"No town can live peacefully, whatever its laws," Plato wrote, "when its citizens . . . do nothing but feast and drink and tire themselves out in the cares of love." “没有哪个城镇能过太平日子，无论制定什么法律，”柏拉图写道，“假使市民……无所事事，只是享受美酒盛宴，因为谈情说爱而搞得自己筋疲力竭。”

But is it such a bad thing to live like this for just a little while? Just for a few months of one's life, is it so awful to travel through time with no greater ambition than to find the next lovely meal? Or to learn how to speak a language for no higher purpose than that it pleases your ear to hear it? Or to nap in a garden, in a patch of sunlight, in the middle of the day, right next to your favorite fountain? And then to do it again the next day?  可是偶尔过过这样的生活有何不好？一生当中只花数个月的时间，除了找寻下一顿佳肴之外别无所求，难道罪无可赦？只是为了取悦自己的听觉而去学习一种语言，别无其他目的？或者正午时分在庭园的一方阳光中，坐在自己最爱的喷泉边打盹？隔天再这么做一次？真那么难以原谅吗？ 

Of course, one can't live like this forever. Real life and wars and traumas and mortality will interfere eventually. Here in Sicily with its dreadful poverty, real life is never far from anyone's mind. The Mafia has been the only successful business in Sicily for centuries (running the business of protecting citizens from itself), and it still keeps its hand down everybody's pants. Palermo—a city Goethe once claimed was possessed of an impossible-to-describe beauty—may now be the only city in Western Europe where you can still find yourself picking your steps through World War II rubble, just to give a sense of development here. The town has been systematically uglified beyond description by the hideous and unsafe apartment blocks the Mafia constructed in the 1980s as money-laundering operations. I asked one Sicilian if those buildings were made from cheap concrete and he said, "Oh, no—this is very expensive concrete. In each batch, there are a few bodies of people who were killed by the Mafia, and that costs money. But it does make the concrete stronger to be reinforced with all those bones and teeth."  当然，没有人能够永远过这种日子。真实生活、战争、苦难、道德终将起而干预。在贫困的西西里，真实生活永远走不出任何人的脑海。黑手党是西西里数百年来唯一成功的事业（保护市民免受其害），而它的魔爪仍伸及每个人。巴勒莫（Palermo）——歌德曾称之为拥有无法形容之美的城市——或许是目前西欧唯一能让你走在二战瓦砾堆中感受发展状况的城市。黑手党在20世纪80年代为洗钱操作而建造的丑陋不堪的公寓危楼，使这座城市有计划地遭受不可名状的丑化。我问一位西西里人，这些建筑是否用廉价的混凝土建造而成，他说：“喔不——是很贵的混凝土。每一批混凝土都混有几具遭黑手党杀害的尸体，这可花钱咧。不过用骨头、牙齿加固，的确让混凝土比较坚固。” 

In such an environment, is it maybe a little shallow to be thinking only about your next wonderful meal? Or is it perhaps the best you can do, given the harder realities? Luigi Barzini, in his 1964 masterwork The Italians (written when he'd finally grown tired of foreigners writing about Italy and either loving it or hating it too much) tried to set the record straight on his own culture. He tried to answer the question of why the Italians have produced the greatest artistic, political and scientific minds of the ages, but have still never become a major world power. Why are they the planet's masters of verbal diplomacy, but still so inept at home government? Why are they so individually valiant, yet so collectively unsuccessful as an army? How can they be such shrewd merchants on the personal level, yet such inefficient capitalists as a nation?  在这种环境下思考下一顿佳肴，是否有些肤浅？或者，考虑到这般严峻的现实，你也只能这么做，无从选择？巴兹尼（Luigi Barzini）在1964年的大作《意大利人》（他之所以书写此书，是因为描述意大利的外国人对这个国家不是爱就是恨得要命，这些终于让他感到厌倦）当中，尝试明确记录他的文化。他试图回答几个问题：关于意大利为何出产最伟大的艺术家、政治家和科学家，却仍未能成为世界强国？他们为什么是外交辞令的佼佼者，却仍拙于国内政治？他们为什么具有个人勇气，组织军队却集体溃败？就个人而言，他们每个人都是精打细算的商人，为什么作为一个国家的时候，就成了缺乏效率的资本主义国家？ 

His answers to these questions are more complex than I can fairly encapsulate here, but have much to do with a sad Italian history of corruption by local leaders and exploitation by foreign dominators, all of which has generally led Italians to draw the seemingly accurate conclusion that nobody and nothing in this world can be trusted. Because the world is so corrupted, misspoken, unstable, exaggerated and unfair, one should trust only what one can experience with one's own senses, and this makes the senses stronger in Italy than anywhere in Europe. This is why, Barzini says, Italians will tolerate hideously incompetent generals, presidents, tyrants, professors, bureaucrats, journalists and captains of industry, but will never tolerate incompetent "opera singers, conductors, ballerinas, courtesans, actors, film directors, cooks, tailors . . ." In a world of disorder and disaster and fraud, sometimes only beauty can be trusted. Only artistic excellence is incorruptible. Pleasure cannot be bargained down. And sometimes the meal is the only currency that is real.  他给予这些问题的答案，比我在此所能引用的更为复杂，而其和意大利长期以来地方官员的贪污以及外来统治者的剥削有很大的关系，这一切悲伤的历史经验，导致意大利人得出看来正确的结论：这世界上没有任何人或任何事可让人信赖。因为世界如此腐败、动荡、夸大、不公，你只能信赖自己的感官体验，正因为如此，意大利人的感官在欧洲首屈一指。巴兹尼说，因此意大利可以忍受庸碌无能的将军、总统、暴君、教授、官僚、记者和工业大亨，却永远无法忍受无能的“歌剧演唱家、指挥家、芭蕾舞者、交际花、演员、电影导演、厨师、裁缝……”在一个混乱失序、灾祸连连、充满诈骗的世界，有时只能信赖美。唯有卓越的才艺不会腐败。快乐无法降价求售。有时一顿饭是唯一真实的货币。