Ada Palmer on Viking Metaphysics, Contingent Moments, and Censorship (Ep. 191)

She is a tenured historian at the University of Chicago in the history department.

她是芝加哥大学历史系的终身历史学家。

She studies the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, radical free thought, the history of censorship, information revolutions.

她研究文艺复兴、启蒙运动、激进的自由思想、审查制度的历史、信息革命。

Oh, and by the way, her science fiction series was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Series in 2022.

哦，对了，她的科幻小说系列获得了 2022 年雨果奖最佳系列奖提名。

She composes music, as well, and participates in performing it.

她也创作音乐并参与表演。

She has a Viking mythology cycle called Sundown Whispers of Ragnarok.

她有一个维京神话系列，名为《诸神黄昏的日落低语》。

She studies anime and manga, especially Osamu Tezuka, post–World War II manga, and feminist manga.

她研究动画和漫画，尤其是手冢治虫、二战后漫画和女权主义漫画。

She consults for anime and manga publishers, blogs at exurbe.com, and she can be supported at Patreon just by googling Ada Palmer Patreon.

她为动画和漫画出版商提供咨询，在 exurbe.com 上发表博客，只需在 Google 上搜索 Ada Palmer Patreon 即可获得 Patreon 的支持。

There’s actually much more, but that’s the start for now.

实际上还有更多，但这只是现在的开始。

Ada, welcome.

艾达，欢迎。

On living in the Renaissance

论文艺复兴时期的生活

Similarly, there were advances in military technology and in the sizes of cities.

同样，军事技术和城市规模也取得了进步。

There wasn’t quite industrialization, but there was a concentration around things like the wool industry.

那里还没有完全工业化，但集中在羊毛工业等领域。

Increased population in cities and more advanced military tech means you can have larger, deadlier wars, in which larger populations of people are concentrated in one place and get struck by an army at the same time, while the army is more effective at breaking in through the outside of the city.

城市人口的增加和更先进的军事技术意味着你可以发动更大规模、更致命的战争，在这种战争中，更多的人口集中在一个地方，同时受到军队的攻击，而军队在闯入城市外部时更有效。

There’d also been a long and slow process throughout the Middle Ages of what we could call the slow centralization of power.

整个中世纪还经历了一个漫长而缓慢的过程，我们可以称之为缓慢的权力集中化。

This wasn’t yet the absolutist centralized monarchies of the 18th century and Louis XIV, but they were much better at extracting taxes from their periphery than before.

这还不是 18 世纪和路易十四时期的专制中央集权君主国，但他们比以前更擅长从外围国家征收税收。

Richer kings can afford larger armies and fight more and larger wars.

更富有的国王可以负担得起更大的军队并进行更多更大的战争。

So, I like to describe it as, “The Renaissance is just the Middle Ages, only slightly bigger and more so.” So, all of the same causes of violence and all of the same causes of death that were happening in the Middle Ages were able to happen on a larger scale once we hit 1400.

所以，我喜欢这样形容它：“文艺复兴就是中世纪，只是稍微大一点，而且更大一些。”因此，一旦我们达到 1400 人，中世纪发生的所有相同的暴力原因和所有相同的死亡原因都可能以更大的规模发生。

One of the things that’s fun to remember in the Renaissance is that the actual pay for a day laborer was pretty high.

在文艺复兴时期，值得记住的一件有趣的事情是，临时工的实际工资相当高。

In Renaissance Florence, which is my specialty, one of the things people never expect is that most sorts of day laborers — which is the bottom of the economic totem pole in the city — earned enough to live on working three days a week and spent the other several days of the week enjoying themselves and looking at art.

在我的专业——文艺复兴时期的佛罗伦萨，人们从未想到的一件事是，大多数类型的临时工——“城市经济图腾柱的底部”——每周工作三天，赚到的钱足以维持生计，而一周的其他几天则在享受自己和欣赏艺术。

This is not what we expect, but it was actually true.

这不是我们所期望的，但它确实是事实。

This is why, when people talk about the Renaissance as a golden age, what I’d like to say is, well, golden age can mean a lot of different things.

这就是为什么当人们谈论文艺复兴是黄金时代时，我想说的是，黄金时代可以意味着很多不同的事情。

Do we judge a golden age based on the quality of how beautiful the cities are, how great the art is that is being produced, how many consumer goods somebody is living with in a daily life, the quality of your clothing?

我们是否根据城市的美丽程度、正在创作的艺术作品的伟大程度、人们日常生活中使用的消费品的数量以及服装的质量来判断黄金时代？

Or do we measure it by life expectancy?

或者我们用预期寿命来衡量？

Do we measure it by fear?

我们用恐惧来衡量它吗？

Do we measure it by how many times you have relatives who are on death’s door from being exposed to the plague and living from it?

我们是否可以用有多少亲戚因接触瘟疫而濒临死亡并靠瘟疫生存来衡量？

We’ve all experienced during post-2020 those moments when a friend would say, “Oh, no, I got exposed,” and we have that little palpitation of anxiety waiting for the result of a COVID test.

在 2020 年后，我们都经历过这样的时刻：朋友会说，“哦，不，我暴露了”，我们在等待新冠病毒检测结果时会感到一丝焦虑。

We have letters from Machiavelli and his brother back and forth, “Oh, no, I got exposed to somebody who had the Black Death.

我们收到了马基雅维利和他兄弟的来信，“哦，不，我接触到了患有黑死病的人。

Now we have to wait two days to see whether I got it.” Those factors of fear.

现在我们得等两天才能看我是否收到了。”那些恐惧的因素。

So, the answer is, the Renaissance is a really complicated and sort of high-extremes-and-low-troughs place to live, in which a lot of the things that had been true in the Middle Ages became more extreme in both positive and negative ways.

所以，答案是，文艺复兴时期是一个非常复杂的、高极端和低谷的生活场所，中世纪的许多事情在积极和消极方面都变得更加极端。

Whenever Florence has been in danger from something, those dangers have pulled back.

每当佛罗伦萨遇到危险时，这些危险就会消失。

Even during World War II, for example, both Axis and Allies were under strict orders never to damage the artistic legacy in Florence, even as they were allowed to bomb the heck out of Milan and its historic center, Genoa and its historic center, Naples and its historic center.

例如，即使在第二次世界大战期间，轴心国和同盟国都受到严格命令，不得损害佛罗伦萨的艺术遗产，即使他们被允许轰炸米兰及其历史中心、热那亚及其历史中心、那不勒斯及其历史中心。

So, one of the reasons Florence seems to have so much more art than everywhere else is that more of it has survived, which is a decision made by the later centuries by valuing Florence in a unique way, Venice being its rival in that degree of affection.

因此，佛罗伦萨似乎比其他地方拥有更多艺术品的原因之一是，有更多的艺术品得以幸存，这是后来几个世纪以独特的方式评价佛罗伦萨而做出的决定，而威尼斯在这种喜爱程度方面是它的竞争对手。

As for why the art got there in the first place, the short answer is that it’s a defense mechanism.

至于为什么艺术首先出现在那里，简单的回答是它是一种防御机制。

Remember, Renaissance Italy is a bunch of little, tiny city-states, each of them its own country.

请记住，文艺复兴时期的意大利是一群很小的城邦，每个城邦都有自己的国家。

They all hate their neighbors and are facing constant small-scale warfare, like the wars between Florence and Pisa or between Florence and Siena.

他们都憎恨自己的邻居，并面临着持续不断的小规模战争，例如佛罗伦萨和比萨之间或佛罗伦萨和锡耶纳之间的战争。

Meanwhile, outside of Italy, there are these large, ambitious, centralized powers, the Kingdom of France, the Kingdom of Aragon, the Ottoman Empire, the what we call Holy Roman Empire — they would just say Empire — to the north that wants to conquer things because it brings in income and it results in acclaim for the monarch.

与此同时，在意大利之外，还有这些巨大的、野心勃勃的中央集权国家，比如法兰西王国、阿拉贡王国、奥斯曼帝国、我们所说的神圣罗马帝国——他们只会说帝国——北方想要征服事物，因为它能带来收入，并为君主赢得赞誉。

Remember those very telling lines in Henry IV, Part 2, where young Henry V is advised by his father, “Busy minds with foreign wars.

请记住《亨利四世》第二部分中那些非常有说服力的台词，年轻的亨利五世的父亲建议他“忙于国外战争。

Achieve peace at home by sending our ambitious noblemen to other places to fight wars.” Italy was the place you went to fight wars.

通过派遣我们雄心勃勃的贵族到其他地方去打仗来实现国内和平。”意大利是你去打仗的地方。

Italy was the economic center of medieval and Renaissance Europe.

意大利是中世纪和文艺复兴时期欧洲的经济中心。

We talk about Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Oil, right?

我们谈论大型科技、大型制药和大型石油，对吧？

But in the Renaissance, it was Big Wool, Big Olive Oil, and Big Finance is an eternal thing.

但在文艺复兴时期，大羊毛、大橄榄油和大金融是永恒的事物。

But Italy was the center for banking.

但意大利是银行业中心。

It was the center for cloth production, which was the economic equivalent of the auto industry — giant industry.

它是布料生产的中心，相当于汽车工业——经济上的巨型工业。

And it was also the center for the export of olive oil, which was not only a foodstuff at the time, but an industrial product necessary for a lot of production, and it was what you burned for light, a lot of the time, in oil lamps.

它也是橄榄油的出口中心，橄榄油在当时不仅是一种食品，而且是大量生产所必需的工业产品，而且很多时候，它是人们在油灯中燃烧的东西。

So, these tiny Italian city-states were richer than the large kingdoms outside of them but had smaller populations.

因此，这些意大利小城邦比外部的大王国更富裕，但人口较少。

They struggled to raise armies because they didn’t have enough people.

他们很难筹集军队，因为他们没有足够的人手。

They had to hire foreign armies to defend them, and yet they were full of the richest families on Earth, who literally had mountains of gold piled in their basements.

他们不得不雇佣外国军队来保卫他们，但他们却充满了地球上最富有的家庭，他们的地下室里堆满了金山。

If you’re a king and you want to conquer something, do you want to go for anything else or do you want to go for a small, friendless Italian city-state with piles of gold in the basement?

如果你是一个国王，你想要征服一些东西，你想要去追求其他东西，还是想要去一个地下室里有成堆黄金的、没有友好的意大利小城邦？

Now, you already have a terrible opinion of Florence because Florence is a pit of merchants, scum, and villainy.

现在，你已经对佛罗伦萨有了很糟糕的看法，因为佛罗伦萨是商人、败类和邪恶的深渊。

Florence, in order to prevent noblemen from taking over the republic, literally executed everyone in this city who had a drop of royal blood or noble blood.

佛罗伦萨为了阻止贵族接管共和国，简直处决了这座城市里所有有一点皇室血统或贵族血统的人。

So, it’s just commoners.

所以说，只是普通人而已。

There’s not a single person in this city who is of sufficient right to be worthy to talk to you.

这个城市里没有一个人有足够的资格和你说话。

In addition, Florence has such a terrible reputation for sodomy, homosexuality, and perversion that the verb to Florentine is literally the word for anal sex in five different European countries, including in France.

此外，佛罗伦萨因鸡奸、同性恋和性变态而声名狼藉，以至于在五个不同的欧洲国家（包括法国），动词“Florentine”实际上是指肛交。

So, you’re on your way to this city, and it’s full of merchant scum and they’re all perverts and there isn’t even anyone there who’s worthy to host you on the way.

所以，你在去这座城市的路上，那里到处都是商人败类，他们都是变态，甚至没有一个值得在路上接待你的人。

You’re going to stay with your dad’s banker because he’s the only Florentine whose address you’ve got.

你将和你父亲的银行家住在一起，因为他是你知道的唯一一个佛罗伦萨人。

You show up in the city, and you reach the city, and suddenly, wait a minute, it’s full of these gorgeous ancient Roman bronzes.

你出现在城市里，到达城市后，突然，等一下，里面到处都是这些华丽的古罗马青铜器。

Wait a minute, they can’t be ancient Roman bronzes.

等一下，它们不可能是古罗马青铜器。

They look like they’re new, but that technology doesn’t exist.

它们看起来像是新的，但这项技术并不存在。

That technology was lost centuries ago.

这项技术在几个世纪前就失传了。

Then you go to the banker’s house, and he greets you humbly at the door saying, “I’m sorry, my house is unworthy to host your excellency,” and he invites you inside, and you look around the courtyard, and it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before, with these round circular arches that let enormous amounts of light shine in on the gardens and the statues.

然后你去了银行家的房子，他在门口谦恭地迎接你，说：“对不起，我的房子不配接待阁下。”然后他邀请你进去，你环顾庭院，你会发现它是你以前从未见过的，这些圆形的拱门让大量的光线照射在花园和雕像上。

You’ve never seen this before.

你以前从未见过这个。

Wait, you have seen this before.

等等，你以前见过这个。

It looks like the ruins of the Roman villa in the backyard of your father’s castle where you grew up, but that doesn’t exist anymore.

它看起来就像你长大的父亲城堡后院的罗马别墅废墟，但那已经不存在了。

Those arts were lost.

那些艺术都消失了。

In the middle of the courtyard, there’s a gorgeous statue, an ancient Roman statue of Bacchus or Dionysius, and next to it, there’s a brand-new statue that’s obviously new because it hasn’t even turned green yet.

庭院中央有一座华丽的雕像，是古罗马的巴克斯或狄奥尼修斯雕像，旁边还有一座全新的雕像，显然是新的，因为它甚至还没有变绿。

The bronze is still ruddy.

青铜色依然红润。

But that technology, you know, doesn’t exist.

但你知道，这项技术并不存在。

In the corner, there are some men dressed in strange robes speaking a language you’ve never heard, and you say, “What language are they speaking?” The banker says, “Oh, they’re speaking Ancient Greek.

在角落里，有一些穿着奇怪长袍的男人说着一种你从未听过的语言，你说：“他们在说什么语言？”银行家说：“哦，他们说的是古希腊语。

They’re Plato scholars.” And you say, “But Ancient Greek is lost, and Plato is lost.

他们是柏拉图学者。”你说：“但是古希腊语已经迷失了，柏拉图也已经迷失了。

How do you have this?” “Oh, we have lots of Ancient Greek here.

你怎么有这个？” “哦，我们这里有很多古希腊语。

Look, here’s my grandson, Lorenzo.

看，这是我的孙子，洛伦佐。

He’s just written a sonnet in Ancient Greek about the three parts of the soul.” And then, here’s a little boy reciting a sonnet to you about the nature of the soul in Ancient Greek.

他刚刚用古希腊语写了一首关于灵魂的三个部分的十四行诗。”然后，这是一个小男孩用古希腊语向你背诵一首关于灵魂本质的十四行诗。

You’re like, “Where am I?

你会说：“我在哪里？

All of this stuff is impossible.” And that’s the moment that your host, Cosimo de’ Medici, turns to you and says, “Would France like to make an alliance with Florence?”

所有这些都是不可能的。”就在那时，你的东道主科西莫·德·美第奇转向你说：“法国愿意与佛罗伦萨结盟吗？”

You could say no, right?

你可以说不，对吧？

You could say, “No, we’re going to come here, we’re going to bring our army.

你可以说：“不，我们要来这里，我们要带着我们的军队。

We’re going to mop the floor with you because you’re helpless compared to our giant forces, and we’re going to burn this down and take the gold, and all of this will be gone, and we’ll be rich.”

我们将和你们一起拖地，因为与我们的庞大军队相比，你们是无助的，我们将把它烧毁并拿走黄金，所有这些都会消失，我们就会变得富有。”

Or you could say, “Yes.

或者你可以说：“是的。

Let’s make an alliance.

让我们结成联盟吧。

Send me a bronzesmith and an architect and a Greek tutor and a Plato scholar, and we’re going to bring them to the court in France, and the king is going to do his court like this.

给我派一位青铜匠、一位建筑师、一位希腊导师和一位柏拉图学者，我们要把他们带到法国的宫廷，国王就会像这样对待他的宫廷。

Then, when the envoys from England show up, they’re going to feel like uncultured country bumpkins, just like I feel now.” That’s how it’s a defense mechanism, because they are helpless on the military game, but they are so ahead on the culture game that you don’t want to hurt them.

然后，当英国使节出现时，他们会感觉自己像没有文化的乡巴佬，就像我现在的感觉一样。”这就是一种防御机制，因为他们在军事游戏中无能为力，但在文化游戏中却遥遥领先，你不想伤害他们。

You want to befriend them so that you can have the art.

你想和他们成为朋友，这样你就可以拥有艺术。

On going back in time

回到过去

Now, let’s imagine that we can set me up so that not only is my health guaranteed, but they’re going to believe I’m local.

现在，让我们想象一下，我们可以对我进行安排，这样不仅我的健康得到保证，而且他们会相信我是当地人。

They’re not going to think that I’m a foreigner.

他们不会认为我是外国人。

I’m going to have a fake family, and I’m going to have a perfect accent, and I’m going to have letters of introduction because if you’re a foreigner, you’re sunk.

我将有一个假家庭，我将有完美的口音，我将有介绍信，因为如果你是外国人，你就会沉没。

If I want to do the most good — because I’m actually changing history — then I need to go back to preclassical Egypt and teach Imhotep the germ theory of disease and handwashing practices because he is the earliest medical authority who has the correct background to be able to understand the germ theory of disease and the correct degree of authority to be able to teach it to people.

如果我想做最大的善事 ——因为我实际上正在改变历史 ——那么我需要回到前古典时期的埃及，教伊姆霍特普疾病的细菌理论和洗手方法，因为他是最早的医学权威，他有正确的背景能够理解疾病的细菌理论，并且有正确的权威程度能够将其传授给人们。

If you want to actually increase the number of people who have lived by billions, you want to teach handwashing to Imhotep.

如果你想真正增加数十亿人口的数量，你想教伊姆霍特普洗手。

We know more, which is great.

我们知道更多，这很棒。

We can do more, which is great.

我们可以做得更多，这很棒。

That’s been true of every generation for a long time.

长期以来，每一代人都是如此。

We have to understand and look at the reasons that people in the past made their mistakes in order to be able to not do similar ones, and we need to go through the clutter to learn all that.

我们必须了解并审视过去人们犯错误的原因，以便能够不犯类似的错误，并且我们需要从混乱中学习所有这些。

On methods of doing history

论研究历史的方法

That means that, especially in the middle of the 20th century, they were and still are disproportionately written by women because more women don’t manage to make a living within the academic world than men.

这意味着，特别是在 20 世纪中叶，无论过去还是现在，这些文章的作者都不成比例，因为与男性相比，更多的女性无法在学术界谋生。

So, biography has come to be an almost gendered practice of history, associated with those women who got pushed out of the academy and are trying to support themselves as scholars independently.

因此，传记已经成为一种几乎性别化的历史实践，与那些被赶出学院、试图独立养活自己的学者的女性联系在一起。

That has meant that there’s been a move away from respecting biography as a practice.

这意味着人们已经不再尊重传记作为一种做法。

But one of the really powerful things biography does is cut across moments when we draw a line, right?

但传记真正强大的作用之一就是跨越我们划清界限的时刻，对吗？

We talk a lot about when does the Renaissance end and the Baroque period begin?

我们经常谈论文艺复兴时期结束和巴洛克时期何时开始？

When does the Middle Ages end and another thing begin?

中世纪何时结束，另一件事开始？

Then you do a biography of somebody like Titian who lives into his 90s, and you realize there was no line.

然后，当你为像提香这样活到九十多岁的人写传记时，你会意识到没有台词。

He lived through three different places where we would draw a line.

他经历过三个不同的地方，我们在这三个地方划清了界限。

We often forget that people who lived through one thing are still alive for the next unless we approach them beginning to end through the art of biography.

我们常常忘记，经历过一件事的人在下一件事情中仍然活着，除非我们通过传记艺术从头到尾地接近他们。

I’ve also thought about a choose-your-own-adventure biography of Voltaire because there’s that amazing moment when he’s barely in his early 20s, and his father almost decides to arrange him to be banished to South America.

我还考虑过写一本伏尔泰的自选冒险传记，因为有一个令人惊奇的时刻，当他才二十岁出头时，他的父亲几乎决定安排他被流放到南美洲。

Imagine the world where, instead of Voltaire being in France, Voltaire is in South America — both how different France would be and how different South America would be.

想象一下，伏尔泰不在法国，而是在南美洲的世界——法国将会有多么不同，南美洲将会有多么不同。

I love bringing people to think about those contingent moments when a tiny decision, made by somebody often unfamous — and Voltaire’s father is not famous the way Voltaire is — nonetheless shapes enormous amounts of what comes after.

我喜欢让人们思考那些偶然的时刻，一个不起眼的人做​​出的一个微小决定——而且伏尔泰的父亲并不像伏尔泰那样出名——尽管如此，却影响了后来发生的大量事情。

Those moments are what remind us that we are also powerful, and that every single one of us shapes history, not just the people whose names are in newspaper headlines.

这些时刻提醒我们，我们也是强大的，我们每个人都塑造着历史，而不仅仅是那些名字出现在报纸头条上的人。

However, when, in the late ’60s and ’70s, the advances of feminism meant that more women were entering academia, but still often being sidelined within academia and pushed into corners of research that others didn’t want to touch, a number of them started looking at topics that people hadn’t looked at in a long time, including that one, especially because Viking metaphysics revolves around weaving.

然而，在六十年代末和七十年代，女权主义的进步意味着更多的女性进入了学术界，但仍然经常在学术界被边缘化，被推到其他人不想触及的研究角落，其中一些人开始关注人们很长时间没有关注的话题，包括那个话题，特别是因为维京形而上学以编织为中心。

Now, weaving is a feminine-coded, feminine-gendered subject, both in the Viking period and in the period when history took its formation in the 20th and 21st centuries.

现在，无论是在维京时期还是在20世纪和21世纪历史形成的时期，编织都是一个女性化、女性化的主题。

Lots of weaving-related equipment had been found in tombs and excavated here and there and then set aside, as this is women’s work and not of interest except to women.

在坟墓中发现了许多与编织相关的设备，并到处挖掘，然后放在一边，因为这是妇女的工作，除了妇女之外，人们不会感兴趣。

Women started looking at it and were like, wait a minute, this isn’t a weaving shuttle; this is a staff of sorcery, as described in the sagas that very clearly described these staffs of sorcery that look like weaving shuttles because Viking metaphysics is dominated by ideas of threads of fate, the Norns spinning fate, weaving fate, etc. And it was women who were first willing to look at that stuff in detail.

女人们开始看着它，然后说，等一下，这不是梭子；而是梭子。这是一根巫杖，正如传说中所描述的那样，非常清楚地描述了这些看起来像编织梭子的巫杖，因为维京形而上学以命运之线、诺恩人旋转命运、编织命运等观念为主。而首先愿意详细研究这些东西的是女性。

Diderot’s Jacques le Fatalist reminds us that there’s only one contract between the author and the reader, truly, which is, when you finish each sentence, you will want to read the subsequent sentence.

狄德罗的宿命论者雅克提醒我们，作者和读者之间确实只有一个契约，那就是，当你读完每个句子时，你会想读下一个句子。

So long as the author keeps that promise, the text succeeds in getting you to enjoy the path from one end to the other.

只要作者信守这一承诺，文本就能成功地让你享受从一端到另一端的道路。

Diderot is therefore absolutely infuriating and does brilliant, ridiculous things, like a point at which the two characters go to bed.

因此，狄德罗绝对令人愤怒，他做了一些精彩而荒谬的事情，比如两个角色上床睡觉的时刻。

And he says, “While we’re waiting for them to wake up, I’m going to tell you a completely unrelated story,” and starts telling you a completely unrelated story.

他说，“当我们等待他们醒来时，我要告诉你一个完全不相关的故事”，然后开始告诉你一个完全不相关的故事。

And you say, “Diderot, you’re the one who’s putting them to sleep.

你说：“狄德罗，你是让他们入睡的人。

You can wake them up at any moment.

您可以随时叫醒他们。

Why are you doing this?”

你为什么要这么做？

He’s playing around with the structure of a novel, all of which is a complicated attempt to portray an atheistic cosmos because in the 18th century, one dominant way of thinking about Providence and of an intelligent designer, whether one thinks of that in a deist or a Christian or other monotheistic context, is as the author of the world — the author of the Great Scroll, as Diderot often puts it — who sends players out into the world to enact their deeds, to journey through the world.

他正在玩弄一部小说的结构，所有这些都是描绘无神论宇宙的复杂尝试，因为在 18 世纪，思考普罗维登斯和聪明的设计师的一种主要方式，无论人们是在自然神论、基督教还是其他一神论背景下思考这一点，都是作为世界的作者 ——正如狄德罗经常所说的那样，是《大卷轴》的作者 ——派遣玩家到世界去表演他们的事迹，环游世界。

This is very much what Voltaire depicts in Candide, which is full of contrived and improbable reunions and encounters that clearly serve to teach us a moral lesson, the heavy hand of the author palpable as the background of Providence.

这正是伏尔泰在《老实人》中所描绘的，书中充满了做作的、不可能的重聚和遭遇，显然是为了给我们上一堂道德课，作者的粗暴手作为普罗维登斯的背景，显而易见。

This is a very common way of thinking in Diderot’s 18th century.

这是狄德罗 18 世纪非常普遍的思维方式。

But Diderot thought, wait a minute.

但狄德罗想，等一下。

When you look around the world, you meet lots of random people, and they don’t have character arcs, and they don’t show up again later, and there’s no particular moral lesson you got from chatting with that person who was sitting next to you in the wagon — or, in our case, on the airplane.

当你环顾世界时，你会遇到很多随机的人，他们没有人物弧线，以后也不会再出现，而且你不会从与坐在马车上或飞机上坐在你旁边的人聊天中得到什么特别的道德教训。

It just sort of happened, and sometimes things get interrupted, and you never find out what happened at the end.

它就这样发生了，有时事情会被打断，你永远不会知道最后发生了什么。

Or you might see a funeral go by and never find out whose funeral that was.

或者，您可能会看到一场葬礼，却永远不知道那是谁的葬礼。

Doesn’t that feel to you like chaos?

你不觉得这很混乱吗？

He’s trying to write a book that feels as if it is taking place in a world that has no author, if most book take place in a world with an author.

他试图写一本让人感觉好像它发生在一个没有作者的世界里的书，如果大多数书都发生在一个有作者的世界里的话。

Diderot has other work that’s about sexuality.

狄德罗还有其他与性有关的作品。

He has a lot of discussions of sexuality in Rameau’s Nephew.

他在《拉莫的侄子》中对性有很多讨论。

He, of course, famously went to the Bastille for writing The Nun, which is a pornographic lesbian novel about nuns.

当然，他因写《修女》而前往巴士底狱而闻名，这是一部关于修女的色情女同性恋小说。

But Jacques the Fatalist — while it has sexuality in it, he’s more interested in sexuality as a thing which is very, very natural and yet very, very taboo.

但是宿命论者雅克——虽然其中有性欲，但他更感兴趣的是性欲，因为它是一种非常非常自然但又非常非常禁忌的东西。

The 18th century is very interested in this question of, are we to guide ourselves by laws of nature that we deduce from observing nature the way John Locke and Thomas Hobbes recommended?

18世纪对这个问题非常感兴趣，我们是否应该按照约翰·洛克和托马斯·霍布斯建议的方式通过观察自然而推导出来的自然法则来指导自己？

If so, doesn’t nature tell us that sex and sexual reproduction is one of the biggest parts of life?

如果是这样，大自然难道不告诉我们性和有性生殖是生命中最重要的部分之一吗？

Why is it silenced by our culture?

为什么它被我们的文化压制了？

Is our culture irrational in its behavior toward this?

我们的文化对此的行为是非理性的吗？

The sex is a tool for getting at questions of what is natural or unnatural rather than the end, if that makes sense.

性是一种工具，可以用来解决什么是自然或不自然的问题，而不是解决结果（如果这有意义的话）。

In Terra Ignota, for example, there are people who are living in a largely genderless future in which only gender-neutral language is used.

例如，在《Terra Ignota》中，有些人生活在一个基本上没有性别的未来，只使用性别中立的语言。

And people are not intended to publicly acknowledge gender, nonetheless are sexually excited by gender because of its taboo-ness — not because I’m presenting gender as something that is biologically ingrained or innate, but because our society has spent literal thousands of years developing complex ways to perform gender in not only language, but in clothing, in physicality and comportment, in patterns of inflection, in how we walk, which are performed differently in different societies.

人们并不打算公开承认性别，但由于性别的禁忌而对性别产生性兴奋——不是因为我将性别描述为生物上根深蒂固或与生俱来的东西，而是因为我们的社会花了数千年的时间发展出复杂的方式来表现性别，不仅在语言上，而且在服装、身体和举止、语调变化模式、走路方式上，这些在不同的社会中表现得不同。

The adoption of genderless language isn’t, by itself, going to mean that people abandon this ancient vocabulary of performance.

采用无性别语言本身并不意味着人们放弃这种古老的表演词汇。

It’s fascinating to look at the redeployment in transformation over time of so sophisticated a cultural construction as gender, and I think both Diderot and I are interested in that, inasmuch as it gets to the edges of what is biology versus what is culture and how 90 percent of it is culture.

随着时间的推移，观察像性别这样复杂的文化结构在转变中的重新部署是很有趣的，我想狄德罗和我都对此感兴趣，因为它触及了什么是生物学与什么是文化以及它的 90% 是文化的边缘。

But the same underground bookshops sell all underground materials, which means an underground bookshop sells pornography, and it also sells Voltaire and Rousseau, and it also sells diatribes criticizing the king, and it also sells radical Jansenist theological pamphlets about whether the Holy Spirit derives from the Father and Son equally or from the Father alone.

但同样的地下书店卖的都是地下资料，这意味着地下书店卖的是色情作品，也卖的是伏尔泰和卢梭的书，也卖的是批评国王的谩骂，还卖的是激进的詹森主义神学小册子，关于圣灵是平等地来自圣父和圣子，还是仅仅来自圣父。

The same kinds of people frequent these shops, and the same kinds of people buy things.

同一类人经常光顾这些商店，同一类人买东西。

So, think about how, when you go into a Barnes & Noble, the science fiction and fantasy section is one section, even though science fiction and fantasy are different things.

所以，想一想，当你走进巴诺书店时，科幻小说和奇幻小说区是一个区，尽管科幻小说和奇幻小说是不同的东西。

But they have a lot of overlap, both in the overlap of readership and in overlap in books that have both science fiction and fantasy elements.

但它们有很多重叠之处，无论是读者群的重叠，还是同时具有科幻和奇幻元素的书籍的重叠。

It was perfectly natural, in the same way, for clandestine bookshops to generate these works that are pornography and radical philosophy at the same time.

同样，秘密书店产生这些同时是色情作品和激进哲学的作品也是非常自然的。

They’re printed by the same printers, sold to the same audiences, and circulate in the same places.

它们由相同的印刷商印刷，出售给相同的受众，并在相同的地方流通。

De Sade uses his extreme pornography to get at questions of morality, ethics, and artificiality.

德萨德用他的极端色情作品来探讨道德、伦理和人为的问题。

What are the ethics of hurting each other?

互相伤害的道德是什么？

Why do we feel that way about hurting each other?

为什么我们会对互相伤害有这样的感觉？

What are so-called natural impulses, as John Locke and Hobbes were very dominant at the time, or Descartes, who is differently dominant at the time in rivalry with them?

约翰·洛克和霍布斯在当时占据主导地位，所谓的自然冲动是什么，或者笛卡尔在与他们的竞争中在当时处于不同的主导地位？

They make claims about the natural human impulses or the natural character of a human being.

他们声称人类的自然冲动或人类的自然性格。

What does extreme sexuality show us about how that character might be broader than it is?

极端的性行为向我们展示了哪些关于这个角色可能比实际更广泛的内容？

I mean it when I say Thomas Aquinas, right?

当我说托马斯·阿奎那时，我是认真的，对吧？

One of Thomas Aquinas’s traditional proofs of the existence of God is that everything he sees around him in nature — this also is one that Aristotle uses, but Aquinas articulates it in the most famous way for de Sade’s period — that when we look around us, it’s clear that everything is designed to work.

托马斯·阿奎那对上帝存在的传统证明之一是他在自然界中看到的一切——这也是亚里士多德所使用的，但阿奎那以德萨德时期最著名的方式表达了这一点——当我们环顾四周时，很明显一切都是设计好的。

Forest animals have forest camouflage.

森林动物有森林伪装。

Desert animals have desert camouflage.

沙漠动物有沙漠伪装。

Woodpeckers that eat grubs have a beak shaped correctly to be able to get grubs.

吃幼虫的啄木鸟有一个正确形状的喙，以便能够获取幼虫。

Clearly, therefore, an intelligence designed everything to fit where it needs to fit so that carnivores have carnivore teeth and herbivores have herbivore teeth.

因此，显然，智能设计了一切以适合它需要适合的地方，以便肉食动物有肉食动物的牙齿，食草动物有食草动物的牙齿。

“Yes,” says Thomas Hobbes, quoting all this, and says, “And furthermore, the penis is round and the anus is round.

“是的，”托马斯·霍布斯引用这一切说道，“而且，阴茎是圆的，肛门也是圆的。

So, clearly, God designed the penis to fit into the anus and not into the vagina, which is a long, thin shape.” He’s playing with the question of why we believe these century-old, or in that case, millennium-old arguments about what is and isn’t natural, and inviting us to reexamine questions like, well, what that a woodpecker needs does it have?

因此，很明显，上帝设计的阴茎是为了适合肛门而不是阴道，因为阴道是又长又细的形状。”他正在思考为什么我们相信这些关于什么是自然、什么不是自然的百年历史或千年历史的争论，并邀请我们重新审视这样的问题，比如，啄木鸟需要什么？

What that a woodpecker needs does it not have?

啄木鸟所需要的东西是它没有的吗？

Because it doesn’t have fingers with which to disentangle its legs from a thread if it gets tangled up.

因为如果它被缠住了，它没有手指可以用来将腿从线中解开。

In that way, Sade is using pornography to open the questions that Darwin will later answer.

这样，萨德正在利用色情来揭开达尔文稍后将回答的问题。

I think it would’ve been much more deist — still theist, but much more deist, “we can’t know things with certainty except what we deduce from nature” kind of text, greater in alignment therefore with what we see in our Enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Rousseau.

我认为它会更加自然神论——仍然是有神论，但更加自然神论，“除了从自然中推论之外，我们无法确定地知道事物”这种文本，因此更符合我们在伏尔泰和卢梭等启蒙运动人物中看到的内容。

For that reason, I think that if Descartes, who becomes dominant in France a bit before the rise of Voltaire and Rousseau, had been more expressly deist, we would have seen less association between deism and Newtonian physics.

出于这个原因，我认为，如果笛卡尔（他在伏尔泰和卢梭崛起之前在法国占据主导地位）更加明确地是自然神论者，我们就会看到自然神论和牛顿物理学之间的联系较少。

But we get deism associated with Newtonian physics during the Enlightenment because it’s the same people who are deists who are sympathetic to importing Bacon’s scientific method and Newtonian physics into France.

但我们在启蒙运动期间将自然神论与牛顿物理学联系在一起，因为正是这些自然神论者同情将培根的科学方法和牛顿物理学引入法国。

A simplified version of that answer therefore, being the impact of Descartes’ treatise being more deist, would have been an Enlightenment in which France didn’t split into the France being more interested in logic and this new imported, perceived-as-foreign-and-British thing being more interested in empiricism and the scientific method, and the two would’ve been seen as more compatible with each other.

因此，这个答案的简化版本，作为笛卡尔的论文更加自然神论的影响，将是一种启蒙运动，在这种启蒙运动中，法国没有分裂成法国对逻辑更感兴趣，而这个新进口的、被视为外国和英国的东西对经验主义和科学方法更感兴趣，而这两者将被视为彼此更兼容。

Probably, we would’ve therefore seen even more scientific laboratories develop in France in that period, as opposed to the centers of material of experimental science settling in England, Scotland, and Italy.

因此，在那段时期，我们可能会看到更多的科学实验室在法国发展，而不是实验科学材料中心落户英格兰、苏格兰和意大利。

And that bureaucracy is obliged to enforce any rule that the pope and the central Roman Inquisition make.

该官僚机构有义务执行教皇和中央罗马宗教裁判所制定的任何规则。

But it hires its own staff, and they are genuinely more concerned with questions like whether things are criticizing the king than they are with questions of theology.

但它雇佣了自己的员工，他们真正更关心的是诸如事情是否在批评国王之类的问题，而不是神学问题。

Many of them — this is a first job out of college for a lit major, and many of them — this is well documented in the work of Robert Darnton — many of them are themselves aspiring authors and aspiring professors.

他们中的许多人——这是文学专业毕业后的第一份工作，而且他们中的许多人——这在罗伯特·达恩顿的著作中有详细记录——他们中的许多人本身就是有抱负的作家和有抱负的教授。

We have letters from French censors back and forth.

我们收到了来自法国审查机构的来信。

“Oh, Jacques, I got your book to censor.

“哦，雅克，我要审查你的书。

Don’t worry.

别担心。

I’ll do a really good job.” They therefore are actually very sympathetic to the radical ideas that are circulating because they are fresh-out-of-college intelligentsia who are also excited by these new ideas, and they tend to let through a lot of things.

我会做得非常出色。”因此，他们实际上非常同情正在流传的激进思想，因为他们是刚从大学出来的知识分子，他们也对这些新思想感到兴奋，他们往往会放过很多事情。

Often, later, Rome will examine the materials if the materials become famous and will ban them then.

通常，后来，如果这些材料变得出名，罗马会检查这些材料，然后将其禁止。

This is why, for example, Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie is approved by the French censors but banned by the pope as of volume 7, I think it is, the letter H.

这就是为什么，例如，狄德罗和达朗贝尔的百科全书被法国审查机构批准，但从第七卷开始被教皇禁止，我认为是字母H。

At that point, Rome catches up with France and says, “You must ban this thing.

就在那时，罗马赶上了法国并说：“你必须禁止这件事。

We command it.” Under this command, the copies that are public in Paris are confiscated.

我们指挥它。”根据这一命令，在巴黎公开的副本将被没收。

Paris is required to hold a public burning of the Encyclopédie.

巴黎被要求公开焚烧百科全书。

They marched the copy up to the spot.

他们将副本运送到现场。

They then set it aside and don’t burn it, instead burn Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity, which is what France actually is afraid of at the time.

然后他们把它放在一边，不烧掉它，而是烧掉詹森主义关于三位一体本质的论文，这正是法国当时真正害怕的。

So, there are a lot of layers and permeability.

所以，有很多层次和渗透性。

And while the pope had ultimate authority in some ways to say “No, you may not have this,” that is only several years slower than the short-term bureaucracy, which is run by lit majors, overseen by people who answer to the king, much more concerned about political and local questions than about abstract scientific or theological ones.

尽管教皇在某些方面拥有说“不，你可能没有这个”的最终权力，但这只比短期官僚机构慢了几年，短期官僚机构由文学专业人士管理，由向国王负责的人监督，他们更关心政治和地方问题，而不是抽象的科学或神学问题。

And also happy to let people smuggle things through, which is why, even after the banning of the Encyclopédie, if you’re in Geneva and you’re printing something really bad, like de Sade or Jansenist treatises about the nature of the Trinity, you smuggle them into France by wrapping them in copies of the Encyclopédie because if you’re intercepted at the border, and they open up the secret trunk under your wagon, say, “Oh, it’s just the Encyclopédie.

他们也很乐意让人们走私东西通过，这就是为什么，即使在《百科全书》被禁止之后，如果你在日内瓦印刷了一些非常糟糕的东西，比如萨德或詹森主义关于三位一体本质的论文，你就会通过将它们包裹在百科全书的副本中将它们偷运到法国，因为如果你在边境被拦截，他们会打开你马车下的秘密箱子，说：“哦，这只是百科全书。

Pay me a small bribe, and I’ll let it through.” You pay a small bribe, and they let it through, the banned book providing cover for an even more banned book.

给我一点小贿赂，我就会让事情过去。”你支付了一小笔贿赂，他们就放行了，禁书为一本更禁书提供了封面。

On censorship

关于审查制度

The Catholic Church wanted to seem more unified than it was, but in periods when it took six months or more for a message to get to Rome from one of the Spanish colonies in the New World, for example, these are local authorities making local decisions in the name of Rome and Rome struggling to catch up.

天主教会希望看起来比实际更加统一，但例如，在信息从新大陆的西班牙殖民地之一到达罗马需要六个月或更长时间的时期，地方当局以罗马的名义做出地方决策，而罗马则奋力追赶。

To the degree that Rome even printed a manual to guide inquisitors on how to respond if people came to them talking about books that have been banned in Spain that they’ve never heard of being banned elsewhere, and how to sort of fake it and pretend that “Yes, Rome totally knew that you banned this.

罗马甚至印制了一本手册，指导调查人员如何应对，如果人们来找他们谈论那些在西班牙被禁但他们从未听说过在其他地方被禁的书籍，以及如何伪造并假装“是的，罗马完全知道你禁止了这本书。

Yes, it was a very good idea to ban it.”

是的，禁止它是一个非常好的主意。”

So, the Inquisition is a blunt instrument and usually a tool of local power.

因此，宗教裁判所是一个生硬的工具，通常是地方权力的工具。

It isn’t a government.

它不是政府。

We often think of the Inquisition as the government, but it’s more a nongovernment body that reaches internationally.

我们经常将宗教裁判所视为政府，但它更像是一个影响国际的非政府机构。

Think about UNICEF or Doctors Without Borders, and it has the infrastructure to go from place to place.

想想联合国儿童基金会或无国界医生组织，它拥有从一个地方到另一个地方的基础设施。

Now, think about that operating locally and having agents that are good at crossing borders, but depend on the local government for collaboration and economic support.

现在，考虑一下在当地运营并拥有擅长跨境的代理，但依赖当地政府的合作和经济支持。

In the case of the Inquisition, it doesn’t own its own prisons.

就宗教裁判所而言，它没有自己的监狱。

It doesn’t have its own police.

它没有自己的警察。

It has to borrow them locally.

它必须在当地借用它们。

So, what does the local authority want to persecute?

那么，当地政府到底想迫害什么呢？

That’s what the Inquisition will end up persecuting.

这就是宗教裁判所最终要迫害的。

In Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain and that of their successors, they were incredibly anxious about the imagined treacherous fifth column of descendants of converted Jews and converted Muslims.

在费迪南德和伊莎贝拉统治下的西班牙以及他们的继任者的西班牙，他们对想象中的由皈依犹太人和皈依穆斯林的后裔组成的第五纵队感到非常焦虑。

So, they lavished money on their Inquisition to encourage their Inquisition to advance the mass persecution of what they perceived as a local threat to their crown.

因此，他们在宗教裁判所上投入了大量资金，以鼓励他们的宗教裁判所对他们认为对他们的王权构成威胁的地方进行大规模迫害。

This had nothing to do with the practices of the Inquisition that were going on at the same time in Italy or in France, or in even Spanish-controlled territories or Portuguese-controlled territories.

这与同时在意大利或法国，甚至在西班牙控制的领土或葡萄牙控制的领土上进行的宗教裁判所的做法无关。

So, for example, in Goa on the west coast of India, in the 17th century, the orders given by the Inquisition were to destroy all texts in indigenous languages and try to wipe out indigenous languages and indigenous knowledge.

例如，在17世纪的印度西海岸果阿，宗教裁判所下达的命令是销毁所有土著语言文本，并试图消灭土著语言和土著知识。

At the same time, the Inquisition in what is now Mexico City was ferociously devoting itself to developing indigenous dictionaries and translating materials into indigenous languages because it decided that the best way to proselytize was through translation.

与此同时，位于现在墨西哥城的宗教裁判所正大力致力于开发土著词典并将材料翻译成土著语言，因为它认为传教的最佳方式是通过翻译。

These are the decisions being made by local authorities to try to seek power.

这些是地方当局为寻求权力而做出的决定。

Zooming out, however, the biggest pattern in all of them is that the most common form of censorship is self-censorship.

然而，缩小范围来看，所有这些中最大的模式是最常见的审查形式是自我审查。

But the majority of self-censorship is intentionally cultivated by an outside power.

但大多数自我审查是由外部势力有意培养的。

The Inquisition more broadly, especially the Roman Inquisition, spends a lot more of its time trying to scare people into not writing books than it does trying to destroy books that are actually there.

更广泛地说，宗教裁判所，尤其是罗马宗教裁判所，花更多的时间试图吓唬人们不要写书，而不是试图销毁实际存在的书籍。

If you think about the goal being to silence Galileo, the way to silence Galileo is not to make Galileo world-famous by having a giant splashy trial of Galileo.

如果你认为目标是让伽利略沉默，那么让伽利略沉默的方法并不是通过对伽利略进行一场引人注目的巨大审判来让伽利略闻名于世。

The way to make Galileo silent is to quietly poison Galileo, right?

让伽利略沉默的方法就是悄悄毒害伽利略吧？

This is Renaissance Italy.

这就是文艺复兴时期的意大利。

We are very good at quietly poisoning people.

我们很擅长悄悄地毒害人。

This is a solved problem.

这是一个已解决的问题。

If you want to silence a man, you silence him.

如果你想让一个人闭嘴，你就让他闭嘴。

You do not put him on a big show trial.

你不会让他接受一场盛大的审判。

But what they want to do is silence Descartes and dozens of others who saw what happened to Galileo, were scared and therefore never wrote the treatises that they otherwise would have.

但他们想要做的是让笛卡尔和其他几十个看到伽利略遭遇的人保持沉默，他们感到害怕，因此从未写下他们原本会写的论文。

Censorship intends to cause and stimulate self-censorship.

审查制度旨在引发和刺激自我审查。

That’s a pattern we see broadly, whether in the Inquisition, whether in the Middle Ages before there was an inquisition, or whether today in China with the extremely intentionally unpredictable enforcement of when they arrest a blogger, for example, which they do with very little pattern, to make it harder to predict whether you are in danger, to make people more scared that they might be in danger — to, again, encourage self-censorship.

这是我们广泛看到的一种模式，无论是在宗教裁判所中，无论是在宗教裁判所出现之前的中世纪，还是在今天的中国，当他们逮捕博客作者时，他们会以极其不可预测的方式执行，例如，他们这样做的模式很少，让人们更难预测你是否处于危险之中，让人们更加害怕他们可能处于危险之中——再次鼓励自我审查。

Pornography is usually where major battles over censorship are fought these days because people don’t want to defend it.

如今，色情作品通常是有关审查制度的重大斗争的焦点，因为人们不想捍卫它。

It’s icky and gross, and a lot of people don’t want it, or do want it but don’t want to publicly say so, don’t want to be associated with it.

这是令人厌恶和恶心的，很多人不想要它，或者确实想要它，但不想公开这么说，不想与它有联系。

So, a lot of people are willing to say, “Okay, fine, censor this.”

所以，很多人愿意说，“好吧，好吧，审查这个。”

But then you create the apparatus to censor this, and the next stage is someone saying, “Oh, well, this other book — clearly this is basically the same as pornography because it depicts a same-sex couple.

但是，然后你创建了一个装置来对此进行审查，下一阶段有人会说，“哦，好吧，另一本书  -  显然这与色情作品基本相同，因为它描绘了一对同性伴侣。

Let’s censor that using the same infrastructure you’ve just created.” Almost all censorship isn’t carried out by creating a new institution to do it, but by repurposing an old institution that’s already there.

让我们使用您刚刚创建的相同基础设施对其进行审查。”几乎所有的审查制度都不是通过创建一个新机构来进行的，而是通过重新利用已经存在的旧机构来进行的。

And new things will be censored using old tools so that when talkies came in, people were very anxious that there could suddenly be bad words in movies.

新事物将使用旧工具进行审查，因此当有声电影出现时，人们非常担心电影中可能会突然出现脏话。

All over the place — New Zealand, Australia, the US — new methods were set up for censoring movies to make sure bad words weren’t used.

各地——新西兰、澳大利亚、美国——都制定了新的电影审查方法，以确保不使用脏话。

Well, those are the same methods that were then used to censor discussions of communism during the Red Scare and that were used to persecute free-thinking and socialist authors — the same apparatus that got created for the censorship of a bad word.

好吧，这些方法与红色恐慌期间用于审查共产主义讨论的方法相同，也用于迫害自由思想和社会主义作家 ——同样的方法也用于审查坏词。

Once we make it, it exists and it’s very hard to dismantle it.

一旦我们制造了它，它就存在并且很难拆除它。

So, don’t let the fact that we don’t care about pornography enable people to create tools they will use to censor other things in the future.

因此，不要让我们不关心色情的事实使人们能够创建他们将来用来审查其他事物的工具。

I always make a point of bringing up menstruation when it’s relevant in my classroom.

当与课堂相关时，我总是强调提及月经。

When I’m describing to students what it was like experiencing the fall of the Roman Empire and that suddenly, there’s no one keeping peace on the roads, and there are bandits on the streets.

当我向学生描述罗马帝国衰落的经历时，突然间，道路上没有人维持和平，街上有强盗。

And it means that you can’t get imported high-quality, non-itchy wool, and you can’t get good olive oil.

这意味着你买不到进口的优质、不痒的羊毛，也买不到好的橄榄油。

You can only get local olive oil, and you can’t get fish sauce.

你只能买到当地的橄榄油，却买不到鱼露。

I always mention you can’t get sponges, the sea sponges which are what women would use as maxi pads in the period, and now you can’t get maxi pads, and you just have to shove a bunch of rags up there.

我总是提到你买不到海绵，那个时期女性会用海海绵作为超长垫，现在你买不到超长垫，你只能把一堆破布塞在那里。

It’s always delightful to see the stunned look on the face of most of the boys in the class and the delighted look on the face of many of the girls in the class.

看到班上大多数男生脸上的惊讶表情和班上许多女生脸上的喜悦表情总是令人高兴的。

Yeah, people in the past menstruated, too.

是的，过去的人也有月经。

This is a real, legitimate thing.

这是真实的、合法的事情。

But I would say it is a taboo, and a taboo is a kind of censorship because censorship isn’t exclusively state actors or organized actors.

但我想说这是一个禁忌，禁忌是一种审查制度，因为审查制度不仅仅针对国家行为者或有组织的行为者。

There’s a lot of bottom-up, grassroots censorship as well, and taboos are part of that.

还有很多自下而上的草根审查制度，禁忌也是其中的一部分。

When you compare the actual costs of fabric, buying a suit of very nice clothing made out of good-quality Florentine brocade with velvet trim cost as much as buying a luxury sports car, and you have one outfit or two outfits.

当你比较布料的实际成本时，购买一套由优质佛罗伦萨锦缎制成的带有天鹅绒装饰的非常漂亮的衣服，其成本与购买一辆豪华跑车一样多，而且你有一套或两套衣服。

You have your Sunday outfit and your regular one, and you wear them all year, and then you get the next year’s fashions.

你有周日的服装和常规的服装，你全年都会穿它们，然后你会得到明年的时装。

A huge part of the purpose of it is to display social status by showing the high-end things.

它很大一部分目的是通过展示高端的东西来显示社会地位。

So, we associate with Renaissance affluence and the Renaissance’s biggest industry — the one that’s the equivalent of the auto industry — the development of these extremely high-end luxury things that you then show off on your person every day.

因此，我们将文艺复兴时期的富裕和文艺复兴时期最大的工业（相当于汽车工业）联系在一起，开发这些极其高端的奢侈品，然后每天在自己身上炫耀。

In the Middle Ages, they had very little knowledge of Epicureanism, though they knew that it was something.

在中世纪，他们对伊壁鸠鲁主义知之甚少，尽管他们知道它是某种东西。

It was mentioned by medieval authorities like Lactantius.

拉克坦修斯等中世纪权威人士曾提到过这一点。

It was discussed in bits of Cicero that they had, but they didn’t actually have Epicureanism.

他们在西塞罗的著作中对此进行了讨论，但他们实际上并没有伊壁鸠鲁主义。

They just knew there had to have been this philosophical movement that said that happiness was the highest good and that the world was made of atoms.

他们只知道一定有这样的哲学运动，它说幸福是最高的善，世界是由原子组成的。

So, they have high and exciting expectations of this work, and then they finally get ahold of it, and as they make comments in the margin, we see their moment of first contact.

所以，他们对这部作品抱有很高而令人兴奋的期望，然后他们终于拿到了它，当他们在页边发表评论时，我们看到了他们第一次接触的时刻。

We see which pieces in a long and complicated text stood out to them and which pieces didn’t.

我们会看到一篇长而复杂的文本中的哪些部分对他们来说很突出，哪些部分没有。

We see how they respond when a claim like that there is no afterlife is made, and they write things in the margin like opinio non Christiana, which is written in two of the copies that I’ve looked at.

我们看到他们在提出“没有来世”这样的说法时如何反应，他们在页边空白处写下了一些东西，比如我看过的两份副本中都写着“非克里斯蒂娜的意见”。

We also see which parts of a very long book that covers lots of topics they find exciting.

我们还了解一本涵盖大量主题的长书的哪些部分让他们感到兴奋。

It lets us see what it was like for that world to encounter a different world.

它让我们看到那个世界遇到另一个世界是什么样子。

It’s sort of like alien first contact, and there it is, preserved live for us in the margins of a book.

这有点像外星人的第一次接触，它就在那里，为我们活生生地保存在书的页边空白处。

When science fiction originates and crystallizes as a genre and gets a name, it is in the 1920s and ’30s with the advent of pulp printing, which is the moment when we invent these very large-scale machines that can print at mass volume on a much larger, cheaper sheet of paper.

当科幻小说作为一种流派起源、结晶并获得名称时，是在 20 世纪 20 年代和 30 年代，随着纸浆印刷的出现，我们发明了这些超大型机器，可以在更大、更便宜的纸张上进行大量印刷。

These are not printers that are printing two or four pages on one small sheet of high-quality paper.

这些打印机不是在一张小张高质量纸张上打印两页或四页的打印机。

They are printing 12 or 24 pages on cheap, disposable magazine newsprint.

他们在廉价的一次性杂志新闻纸上打印 12 或 24 页。

Those were used to print magazines.

那些被用来印刷杂志。

But in the US only and not Europe, they were also used to print cheap paperbacks, which then went into racks that were sold in grocery stores and newspapers.

但仅在美国而非欧洲，它们还被用来印刷廉价的平装书，然后将其放入杂货店和报纸上出售的架子上。

Bookstores did not like to stock those paperbacks.

书店不喜欢储存这些平装书。

Bookstores, especially in the US, exclusively preferred to stock hardcovers because they made more money on selling a hardcover than they did on a paperback.

书店，尤其是美国的书店，更喜欢库存精装书，因为他们销售精装书比销售平装书赚更多的钱。

So, these pulp paperbacks, as we now call them, were of a different social status because they weren’t sold in bookstores, which existed in elite locations, like affluent cities or near universities.

因此，这些纸浆平装书，正如我们现在所说的那样，具有不同的社会地位，因为它们不在书店出售，而书店存在于富裕城市或大学附近的精英地区。

They were sold at hardware stores in little magazine racks, where they competed with Hershey’s candy bars rather than competing with fellow books for the allowance money of a kid.

它们在五金店的小杂志架上出售，在那里它们与好时糖果棒竞争，而不是与其他书籍竞争孩子的零用钱。

Since that was the birth of science fiction, and the earliest people who identified and were identified as science fiction writers and readers were producing for that market, it was born for a low-status commodity — a very democratizing commodity since, of course, those books were available to people in huge swaths of the USA, for example, where there were no bookstores, where towns had no bookstore, but they sure had a rack with 144 cheap paperbacks next to the grocery checkout.

因为那是科幻小说的诞生，而最早被认定为科幻小说作家和读者的人们正在为这个市场创作，它是为一种地位低下的商品而诞生的——一种非常民主化的商品，因为，当然，这些书可供美国大片地区的人们使用，例如，那里没有书店，城镇没有书店，但他们的杂货店收银台旁边确实有一个架子，上面有 144 本廉价平装书。

So they were enormously —

所以他们非常 ——

In Ursula Le Guin, if you read the major novels —

在《乌苏拉·勒吉恩》中，如果你读过主要小说 ——

This is not a biological thing, but this is that a number of behavior patterns, including types of teambuilding and non-zero-sum thinking, are culturally coded female, and women are encouraged to do it, whereas men are encouraged more to do aggressive problem-solving, haggling, and zero-sum thinking.

这不是生物学问题，而是许多行为模式，包括团队建设和非零和思维，都是女性的文化编码，鼓励女性这样做，而男性则更多地被鼓励积极解决问题、讨价还价和零和思维。

In my own classroom, I often run this papal election simulation, and there’s a survey that the students have to fill out to say, “What kind of participation in this political simulation would you enjoy?” It’s always very interesting to me that while there’s a huge range of genderedness about most of the questions, the question, “Would you enjoy having a face-to-face opponent where one or the other of you has to fall for the other to rise, and there is no possibility of compromise, you just have to go head on?” That question is almost exclusively said yes to by men, or men are enthusiastic about it.

在我自己的课堂上，我经常进行教皇选举模拟，学生们必须填写一份调查问卷，询问“您喜欢参与这种政治模拟吗？”对我来说，总是很有趣的是，虽然大多数问题都存在很大的性别差异，但问题是，“你是否喜欢面对面的对手，其中一个人必须倒下，另一个人才能站起来，而且没有妥协的可能性，你只能迎头而上？”这个问题几乎完全由男性回答“是”，或者男性对此充满热情。

Women are more wary of it.

女性对此更加警惕。

Whereas the question, “Would you enjoy being on or leading a team and being in charge of helping a group of people work together to achieve a collaborative goal?” is disproportionately answered yes by .

而问题是，“您是否喜欢加入或领导一个团队，并负责帮助一群人一起工作以实现协作目标？”的回答是不成比例的。

This is a culturation thing.

这是一个文化的事情。

This is something that we learn when we’re toddlers, that we learn when we’re in elementary school, as different behaviors are encouraged or discouraged among both men and women.

这是我们在幼儿时、在小学时学到的东西，因为男性和女性的不同行为受到鼓励或劝阻。

I think that it’s not that we need to eliminate the differences between men and women; it’s that we need to get more of those female-coded problem-solving behaviors to be welcome in positions of power in one way or another.

我认为并不是我们需要消除男女之间的差异；而是我们需要消除男女之间的差异。而是我们需要让更多女性编码的解决问题的行为以某种方式受到权力职位的欢迎。

The other thing that’s really fun with it is that there’s a lot of really great new, recent research on Viking myth.

另一件真正有趣的事情是，最近有很多关于维京神话的非常伟大的新研究。

We’re getting to understand the metaphysics a lot better.

我们对形而上学有了更好的理解。

We’re translating a lot of the older canon.

我们正在翻译很多旧的经典。

We’re realizing that some of the works that were kicked out of the canon in the 19th century and believed to be spurious are not spurious, and that some of the ones we kept in are spurious that weren’t.

我们意识到，一些在 19 世纪被踢出正典并被认为是虚假的作品其实并不是虚假的，而我们保留的一些作品其实并不是虚假的。

So, while there’s tons of science fiction and fantasy that already draws on Viking myth, there’s very little of it that draws on the very latest in Viking myth.

因此，虽然已经有大量的科幻小说和奇幻小说借鉴了维京神话，但借鉴最新维京神话的却很少。

And I’m excited to dive into a lot of that material, which I have access to just because I’m a scholar.

我很高兴能够深入研究这些材料，因为我是一名学者，所以我能够接触到这些材料。

This is one of the big problems with paywalls, because all of this is in journals that are behind paywalls or the ridiculous Oxford annotated Poetic Edda.

这是付费墙的大问题之一，因为所有这些都在付费墙后面的期刊或可笑的牛津注释《诗意埃达》后面。

Three volumes, $300 a volume.

三卷，每卷300美元。

No wonder nobody has this book.

难怪没人拥有这本书。

It’s great.

这很棒。

It’s full of wonderful materials.

它充满了美妙的材料。

I wish that I could give copies of it to every science fiction writer and fantasy writer that’s a friend of mine who likes this stuff so that they could use it in their things.

我希望我可以将它的副本送给我的每一个喜欢这些东西的朋友的科幻作家和奇幻作家，以便他们可以在自己的东西中使用它。

But good grief, nobody can afford to spend a thousand dollars on the Oxford annotated Poetic Edda.

但天哪，没有人能花一千美元买一本带有牛津注释的《诗意埃达》。

I only have it because I did a bunch of favors for Oxford editors until they gave me store credit.

我之所以拥有它，只是因为我为牛津编辑们做了很多恩惠，直到他们给了我商店信用。

A good way to think about it is that dissemination works as a kind of pyramid.

思考这个问题的一个好方法是，传播就像一种金字塔一样运作。

At the bottom of the pyramid are a thousand PhD students doing dissertations, discovering awesome new stuff.

在金字塔的底部有一千名博士生正在做论文，发现很棒的新东西。

The next level up from that are several hundred books by somewhat more experienced scholars who are drawing on not only their own dissertations, but their friends’ dissertations and what they’ve learned from going to conferences and debating this to make syntheses that draw on a bunch of that research.

再往上一层是由经验更丰富的学者撰写的数百本书，他们不仅借鉴了自己的论文，还借鉴了朋友的论文以及他们从参加会议和辩论中学到的知识，以对大量研究进行综合。

Then above that are a couple of dozen popular history books that transform the latest in what historians are saying to each other into a form that then gets out and is accessed by the public.

除此之外，还有几十本流行历史书，它们将历史学家彼此所说的最新内容转化为一种形式，然后发布并供公众访问。

Then that in turn, influences — actually, it’s not a pyramid; it’s more of an hourglass — several hundred television series, video games, and novels, which are really where we form our ideas of history, right?

那么这反过来又会影响 ——事实上，它不是金字塔；而是金字塔。它更像是一个沙漏——数百部电视剧、电子游戏和小说，它们确实是我们形成历史观念的地方，对吗？

Nobody gets their first glimpse of the Renaissance without already having run into the Renaissance in some form of fiction.

没有人第一次接触文艺复兴时，就已经在某种形式的小说中接触过文艺复兴了。

We all encounter stories about this stuff before we encounter the scholarship.

在获得奖学金之前，我们都会遇到关于这些东西的故事。

So, my colleagues have nothing but the best to say about the process of getting it out there in a way that’s going to hopefully also mean that another generation of people who want to write more fiction will say, “Oh, wow.

因此，我的同事们对于将其出版的过程只有最好的说法，希望这也意味着想要写更多小说的另一代人会说：“哦，哇。

There’s a lot of new Viking stuff.

有很多新的维京东西。

Let’s look at the new Viking stuff and tell even better stories.”

让我们看看维京人的新作品，讲述更好的故事。”

But there are also zoomed-out essays about questions like what I call the protagonist problem, and how it is more and more rare these days for any book to have a structure other than centering upon a core protagonist.

但也有一些缩小的文章，涉及诸如我所说的主角问题之类的问题，以及当今任何一本书除了以核心主角为中心之外的结构越来越罕见。

Or we have an essay in there about hopepunk.

或者我们有一篇关于希望朋克的文章。

We have essays about how science fiction historically has served to combat censorship and to increase international empathy.

我们有一些关于科幻小说在历史上如何对抗审查制度和增强国际同理心的文章。

So, it’s a collection of detailed reflections on the genre, its history, and just how powerful it is to influence the way we think as a society.

因此，这是对这一流派、其历史以及它对我们作为一个社会的思维方式的影响力有多大的详细反思的集合。

I’m also co-writing with her a novel about an exoplanet terraforming mission.

我还与她共同写了一本关于系外行星地球化任务的小说。

Every time I run it, I have people write to me, even years later, saying, “I decided to run for office because I did this event.

每次我举办这个活动时，都会有人写信给我，甚至是在几年后，他们说：“我决定竞选公职，因为我做了这个活动。

I decided to go home to Russia and work with the Democratic Resistance Movement because this event showed me that I really can make a difference.”

我决定回到俄罗斯家乡并与民主抵抗运动一起工作，因为这次活动向我展示了我确实可以做出改变。”

Especially, if I could bring in educational administrators, people who make decisions about what kind of education gets advanced from some of the powers that shape the world, I would love to help them see that we can teach people better to believe that they have power, and that if we get this into the way we teach people to think, we can save democracy by making people actually be confident in democracy.

特别是，如果我能引入教育管理者，那些决定从塑造世界的某些力量中获得何种教育的人，我很乐意帮助他们看到，我们可以教导人们更好地相信他们拥有权力，并且如果我们将其纳入我们教导人们思考的方式，我们可以通过让人们真正对民主充满信心来拯救民主。

The first step to that is people being confident that what they do actually makes a difference.

实现这一目标的第一步是人们相信自己所做的事情确实会有所作为。

Photo credit: Jason Smith

照片来源：贾森·史密斯