pathetic. I want to wake up a flower bud and tell it, “So, you’ve come too to replay that old refrain! I’ve seen with my own eyes countless ancestors of your being born like you, and striving each and every one to outdo the others in splendor; not one of them hasn’t withered and turned to dust. What is the point of you too repeating that old refrain? Born into sin, what does the future hold? You’ll drink and posture and play the flirt, and what you’ll get for your trouble is being trampled and crushed and broken off, the same fate as all your ancestors suffered!”
To face facts, someone who has welcomed and seen off thirty-odd springs gets thoroughly fed up with the business of flowers: his senses are numbed, his passion is cooked. He will not be bewitched like a young virgin seeing the world for the first time by the magic of flowers, and praise them, sigh over them, take pity on them, mourn them. For of all things under the sun there is not one that escapes the law of flowering and fading, growing and decaying, living and dying, being and not being. Past history amply proves this point; we need not say more. Countless poets down the ages have written reams of verses, all like, to express their sorrow at the passing of spring and their regret over the fading of flowers. This aping of each other is detestable. If I were to waste words myself on the subject of birth and ripening, death and extinction, it would be to say that birth and ripening are not worth mentioning; my praise goes to death and extinction. Compared with the greed, stupidity and spinelessness of the former, how modest, enlightened and dignified is the attitude of the latter! My preference for autumn over spring is based on that.
Natsume Suseki said this when he was thirty: “Twenty years into life I learned the value of being alive; at twenty-five I learned that where there is light there must be darkness; now at thirty I know even better that where there is much light there is also much darkness, and when joy is abundant sorrow is also heavy.” I now deeply sympathize with this view. At the same time I feel that this is not the only facet of being thirty; a more particular one is the sense of death. When young people are thwarted in love they like to talk about death and dying, but that is only knowledge of the thing called death, no the sense of it. It is similar to not being able to sense what it is like to sit round a winter fire huddled in blankets when one is drinking iced drinks and fanning oneself on a summer’s day. Even we who have known thirty-odd changes of seasons could not in the recent keatwave get the sense of a nice crisp dawn. Things like crisp dawns, winter fires and huddling in blankets are just abstract data in the mind of people in the middle of summer: they merely know that such things lie in the future, but cannot experience the sensation of them. One has to wait for autumn, when the broiling sun has displayed its might and is gradually receding and flesh which has been swelled with sweat gradually draws in, when the wearing of unlined clothes inclines one to shiver and flannel is pleasant to the touch, for the knowledge of crisp dawns, winter fires and huddling in blankets to gradually enter the realm of experience and become sensation.
After my year of age reached the start of autumn, the most special state of mind it gave me was indeed this sensation of “death”. How shallow were my thoughts prior to that! I believed that spring could be our constant companion, that man could stay forever young, and actually never thought of death. And I believed that the meaning of human life was only in living, and my own life was most meaningful; it seemed I couldn’t die. Only now, with the benefit of the illumination of autumn rays, and under the benign influence of the spirit of death, have I comprehended that life’s sweetness and bitterness, joys and sorrows are an old refrain that has been played billions of times under our skies, and are nothing to treasure. I seek only peaceful passage through and release from this life. To make a comparison, if a person suffers from madness, it is pointless to try to make anything of his confusion and delusions: one hopes only to rid him of his sickness.
As I lay down my pen, I see from my western window black clouds filling the sky, a flash of lightning on the horizon, and hear a faint rumble of thunder. A sudden shower of autumn rain mixed with hail pours down. Oh! So few days after the start of autumn, while the autumn mind is still young and green, it turns out that such discordance occurs: it scares me!
