10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times And Bad
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目录
You Are Allowed to Change Your MindTo change is to be alive.Like-minded vs. like-heartedVisit the past.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
Words & phrases
一流智力的检验就是在头脑中同时持有两种相反观点的能力，并且仍然保持运作的能力。例如，一个人应该能够看到事情是没有希望的，但却要下定决心让它们变成另一种样子。
first-rate
adj.第一流的；最上等的
adv.非常好地；极佳
The food here is absolutely first-rate.
这里的食物绝对是第一流的。
I was reading a newspaper article about climate change and a former skeptic said, “If you’ve never changed your mind about something, pinch yourself; you may be dead.”
When was the last time you changed your mind about something? We’re afraid of changing our minds because we’re afraid of the consequences of changing our minds. What will people think?
Words & phrases
skeptic:
n.（对一切都）持怀疑态度的人；怀疑论者，不可知论者；无神论者
adj.不相信的，持怀疑态度的；怀疑论的，不可知论的
I am much more of a skeptic.
我更是一个怀疑论者。
pinch yourself 掐自己：用手指捏自己的皮肤，以确认自己是否在做梦或确认某件事是否真实。
Pinch yourself if you just can't stop laughing.
如果你不能停止发笑，就掐一下自己。
pinch:
v.捏，拧，掐；揑住，夹紧；掐掉；（穿的鞋等）夹痛，挤痛；<非正式>偷窃；<非正式>逮捕，拘捕；节约，节省；使经济拮据；捏拉缩放；（由于担心或紧张）抿（嘴唇）；（航海）使（帆船）紧抢风
n.捏，掐，拧；一撮；偷窃；（棒球）紧要时刻，紧要关头
adj.替代的，替补的；由替补击球手完成的
She gave him a little pinch.
她轻轻地拧了他一下。
In this country, you’re supposed to have your ideas and stick with them and defend them with your life. Take our politics, for example. If a politician changes their mind publicly, it’s a sign of weakness. A sign of defeat. And you don’t want to change your mind too much, heaven forbid, because then you’re wishy-washy.
Words & phrases
defend: v.保卫，防御；捍卫，维护；（在比赛中）防守，防卫；参加卫冕赛，蝉联；做……的辩护律师，为……辩解
He has hired a lawyer to defend him against the allegation.
他已聘请一位律师为他所受的指控辩护。
publicly: adv.公开地，公然地；由政府；由公众；公众可以获取（或购买）地
This information is not publicly available.
这个消息没有对外公开。
defeat:
v.击败，战胜；困惑，难住；使失败，阻挠；反对（动议或提议）
n.失败，战败；战胜，击败
They narrowly avoided defeat.
他们险些儿被打败。
heaven forbid 希望不会发生的事情：用于表达对某种不好的情况的担忧或希望避免的意思。
Heaven forbid that we should ever have to use this emergency kit.
希望我们永远不需要使用这个应急包。
heaven:
n.天堂，天国；<非正式>极乐之地，极乐；<文>天空；神，诸神；与上帝同享永福
int.（表示惊讶或强调）天哪
Heaven knows what they put in it.
天知道他们往里面放了些什么。
wishy-washy: adj.空泛的；缺乏特点或决心的；淡而无味的；缺乏力量的
If there's anything I can't stand it's an indecisive, wishy-washy customer.
如果说我有什么不能容忍，那就是优柔寡断、挑三拣四的顾客。
Social media has turned us all into politicians. And brands. Everyone’s supposed to be a brand now, and the worst thing in the world is to be off-brand.
But to be on brand is to be 100 percent certain of who you are and what you do, and certainty, in art and in life, is not only completely overrated, it is also a roadblock to discovery.
Uncertainty is the very thing that art thrives on. The writer Donald Barthelme said that the artist’s natural state is one of not-knowing. John Cage said that when he was not working he thought he knew something, but when he was working, it was clear that he didn’t know anything. “This has been my job in a way,” says screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. “I sit at my desk and I don’t know what to do.”
Words & phrases
brand
n.品牌，商标；（独特的）一种，一类；（动物身上标明所属的）烙印，火印；独特的个性，自成一格的形象；燃烧的木头，烧焦的木头；<古>（打印用的）烙铁；火炬，剑
v.打烙印于（牲畜，以标明所属）；给……冠以恶名，谴责；给……设计品牌，加商标于；铭刻，铭记
She bought her car brand new.
她买的汽车是全新的。
off-brand
adj.商标未注册的；杂牌的
n.未注册的商标；杂牌
Mr. Kasriel says he buys off-brand shoes 'so that my lovely children could have Nikes. '
卡斯瑞尔先生说，他买大陆货的鞋子，“是要让我可爱的孩子们能穿耐克鞋。”
overrated:
adj.评价过高的
v.对……估计过高（overrate 的过去分词）
Life in the wild is vastly overrated.
野外生活被大大地高估了。
roadblock:
n.路障；障碍物
vi.设置路障
Detaining and ticketing such drivers is not the purpose of the roadblock and would unduly slow down the stops of other cars.
拘留和对这类司机开罚单不是设置路障的目的，而且会使其他车辆过度减速。
thrive on 以……成长
Many people thrive on a stressful lifestyle.
许多人喜欢有压力的生活方式。
not-knowing
I started pottering around outside, not knowing what I was doing.
我开始在外面混日子，不知道自己在做些什么
screenwriter: n.编剧家；电影剧本作家
He's a talented screenwriter who has sold out to TV soap operas.
他是个有才华的电影编剧，却改行写起电视肥皂剧来了。
“I’m making explorations. I don’t know where they’re going to take me.”
—Marshall McLuhan
You start each work not knowing exactly where you’re going or where you’ll end up. “Art is the highest form of hope,” said painter Gerhard Richter. But hope is not about knowing how things will turn out—it is moving forward in the face of uncertainty. It’s a way of dealing with uncertainty. “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,” writes Rebecca Solnit. To have hope, you must acknowledge that you don’t know everything and you don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the only way to keep going and the only way to keep making art: to be open to possibility and allow yourself to be changed.
Of course, to change your mind is to do some real thinking. Thinking requires an environment in which you can try out all sorts of ideas and not be judged for them. To change your mind, you need a good place to have some bad ideas.
The internet, unfortunately, is no longer a safe place to do any kind of experimental thinking, particularly for somebody with an audience or any kind of “brand.” (That awful word! As if we’re all cattle with our owner’s mark burned into our flesh.)
No, if you’re going to change your mind, you might have to go off-brand, and offline is the place to be off-brand. Your bliss station, your studio, a paper journal, a private chat room, a living room full of trusted loved ones: These are the places to really think.
Words & phrases
好像我们都是肉上烙着主人印记的牛。
judged:
v.裁决；审理（judge 的过去分词）
adj.判断的
Schools should not be judged only on exam results.
学校的好坏不能仅凭考试结果来评判。
flesh:
n.（人或动物的）肉；（人体的）皮肤；果肉；肉体
v.<文>激起……的杀性，使投入血战；刮掉（皮上的）肉
Tigers are flesh-eating animals.
虎是食肉动物。
bliss:
n.极乐，天赐之福；天堂，乐园
v.<非正式>乐不可支，欣喜若狂
Swimming on a hot day is sheer bliss.
热天游泳是天大的乐事。
“The world needs you at the party starting real conversations, saying, ‘I don’t know,’ and being kind.”
—Charlie Kaufman
“Think for yourself!” goes the cliché. But the truth is: We can’t. We need other people to help us think.
“To think independently of other human beings is impossible,” writes Alan Jacobs in his book How to Think. “Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said.”
Words & phrases
思考是必然的、彻底的、奇妙的社会性的。你所想的一切都是对别人所想和所说的回应。
cliché: n.陈词滥调，陈腐思想；平庸的人，平庸之物；<英>铅版印刷，电版印刷物
That everyone's too busy these days is a cliché.
现在人人都太忙，这句话是陈词滥调。
The trouble is that we’re increasingly becoming a culture that is clustering into like-minded communities and networks. Offline, this plays out in where people live, whether by choice or necessity. Online, it plays out in what websites we visit, who we choose to follow, and how the algorithms of online networks are fine-tuned to show us what they think we want to see.
Interacting with people who don’t share our perspective forces us to rethink our ideas, strengthen our ideas, or trade our ideas for better ones. When you’re only interacting with like-minded people all the time, there’s less and less opportunity to be changed. Everybody knows that feeling you get when you’re hanging out with people who love the same art, listen to the same music, and watch the same movies: It’s comforting at first, but it can also become incredibly boring and ultimately stifling.
Words & phrases
play out 表演到结束；用完；展开；耗尽；发展
Let's see how this situation will play out.
让我们看看这种情况会如何发展。
necessity: n.必需品，必需的事物；必要，需要；必然性，不可避免的情况
Water is a basic necessity of life.
水是一种基本生活必需品。
incredibly: adv.难以置信地；非常地
It was incredibly hard work.
那是个非常艰辛的工作。
stifling:
adj.令人窒息的；沉闷的
v.使窒息；粉碎（stifle 的现在分词）
There was a stifling smell of hot oil everywhere.
到处都有令人窒息的热油气味。
Jacobs recommends that if you really want to explore ideas, you should consider hanging out with people who aren’t so much like-minded as like-hearted. These are people who are “temperamentally disposed to openness and have habits of listening.” People who are generous, kind, caring, and thoughtful. People who, when you say something, “think about it, rather than just simply react.” People you feel good around.
A reader once sent me a note remarking that while he didn’t share my politics, he felt he was able to really listen to what I had to say, rather than tuning out what he didn’t want to hear. He suspected it had to do with the creative spirit, that connection you feel with another person you know is trying their best to bring new, beautiful things into the world.
Try your best to seek out the like-hearted people with whom you feel this connection.
Words & phrases
尽你最大的努力去寻找和你有这种联系的志同道合的人。
temperamentally
/ ˌtemprəˈmentəli /adv.气质地I'm temperamentally unsuited to this job.
我的性格不适合这种工作。
dispose to 倾向于：使某人对某人或某事产生特定的感觉或态度。
I'm not disposed to argue.
我无意争论。
remarking:
n.评论
v.评论，注意（remark 的现在分词形式）
He rose from his seat, and, remarking carelessly, "Well, now we'd really better be getting on, old chap!"
他从座位上站起来，漫不经心地说：“好啦，老伙计，现在我们该走了！”
politics n.政治，政治活动（事务）；政治事业；政治学；(某团体、组织等内的）争权活动，权术；政治信仰，政治观点；（尤指跟社会权力和地位有关的领域、理论或活动的）主张，观（念）；政治思想体系，政治局势
Politics doesn't interest me.
我对政治不感兴趣。
politic
adj.<正式>（行动）明智的，讲策略的；（人）谨慎的，精明的
v.从事政治活动
It seemed politic to say nothing.
沉默似乎是上策。
tuning out 忽略，不反应：变得不对某事物或周围环境做出反应。
She was so absorbed in her book that she started tuning out everything around her.
她沉浸在书中，开始对周围的一切都不予理会。
“Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books . . . To be sure, the books of the future would be just as good a corrective as the books of the past, but unfortunately we cannot get at them.”
—C. S. Lewis
Words & phrases
每个时代都有自己的观点。它特别善于看到某些真理，也特别容易犯某些错误。 因此，我们都需要能够纠正我们这个时代特有错误的书籍。这意味着旧书…当然，未来的书和过去的书一样能起到很好的纠正作用，但不幸的是，我们无法得到它们。
corrective:
adj.纠正的，矫正的
n.起纠正作用的东西，修正
Scientific institutions have been reluctant to take corrective action.
科学机构一直都不愿采取纠正的行动。
Most everybody alive is so obsessed with what’s new that they all think about the same things. If you’re having trouble finding people to think with, seek out the dead. They have a lot to say and they are excellent listeners.
Read old books. Human beings have been around for a long time, and almost every problem you have has probably been written about by some other human living hundreds if not thousands of years before you. The Roman statesman and philosopher Seneca said that if you read old books, you get to add all the years the author lived onto your own life. “We are excluded from no age, but we have access to them all,” he said. “Why not turn from this brief and transient spell of time and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the past, which is limitless and eternal and can be shared with better men than we?” (He wrote that almost two thousand years ago!)
Words & phrases
人类已经存在了很长时间，几乎你遇到的每一个问题都可能被比你早几百年甚至几千年的其他人写过。
我们没有年龄限制，但我们可以接触到所有年龄，为什么不离开这短暂而短暂的时光，全身心地投入到过去呢？过去是无限而永恒的，可以与比我们更好的人分享。
statesman: n.政治家，国务活动家，治国之才
Hamilton is a great statesman and political thinker.
汉密尔顿是个伟大的政治家和政治思想家。
philosopher: n.哲学家，哲人；思想深刻的人
Carlos was something of a philosopher.
卡洛斯有几分哲人气质。
transient:
adj.转瞬即逝的，短暂的；暂住的，（工作）临时的
n.暂住者，流动人口；（电流、电压、频率的）瞬变
It is argued that the influence of transient investment on public companies can be adverse.
有人认为，短期投资会对上市公司产生不利的影响。
wholeheartedly: adv.全心全意地，全神贯注地
I can endorse their opinion wholeheartedly.
我可以全心全意地支持他们的观点。
It’s amazing how little human life changes. When I read Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, I marvel at how every ancient poem is basically a withering commentary on our contemporary politicians. A dip into Henry David Thoreau’s journals paints a portrait of a plant-loving man who is overeducated, underemployed, upset about politics, and living with his parents—he sounds exactly like one of my fellow millennials!
We have such short memories. You don’t have to go that far back into the past to discover things we’ve already forgotten about. Cracking a book that’s only a quarter of a century old can be like opening a chest of buried treasure.
If you want a quick way to escape the noise of contemporary life, break out of your like-minded bubble, and do some good thinking, just visit the past for a bit. It’s inexhaustible: Every day, we’re making more and more of it.
Words & phrases
当我读到老子的《道德经》时，我惊叹于每一首古诗基本上都是对当代政治家的尖刻评论。
翻阅一下亨利·大卫·梭罗(Henry David Thoreau)的日记，就会发现他是一个热爱植物的人，受教育程度过高，就业不足，对政治感到不安，与父母住在一起——他听起来就像我的千禧一代同胞之一！
它是取之不尽用之不竭的：每一天，我们都在制造越来越多的它。
marvel:
n.令人惊异的人（或事），奇迹
v.感到惊奇，大为赞叹
The operation was a marvel of the medical skill.
这次手术是医术上的一个奇迹。
withering
adj.使干枯的；使畏缩的；极有毁灭性的；极有讽刺性的
n.枯萎；凋谢
v.使凋谢；干枯；减弱；摧毁（wither 的现在分词）
She gave him a withering look.
她极其蔑视地看了他一眼。
commentary n.现场解说，实况报道；评注性著作，评论文；讨论，评论；说明，写照
You can hear commentary on the game at halftime.
你可在中场休息时听到对比赛的评论。
contemporary
adj.当代的，现代的；同时期的，同时代的
n.同时代的人；同龄人，同辈
We weren't out to design a contemporary utopia.
我们不想去设计一个当代乌托邦。
plant-loving adj．热爱植物的：对植物有特殊喜爱或兴趣的。
She is a plant-loving person and has a beautiful garden.
她热爱植物，拥有一个美丽的花园。
overeducated:
v.使接受过多教育（overeducate 的过去式和过去分词）
adj.接受过多教育的
At stores where employees didn't feel empowered, "overeducated" workers expressed greater dissatisfaction than their colleagues did and were more likely to state an intention to quit.
在一些员工感觉自己无权的商店里，受过更高教育的员工比他们的同事表现出更多的不满，也更容易流露出辞职倾向。
underemployed:
adj.未充分就业的；学非所用的；只有部分时间被雇用的
n.大材小用的人
They may also be described as underemployed or freelance workers.
他们有时也被称为失业人员或者自由职业者。
millennials
/ mɪˈleniəl /n.千禧世代；千禧之子；千禧一代（millennial 的复数）Millennials remember their father and mother both were laid off.
千禧一代记得他们的父母都被解雇了。
crack a book 打开书本学习：打开书本，尤其是为了学习。
If you want to pass the exam, you need to crack a book and study hard.
如果你想通过考试，你需要打开书本好好学习。
cracking:
n.裂纹，裂缝；爆裂声，噼啪声；分馏
adj.出色的，极好的；快而令人兴奋的
adv.非常，极其
v.破裂；发爆裂声；打开；重击；变声（crack 的现在分词）
She's always cracking jokes.
她总爱说笑话。
chest
n.胸部，胸膛；箱子，盒子，柜子；<英>金库，钱库
v.以胸部推（球）
The bullet hit him in the chest.
子弹击中了他的胸部。
inexhaustible: adj.用不完的；不知疲倦的
She has an inexhaustible supply of enthusiasm.
她拥有无穷无尽的热情。