朋友四型翻译

A person may have no wife or husband in their lifetime, but it is absolutely impossible to have no friends. Even Robinson Crusoe on a desolate island was badly in need of a “Friday”. One cannot choose his or her parents, but except for Robinson, everybody can have the freedom to choose friends. It is true that one’s choices should be to one’s liking, but it’s not always the case. You pick and choose, and at the same time, are picked and chosen by others. Being chosen is an honor, but is may not be a pleasure. There are many who come to press your doorbell, but how many of them can make “go into raptures?” generally speaking, doorbell pressers fall into the following four categories.

The first category: refined and humorous. Friends of this category are ideal, but they can only be chanced upon rather than be sought after. There are as numerous refined people as there are humorous ones, but how many can you find who are refined as well as humorous? Refined people are respectable, humorous people are loveable, and people who are both refined and humorous are respectable but not awesome, intimate but not improperly familiar. The longer you are with them, the closer you will be, just as the fresh fruit you eat, which is not only delicious but also nutritious: it kills two birds with one stone.

Friends are a mirror of one’s own self. If one has a friend of this kind, his or her own taste will not be low. How many vulgar and humorless people have you found wherever Su Dongpo, a great genius of the Song Dynasty, went?

The second category: refined but humorless. These people are virtually zhengyou (friends who will give forthright admonition) or even weiyou (friends with stern moral integrity), as defined by people of olden times. Of these friends, some are with profound knowledge, some with noble character, and still some with “both character and knowledge” like a good model student. The pity is that these people have little sense of humor, seldom lively. You are always feeling that there is something missing in him or her, so it is impossible for you feel that something suddenly dawns on him or her, or to have the necessary sense of reality. Your chat with that person is not like playing basketball with the ball coming and going frequently between the players; neither is it like snowballing, getting the ball larger with each rolling. People who are extremely active only care about their serving of the ball, without considering whether you could get it or not. But the passive people are just the opposite, as they would be idle instead of being hardworking, and they seldom catch your ball. Whether they are active or passive, it is you who

should always pick up the ball, and if you don’t pick the ball up, the match will be very unlikely to go on. The pity of these friends with stern moral integrity is that their scope of interest is too narrow, and therefore, you cannot have a “wider contact” with them. The world is so big, but the sole purpose of his coming to you from one end of the city to the other is to discuss “the special significance of death in modern French novels”, or “the attitude of the Eskimos towards sexual life”. You can imagine how tiresome it is to pick up the ball the whole night for these friends. And friendship of this kind is something like taking medicine, which is a bit too bitter.

The third category: vulgar but humorous. Friends of this type are highly amusing. When joking, they will offer you the most obscene; when telling stories, theirs will be the most vivid; when talking about rumors, they are the best-informed; when socializing, they are the most popular; they have been to all good places and they have nurtured all evil thoughts. There is no topic that they cannot say something about, but how they manage to do this is none of your business. Their learning lies in the way that no laymen will find that they are not knowledgeable. As to those who are adept …, but how many adept people have seen in this world? That is why they can be

active in the living room and the restaurant without letting the cat out of the bag. These people have glib tongue, and if dining with others, both the host and the guests will be happy. What goes into the ear is much better than what goes into the mouth. If they were in a meeting, a least meaningful meeting would seem to be the most significant, full of content and instructive. If the second category of people possess all the learning in the world but common sense, people of this category are just the other way round: they possess all the common sense of the world but no true learning. In the ordinary course of events, if vulgar people are humorous, their humor would be vulgar, so how can you share pleasure with them? Or are you yourself vulgarly humorous? No. Human nature is heterogeneous. Who can pledge that you yourself are completely void of this unhealthy element? If you wanted to be Robinson, which “Friday” would you like to choose, from the third category or from the second?

The fourth category: vulgar and humorless. Friends of this type are as few as those of the first type, and the chances of meeting them are slim. These people certainly have a set of principles of valuing things. Most likely they will not admit that they are vulgar and humorless, instead they will think that they are

refined and humorous. However, they are not the type of people that I will share pleasure with.