恋爱中的女人：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.”

初读此书让我感觉与其它小说特别不同的是，作者赋予男女主角更多讨论的是比较抽象的人生哲学，而非他们日常生活的人间烟火。然而随着情节的推进，越读越能体味到作者立意的深邃，这不是在描写寻常的爱情纠葛，是借爱情故事探寻更深层的心理和精神世界，Birkin和Ursula 追求的是一种星际平衡式的保持自我的理想爱情，不是普通人能达到的。Gerald 和Gudrun这一对比较复杂，Gerald 虽然物质上富有，但精神层面却依赖活力充沛的Gudrun激起内心的生活动力。而Gudrun接受不了这样的Gerald，她需要一个更懂得艺术和生活情趣的男人。用Gudrun的话来说，Gerald是更需要她，而不是更爱她。这样的差异，即使旅途中没有遇到那个德国雕刻家Loerke，这对恋人也注定会从开始的忘却自我，奋不顾身投入走向最终反目。 本书还有一个更复杂宽泛的精神层面的探索，那就是Birkin这个人物的心理，Birkin爱Ursula，也承认对于女人的亲密之爱，拥有Ursula一人足矣。但他还需要Gerald的男人之爱，他需要这两种爱才觉得人生真正圆满幸福， 而Ursula 觉得Birkin 这种想法是错误的不可能的，对她来说，拥有了Birkin一人的爱足矣，不再需要其他人的爱。 另外本书的情景交融方面写的非常好，人物的情感波动及心理，描写的非常细腻优美，文字却很简练。 这是目前为止我读过的英文原著里最长的一部小说，对两性观念的诠释也最为复杂深刻。但是如果现实生活中，每个人都象书里男女主角那样追求爱情，也是很难达到满意的。在我看来，无论是凡尘烟火，还是星际平衡，只要两个相爱的人精神层面有共鸣，能互相包容体谅，柴米油盐之中也能寻见美好。

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! 不应该叫《爱情中的女人》。 从头到尾都在绝望地讨论人性的需求。人到底需要什么？人可不可以同时存在异性和同性之爱？人的存在到底有什么意义？非得一直问下去的话，就把自己问绝望了。因为人的一生本无意义。人生一世 草生一秋从生到死就是一种过程。如果意识不到人生的意义就是这种体验的过程，而非要寻找结果的话，人就钻牛角尖了，精神问题就出现了。最高境界的活法还是禅宗的＂活在当下”。这种哲学观也是当今世界心理学中目前最主要的心理疗法之一。

2023年12月28日 星期四 祝福早安 天气晴朗 气温—1℃ 《恋爱中的女人》 I try to read I go to work 我努力阅读 我认真工作 I'm laughing with my friends 我与朋友们欢笑着 But I can't stop to keep myself from thinking oh no 但我还是无法停止 对你的思念无法停止 I wonder how I wonder why 我不知道我怎么了 我不明白为什么会这样 I wonder where they are 我想知道它们在哪里 The days we had the songs we sang together 那些我们共度的日子 我们共同吟唱过的歌曲 I'm holding on forever 我始终坚持着 Reaching for the love that seems so far 但这一份爱却是那样遥不可及 So I say a little prayer 于是我低声祈祷 And hope my dreams will take me there 希望梦想能把我带到那儿 Where the skies are blue 那里有湛蓝的天空 To see you once again my love 在那里能与你再次相见 我的爱 Overseas from coast to coast 翻越大海 从此岸到达彼岸 To find a place I love the most 去找寻我钟爱的地方 Where the fields are green 那里有翠绿的田野 To see you once again 在那里能与你再次相见 To hold you in my arms 将你拥入我的怀抱 To promise you my love 向你许下诺言 我的爱 To tell you from the heart 由衷的告诉你 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.”

目前看完最长的英文原著了，花了接近二十天。对于这本书，符合一贯现代性的小说，情节比较单调乏味，说教性贯穿于全文，要不是作业需要觉得自己是不会坚持看完的，只能说自己实在没有鉴赏现代性小说的素养吧。所以能坚持读完也是不错的小成就了！

照常以“三天打鱼两天晒网”的节奏，历经数月才读完，却只能给个“一般”的评价。 寥寥几个主角，故事散漫，情节平铺。有几处看起来还不错的“伏笔”，稍有阅历的读者都能猜出其走向。但最后两三章的故事还算紧凑，尤其结尾处出现的“剧情反转”算是全篇中的亮点。 时不时夹杂的法语、德语倒是没带来太多麻烦（电子书的无敌之处），但关于人生、爱情、友谊、生死、社会等等问题的，长篇大论且莫衷一是的思辨性论述读起来实在烧脑。 个人好恶，难免偏颇。

✔，20210627(674本)《恋爱中的女人》《WOMEN IN LOVE（英文版）》[英]《D.H.劳伦斯》_84.7万_12小时32分钟

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.