戀愛中的女人：WOMEN IN LOVE（英文版）

Such an ambitious and experimental work. Is love about power? or love is about love. Are all our relationships indeed ourselves? Friendship, sisterhood, sexual desire both between men and women and men and men, the place of power and freedom in such relationships, the need for privacy, the importance of physical touch in our lives, how intimacy can uplift and disappoint...sparkle timeless echoes. The density and eloquence of his writing, both the narration and the dialogue, are so inspiring, one will want to live the life of one of his seekers. You could, randomly pick almost any paragraph and read it and close the book and think to yourself "wow, that was simply beautiful.”

初讀此書讓我感覺與其它小說特別不同的是，作者賦予男女主角更多討論的是比較抽象的人生哲學，而非他們日常生活的人間煙火。然而隨着情節的推進，越讀越能體味到作者立意的深邃，這不是在描寫尋常的愛情糾葛，是借愛情故事探尋更深層的心理和精神世界，Birkin和Ursula 追求的是一種星際平衡式的保持自我的理想愛情，不是普通人能達到的。Gerald 和Gudrun這一對比較複雜，Gerald 雖然物質上富有，但精神層面卻依賴活力充沛的Gudrun激起內心的生活動力。而Gudrun接受不了這樣的Gerald，她需要一個更懂得藝術和生活情趣的男人。用Gudrun的話來說，Gerald是更需要她，而不是更愛她。這樣的差異，即使旅途中沒有遇到那個德國雕刻家Loerke，這對戀人也註定會從開始的忘卻自我，奮不顧身投入走向最終反目。 本書還有一個更復雜寬泛的精神層面的探索，那就是Birkin這個人物的心理，Birkin愛Ursula，也承認對於女人的親密之愛，擁有Ursula一人足矣。但他還需要Gerald的男人之愛，他需要這兩種愛才覺得人生真正圓滿幸福， 而Ursula 覺得Birkin 這種想法是錯誤的不可能的，對她來說，擁有了Birkin一人的愛足矣，不再需要其他人的愛。 另外本書的情景交融方面寫的非常好，人物的情感波動及心理，描寫的非常細膩優美，文字卻很簡練。 這是目前爲止我讀過的英文原著裏最長的一部小說，對兩性觀念的詮釋也最爲複雜深刻。但是如果現實生活中，每個人都象書裏男女主角那樣追求愛情，也是很難達到滿意的。在我看來，無論是凡塵煙火，還是星際平衡，只要兩個相愛的人精神層面有共鳴，能互相包容體諒，柴米油鹽之中也能尋見美好。

Even though it was forbidden at that age, we may fail to understand its sexual part. Just read it and you will take in more than you expect.

“Having you, I can live all my life without anybody else, any other sheer intimacy. But to make it complete, really happy, I wanted eternal union with a man too: another kind of love,” he said. “I don't believe it,” she said. “It's an obstinacy, a theory, a perversity.” “Well —” he said. “You can't have two kinds of love. Why should you!” It seems as if I can't,” he said. “Yet I wanted it.” “You can't have it, because it's false, impossible,” she said. “I don't believe that,” he answered.

Great book! 不應該叫《愛情中的女人》。 從頭到尾都在絕望地討論人性的需求。人到底需要什麼？人可不可以同時存在異性和同性之愛？人的存在到底有什麼意義？非得一直問下去的話，就把自己問絕望了。因爲人的一生本無意義。人生一世 草生一秋從生到死就是一種過程。如果意識不到人生的意義就是這種體驗的過程，而非要尋找結果的話，人就鑽牛角尖了，精神問題就出現了。最高境界的活法還是禪宗的＂活在當下”。這種哲學觀也是當今世界心理學中目前最主要的心理療法之一。

2023年12月28日 星期四 祝福早安 天氣晴朗 氣溫—1℃ 《戀愛中的女人》 I try to read I go to work 我努力閱讀 我認真工作 I'm laughing with my friends 我與朋友們歡笑着 But I can't stop to keep myself from thinking oh no 但我還是無法停止 對你的思念無法停止 I wonder how I wonder why 我不知道我怎麼了 我不明白爲什麼會這樣 I wonder where they are 我想知道它們在哪裏 The days we had the songs we sang together 那些我們共度的日子 我們共同吟唱過的歌曲 I'm holding on forever 我始終堅持着 Reaching for the love that seems so far 但這一份愛卻是那樣遙不可及 So I say a little prayer 於是我低聲祈禱 And hope my dreams will take me there 希望夢想能把我帶到那兒 Where the skies are blue 那裏有湛藍的天空 To see you once again my love 在那裏能與你再次相見 我的愛 Overseas from coast to coast 翻越大海 從此岸到達彼岸 To find a place I love the most 去找尋我鍾愛的地方 Where the fields are green 那裏有翠綠的田野 To see you once again 在那裏能與你再次相見 To hold you in my arms 將你擁入我的懷抱 To promise you my love 向你許下諾言 我的愛 To tell you from the heart 由衷的告訴你 You're all I'm thinking of 你是我思念的所有 He lay sick and unmoved, in pure opposition to everything. He knew how near to breaking was the vessel that held his life. He knew also how strong and durable it was. And he did not care. Better a thousand times take one's chance with death, than accept a life one did not want. But best of all to persist and persist and persist for ever, till one were satisfied in life. He knew that Ursula was referred back to him. He knew his life rested with her. But he would rather not live than accept the love she proffered. The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage, a sort of conscription. What it was in him he did not know, but the thought of love, marriage, and children, and a life lived together, in the horrible privacy of domestic and connubial satisfaction, was repulsive. He wanted something clearer, more open, cooler, as it were. The hot narrow intimacy between man and wife was abhorrent. The way they shut their doors, these married people, and shut themselves in to their own exclusive alliance with each other, even in love, disgusted him. It was a whole community of mistrustful couples insulated in private houses or private rooms, always in couples, and no further life, no further immediate, no disinterested relationship admitted:a kaleidoscope of couples, disjoined, separatist, meaningless entities of married couples. True, he hated promiscuity even worse than marriage, and a liaison was only another kind of coupling, reactionary from the legal marriage. Reaction was a greater bore than action. On the whole, he hated sex, it was such a limitation. It was sex that turned a man into a broken half of a couple, the woman into the other broken half. And he wanted to be single in himself, the woman single in herself. He wanted sex to revert to the level of the other appetites, to be regarded as a functional process, not as a fulfilment. He believed in sex marriage. But beyond this, he wanted a further conjunction, where man had being and woman had being, two pure beings, each constituting the freedom of the other, balancing each other like two poles of one force, like two angels, or two demons. He wanted so much to be free, not under the compulsion of any need for unification, or tortured by unsatisfied desire. Desire and aspiration should find their object without all this torture, as now, in a world of plenty of water, simple thirst is inconsiderable, satisfied almost unconsciously. And he wanted to be with Ursula as free as with himself, single and clear and cool, yet balanced, polarised with her. The merging, the clutching, the mingling of love was become madly abhorrent to him. But it seemed to him, woman was always so horrible and clutching, she had such a lust for possession, a greed of selfimportance in love. She wanted to have, to own, to control, to be dominant. Everything must be referred back to her, to Woman, the Great Mother of everything, out of whom proceeded everything and to whom everything must finally be rendered up. It filled him with almost insane fury, this calm assumption of the Magna Mater, that all was hers, because she had borne it. Man was hers because she had borne him. A Mater Dolorosa, she had borne him, a Magna Mater, she now claimed him again, soul and body, sex, meaning, and all. He had a horror of the Magna Mater, she was detestable. She was on a very high horse again, was woman, the Great Mother. Did he not know it in Hermione. Hermione, the humble, the subservient, what was she all the while but the Mater Dolorosa, in her subservienceclaiming with horrible, insidious arrogance and female tyranny, her own again, claiming back the man she had borne in suffering. By her very suffering and humility she bound her son with chains, she held him her everlasting prisoner. And Ursula, Ursula was the same — or the inverse. She too was the awful, arrogant queen of life, as if she were a queen bee on whom all the rest depended. He saw the yellow flare in her eyes, he knew the unthinkable overweening assumption of primacy in her. She was unconscious of it herself. She was only too ready to knock her head on the ground before a man. But this was only when she was so certain of her man, that she could worship him as a woman worships her own infant, with a worship of perfect possession. It was intolerable, this possession at the hands of woman. Always a man must be considered as the broken off fragment of a woman, and the sex was the still aching scar of the laceration. Man must be added on to a woman, before he had any real place or wholeness. And why? Why should we consider ourselves, men and women, as broken fragments of one whole? It is not true. We are not broken fragments of one whole. Rather we are the singling away into purity and clear being, of things that were mixed. Rather the sex is that which remains in us of the mixed, the unresolved. And passion is the further separating of this mixture, that which is manly being taken into the being of the man, that which is womanly passing to the woman, till the two are clear and whole as angels, the admixture of sex in the highest sense surpassed, leaving two single beings constellated together like two stars. In the old age, before sex was, we were mixed, each one a mixture. The process of singling into individuality resulted into the great polarisation of sex. The womanly drew to one side, the manly to the other. But the separation was imperfect even them. And so our world-cycle passes. There is now to come the new day, when we are beings each of us, fulfilled in difference. The man is pure man, the woman pure woman, they are perfectly polarised. But there is no longer any of the horrible merging, mingling selfabnegation of love. There is only the pure duality of polarisation, each one free from any contamination of the other. In each, the individual is primal, sex is subordinate, but perfectly polarised. Each has a single, separate being, with its own laws. The man has his pure freedom, the woman hers. Each acknowledges the perfection of the polarised sex-circuit. Each admits the different nature in the other. So Birkin meditated whilst he was ill. He liked sometimes to be ill enough to take to his bed. For then he got better very quickly, and things came to him clear and sure. Whilst he was laid up, Gerald came to see him. The two men had a deep, uneasy feeling for each other. Gerald's eyes were quick and restless, his whole manner tense and impatient, he seemed strung up to some activity. According to conventionality, he wore black clothes,he looked formal,handsome and comme il faut.His hair was fair almost to whiteness, sharp like splinters of light, his face was keen and ruddy, his body seemed full of northern energy. Gerald really loved Birkin, though he never quite believed in him. Birkin was too unreal; — clever, whimsical, wonderful, but not practical enough. Gerald felt that his own understanding was much sounder and safer. Birkin was delightful, a wonderful spirit, but after all, not to be taken seriously, not quite to be counted as a man among men. “Why are you laid up again?” he asked kindly, taking the sick man's hand. It was always Gerald who was protective, offering the warm shelter of his physical strength. “For my sins, I suppose,” Birkin said, smiling a little ironically. “For your sins? Yes, probably that is so. You should sin less, and keep better in health?” “You'd better teach me.” He looked at Gerald with ironic eyes. “How are things with you?” asked Birkin. “With me?” Gerald looked at Birkin, saw he was serious, and a warm light came into his eyes. “I don't know that they're any different. I don't see how they could be. There's nothing to change.” “I suppose you are conducting the business as successfully as ever, and ignoring the demand of the soul.” “That's it,” said Gerald. “At least as far as the business is concerned. I couldn't say about the soul, I'am sure.”

目前看完最長的英文原著了，花了接近二十天。對於這本書，符合一貫現代性的小說，情節比較單調乏味，說教性貫穿於全文，要不是作業需要覺得自己是不會堅持看完的，只能說自己實在沒有鑑賞現代性小說的素養吧。所以能堅持讀完也是不錯的小成就了！

照常以“三天打魚兩天曬網”的節奏，歷經數月纔讀完，卻只能給個“一般”的評價。 寥寥幾個主角，故事散漫，情節平鋪。有幾處看起來還不錯的“伏筆”，稍有閱歷的讀者都能猜出其走向。但最後兩三章的故事還算緊湊，尤其結尾處出現的“劇情反轉”算是全篇中的亮點。 時不時夾雜的法語、德語倒是沒帶來太多麻煩（電子書的無敵之處），但關於人生、愛情、友誼、生死、社會等等問題的，長篇大論且莫衷一是的思辨性論述讀起來實在燒腦。 個人好惡，難免偏頗。

✔，20210627(674本)《戀愛中的女人》《WOMEN IN LOVE（英文版）》[英]《D.H.勞倫斯》_84.7萬_12小時32分鐘

Even though it was forbidden at that age, we may fail to understand its sexual part. Just read it and you will take in more than you expect.