为什么你能够改变世界

自信与缺乏自信的人之间的一个区别在于他们对历史的态度。

One of the things that separates confident from diffident people is their approach to history.

broadly 来说，缺乏自信的人认为历史已经终结。

Broadly speaking, the unconfident believe that history is over.

自信的人则相信，历史仍在形成之中，或许有一天会由他们自己来书写。

The confident trust that it's still in the process of being made, one day possibly by themselves.

我们来到这个世界时，天然地带着一种偏见，认为变革已经结束，历史已经定型。

The way we enter the world carries with it an inherent bias towards an impression that change has finished and history has been settled.

我们周围的一切都在强化一种印象：现状根深蒂固。

Everything around us conspires to give off a sense that the status quo is entrenched.

我们身边都是追随已有数十年甚至数百年传统的成年人。

We're surrounded by big people who follow traditions that have been in place for decades, perhaps centuries.

我们居住的房子看起来像一座古老的神庙一样不可改变。

The house we live in appears as immutable as an ancient temple.

我们上学的学校看起来仿佛自天地初开以来就一直在重复同样的仪式。

The school we go to looks as though it had been performing the same rituals since the earth began.

我们不断被告诉事物为何如此，也被鼓励接受现实并非按照我们的愿望而构建。

We're constantly told why things are the way they are and encouraged to accept that reality is not made according to our wishes.

我们开始相信人类已经完全绘制出了可能性的全部范围。

We come to trust that human beings have fully mapped the range of the possible.

如果某件事尚未发生，那是因为它不可能发生，或者它不该发生。

If something hasn't happened, it's either because it can't happen or it shouldn't.

其结果可能是对想象改变世界感到深深的疲惫。

The result can be a deep weariness around imagining changing the world.

创办新企业毫无意义。

There's no point starting a new business.

市场一定已经饱和了。

The market must be full already.

开创艺术领域的新方法。

Pioneering a new approach to the arts.

一切都已固定成某种模式，或只是对新理念表示忠诚。

Everything is already set in a fixed pattern or giving loyalty to a new idea.

它要么存在，要么就是疯狂的。

It either exists or is mad.

然而，当我们以某种方式研究历史时，图景会急剧变化。

When we study history in a certain way, however, the picture changes sharply.

一旦时间被加速，我们登上由分钟堆砌的高山，俯瞰数个世纪，变化便显得恒常不变。

Once time is speeded up and we climb up a mountain of minutes and survey centuries, change appears constant.

新大陆被发现。

New continents are discovered.

国家治理的替代方式被开创。

Alternative ways of governing nations are pioneered.

关于穿衣和崇拜对象的理念发生了转变。

Ideas of how to dress and whom to worship are transformed.

曾经，人们穿着奇怪的斗篷，用笨拙的工具耕作土地。

Once people wore strange cloaks and tilled the land with clumsy instruments.

很久以前，他们砍下了国王的头。

A long time ago, they chopped a king's head off.

很久以前，人们乘坐脆弱的船只出行，吃羊的眼睛，使用夜壶，还不知道如何治疗牙齿。

Way back, people got around in fragile ships, ate the eyeballs of sheep, used chamber pots, and didn't know how to fix teeth.

我们从这一切中得出结论，至少在理论上，事物确实是会变化的。

We come away from all this knowing, at least in theory, that things do change.

但在实践中，我们几乎在不知不觉中，将自己和我们的社会与这样一个日常信念拉开距离：我们属于同一个持续动荡的叙事，并且此刻正是其中的主角。

But in practice, almost without noticing, we tend to distance ourselves and our own societies from a day to day belief that we belong to the same ongoing turbulent narrative and are, at present, its central actors.

我们觉得，历史就是过去发生的事。

History, we feel, is what used to happen.

它不可能真的是我们当下身边正在发生的事。

It can't really be what's happening around us in the here and now.

至少在我们周围，事情已经平静下来了。

Things have, in our vicinity at least, settled down.

为了让我们更勇敢地面对今天改变事物的想法，我们可以参考T.S.艾略特的诗集《四个四重奏》中一些引人注目的诗句。

To make us braver about the idea of changing things today, we might turn to some striking lines in TS Eliot's cycle of poems, The Four Quartets.

因此，当冬日的午后光线在一座僻静的教堂里逐渐消逝时，历史此刻就是英格兰。

So while the light fails on a winter's afternoon in a secluded chapel, history is now an England.

下午四点左右的冬日时光，尤其在那些源自中世纪的宁静英国乡村小教堂里，总给人一种格外安定和稳固的感觉。

Winter afternoons around 4PM have a habit of feeling particularly resolved and established, especially in quiet English country chapels, many of which date back to the Middle Ages.

这类小教堂里的空气静止而霉味弥漫。

The air in such chapels is still and musty.

厚重的石质地板，已被虔诚信徒的脚步缓慢磨蚀。

The heavy stone floors have been slowly worn away by the feet of the faithful.

这里不是思考改变世界的好地方或好时刻。

These are not places and times to think about changing the world.

一切都在暗示，我们更明智的做法是接受现状，穿过田野走回家，生起炉火，安享一个宁静的夜晚。

Everything hints that we would be wiser to accept the way things are, walk back home across the fields, light a fire, and settle down for a quiet evening.

因此，艾略特第三行诗——‘历史就是现在，英格兰’——才令人惊讶。

Hence, the surprise of Eliot's third line, his resonant history is now and England.

换句话说，我们所关联的一切历史特征——伟人的果敢冒险、价值观的剧烈变迁、对长期信仰的革命性质疑、旧秩序的颠覆——即便在像萨里郡沙姆利格林这样外表平静、看似不变的地方，此刻也仍在继续，而艾略特正是在那里写下了这首诗。

In other words, everything that we associate with history, the impetuous daring of great people, the dramatic alterations in values, the revolutionary questioning of long held beliefs, the up turning of the old order, all this is still going on even at this very moment in outwardly peaceful, apparently unchanging places like the countryside near Shamley Green in Surrey where Elliot wrote his poem.

我们之所以看不见，仅仅是因为我们站得太近了。

We don't see it only because we are standing far too close.

世界在每一刻都被创造和重塑，因此，我们每个人都有理论上的可能成为历史的推动者，无论规模大小。

The world is being made and remade at every instant, and therefore, any one of us has a theoretical chance of being an agent in history on a big or small scale.

我们的时代完全有能力建造一座丝毫不逊于威尼斯的美丽城市，以文艺复兴般的激进方式改变思想，发起一场如佛教般影响深远的智识运动。

It's open to our own times to build a new city every bit as beautiful as Venice, to change ideas as radically as the Renaissance, to start an intellectual movement as resounding as Buddhism.

当下与过去一样充满偶然性，也同样具有可塑性。

The present has all the contingency of the past and is every bit as malleable.

这不应当让我们感到畏惧。

It shouldn't intimidate us.

我们如何相爱、旅行、对待艺术、治理社会、教育自己、经营企业、衰老与死亡，所有这些都仍有进一步发展的空间。

How we love, travel, approach the arts, govern, educate ourselves, run businesses, age, and die are all up for further development.

当前的观点或许显得稳固，但这只是因为我们夸大了它们的固定性。

Current views may appear firm, but only because we exaggerate their fixity.

现存的大多数事物都是任意的，既非必然，也非正确，仅仅是一团混乱与偶然的结果。

The majority of what exists is arbitrary, neither inevitable nor right, simply the result of muddle and happenstance.

即使在冬日黄昏，我们也应自信地相信，我们有能力加入历史的洪流，哪怕以微小的方式，改变它的走向。

We should be confident even at sunset on winter afternoons of our power to join the stream of history and, however modestly, change its course.