| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
|
| 双语新闻 Bilingual News | 双语对照阅读 分级系列阅读 智能辅助阅读 在线英语学习 |
| [英文] [中文] [双语对照] [双语交替] [] |
| WONDER BOY: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley, by Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans |
| 《神奇小子——谢家华、Zappos和硅谷的幸福神话》(Wonder Boy: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley)，作者：安吉尔·欧阳、戴维·金斯 |
| A few chapters into “Wonder Boy,” Tony Hsieh sells his first company to Microsoft for $265 million. At 24, he is fabulously rich and one of the rising stars in the tech firmament. But he is unaccountably sad — aware, suddenly, that what he has is not enough. |
| 《神奇小子》才进行没几章，谢家华就已经以2.65亿美元的价格将他的第一家公司卖给了微软。24岁的他已经非常富有，是科技界冉冉升起的新星之一。但他莫名其妙地感到悲伤——他突然意识到，他所拥有的还不够。 |
| So he sits down to write a list of the happiest periods in his life. “Connecting with a friend and talking through the entire night until the sun rose made me happy,” he writes. “Trick-or-treating in middle school with a group of my closest friends made me happy.” |
| 于是他坐下来写下自己一生中最快乐的时光。“和朋友聊天聊了一整晚，直到太阳升起，这让我很开心，”他写道，“中学时和一群最亲密的朋友一起玩‘不给糖就捣蛋’，这让我很开心。” |
| If this moment in Hsieh’s story is suffused with dread, it is because we know how the story of this man, who so valued friendship, ends. |
| 如果说谢家华的故事中，这一刻如此可怕，那是因为我们知道，这个如此珍视友谊的人的故事最终如何结束。 |
| He died under horrifying circumstances. At 46, traveling with a crowd of personal assistants and hangers-on, he locked himself into a friend’s storage shed and asked an employee to bring him nitrous oxide, marijuana, a lighter, pizza and candles. The assistant did as he was told, and Hsieh, inebriated, started a fire. Lying on the freezing ground on a filthy blanket, he suffered smoke inhalation that would kill him. |
| 他的死亡场景令人心悸。46岁的他带着一群私人助理和随行人员一起旅行，把自己锁在一个朋友的储藏室里，让一名员工给他拿来一氧化二氮、大麻、打火机、披萨和蜡烛。助手照他说的做了，谢家华喝醉了，放了一把火。他躺在冰冷的地面上，身下是一张肮脏的毯子，他吸入了足以致命的烟雾。 |
| Hsieh was a public person — lauded for his leadership of Zappos, the online shoe retailer — and much of his story appeared in the press as it unfolded. “Wonder Boy,” written by the journalists Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans, tells it from start to finish. It is a gripping, uncomfortable read. One wants to identify the moment when Hsieh’s life turned a corner. Was it when he became so rich he never needed to work again? When he was introduced to ketamine? When the last of his friends were replaced by employees? |
| 谢家华是一位公众人物，因他执掌在线鞋履零售商Zappos的表现受到称赞，他的故事有相当一部分已经在媒体上得到逐步的揭示，而记者安吉尔·欧阳（音）和戴维·金斯的《神奇小子》做出了从头到尾的讲述。这是一本扣人心弦、令人不安的书。人们想知道谢家华的人生在哪一刻发生转折。是当他变得非常富有，再也不需要工作的时候？是当他接触到氯胺酮的时候？是当他最后仅剩的朋友也被雇员取代的时候？ |
| At its heart, this is a story about addiction. The child of Taiwanese immigrants, Hsieh spent his early years under extraordinary pressure to succeed. Only when he got to Harvard did he fall in with a close-knit circle of friends, enjoying a warm flush of belonging that he would spend the rest of his life trying to recreate. In his 20s, partying became wrapped into his work persona. San Francisco’s rave scene introduced him to club drugs like MDMA; and Burning Man, fatefully, to ketamine. |
| 本质上，这是一个关于嗜瘾的故事。作为台湾移民的孩子，他早年生活在一定要出人头地的巨大压力之下。直到进入哈佛大学，他才有了一个亲密的朋友圈，享受一种温暖的归属感，这种感觉是他一生都在努力重建的。在他20多岁的时候，派对成了他工作中的一部分。旧金山的锐舞场景让他接触到了MDMA等夜店毒品；在火人节上则接触到了致命的氯胺酮。 |
| Au-Yeung and Jeans, who covered Hsieh’s death for Forbes magazine, want to tell another story, though, about the dark side of the tech boom. There is something to this. In the 1990s, investors liked their founders to be risk-takers, a little extreme. In those days, the brilliant, off-the-wall founder was the brand, holding court at panel discussions before an audience of M.B.A.s and plutocrats who lived far more careful lives. |
| 欧阳和金斯曾为《福布斯》杂志报道谢家华之死，他们想要讲述另一个故事——关于科技繁荣的阴暗面。这并非无事生非。在20世纪90年代，投资者喜欢他们的创始人勇于冒险，有点极端。在那些日子里，才华横溢、特立独行的创始人就是品牌，在小组讨论中对着一群过着谨小慎微生活的MBA和富豪发号施令。 |
| Hsieh certainly fit the bill. He threw off grandiose ideas like sparks, scribbling them on Post-its as his subordinates scrambled to keep up. He plunged into a study of the science of happiness, an idea that had taken hold in Harvard’s psychology department, and looked for ways to engineer it. In his 30s, he announced a $350 million project to transform a corner of Las Vegas into a tech utopia, and persuaded friends to move with him into a kind of urban commune, a collection of Airstream trailers in a vacant lot, where nights ended with campfires and jam sessions. |
| 谢家华当然符合这个标准。他抛出火花般的宏伟想法，把它们草草写在便利贴上，下属们只能手忙脚乱地跟上。他投入对幸福的科学研究——这是一个已经在哈佛大学心理学系扎下根的理念——并且寻找方法来设计它。30多岁时，他宣布了一个3.5亿美元的项目，要把拉斯维加斯的一个角落改造成一个科技乌托邦，并说服朋友们和他一起搬到一个类似城市公社的地方，那是一片停着许多Airstream拖车的空地，夜晚以篝火和大家的即兴合奏结束。 |
| But there was a flaw in Hsieh’s social engineering: He was trying to create community by distributing money in giant gobs. As he aged, his friends were getting younger, and less able to say no to him. His drug use, once confined to festivals, came into plain view. By 2020, Hsieh was snorting between three and five grams of ketamine daily, the authors say. He lost weight and barely slept. |
| 但谢家华的社会工程有一个缺陷：他试图通过大笔的金钱分配来创造社区。随着年龄的增长，他身边的朋友们变得越来越年轻，越来越不能对他说不。他曾经只在音乐节之类的场合吸毒，现在却成了常事。作者说，到2020年，谢家华每天吸食3到5克氯胺酮。他体重下降，几乎不睡觉。 |
| During his last months, Hsieh’s behavior was increasingly paranoid and bizarre. He demanded faucets be turned on so he could hear the sound of water; he wrote on the walls; he lit dozens of candles. He hired court reporters to stand around, transcribing the conversations going on between housemates. |
| 在生命的最后几个月里，谢家华的行为越来越偏执和怪异。他要求把水龙头打开，好让他能听到水声；他在墙上写字；他点起几十支蜡烛。他雇用法庭书记员站在一边，记录室友们的谈话。 |
| Friends and family tried interventions, but his assistants found ways to deflect them. After a visit that August, his friend Jewel, the singer-songwriter, wrote him a stern letter, warning him that “when you look around and realize that every single person around you is on your payroll, then you are in trouble.” But it was too late. He was dead by Christmas. |
| 朋友和家人试图干预，但被他的助手百般阻挠。那年8月，他的朋友、创作歌手朱厄尔去拜访他之后，给他写了一封措辞严厉的信，警告他“当你环顾四周，发现身边的每个人都在你的发薪名单上时，你就有麻烦了”，但这为时已晚。他在圣诞节前与世长辞。 |
| Why didn’t anyone force Hsieh into treatment? Au-Yeung and Jeans have performed a true service by trying to find out, interviewing many of those in his inner circle. Their writing is frustratingly clunky, as if written in haste. But the material is compelling, with the gathering tension of a slow-motion disaster. The final chapters, documenting a series of interventions that went nowhere, are riveting. |
| 为什么没有人强迫谢家华接受治疗？欧阳和金斯下了很大工夫，采访了他核心圈子里的许多人，试图找到答案。他们的文字笨拙到令人沮丧，好像是仓促写成的。但那些素材很有说服力，灾难仿佛以慢镜头播放，紧张气氛逐渐积聚。最后几章记录了一系列毫无效果的干预措施，颇为引人入胜。 |
| The account of these last months is almost entirely drawn from anonymous sources, presumably the same friends who were there to watch him spiral. Hsieh’s family did not cooperate with the project, and one wonders how their perspective would have changed the story. Journalists tend to bend toward their most helpful sources, and this appears to have happened here. In the end, the authors decline to hold anyone responsible. |
| 对谢家华人生最后几个月的描述几乎完全来自匿名信源，可能是那些在他身边看着他堕落的朋友们。谢家华的家人没有同这个项目合作，这令人不禁猜想他们的观点会如何改变这个故事。记者往往会偏向对他们最有帮助的消息来源，这本书的情况似乎也是如此。最后，作者拒绝追究任何人的责任。 |
| “What emerged in the hundreds of hours of interviews we conducted with people who witnessed Tony’s descent was that there were no heroes or villains,” they write. “Some well-meaning actors gave into the temptations of greed, while supposed bad actors had complicated histories that gave their roles context.” |
| “我们对眼看着托尼（谢家华的英文名。——译注）每况愈下的人进行了数百个小时的采访，结果发现，这其中没有英雄或反派，”他们写道。“一些善意的参与者屈服于贪婪的诱惑，而所谓坏的参与者们有着复杂的历史，这为他们的角色提供了参考背景。” |
| They default to a conclusion worthy of a TED Talk: that Hsieh was doomed because happiness is an intrinsically unreachable goal. He thought “he could build his way to happiness,” they write. “He kept building and acquiring until eventually, he had everything in the world — and it still wasn’t enough.” |
| 他们默认了这样一个值得到TED上去做个演讲的结论——谢家华注定要失败，因为幸福本质上是一个遥不可及的目标。他认为“可以用自己的方式获得幸福，”他们写道。“他一直在建造和获取，直到最后，他拥有了世界上的一切——但这仍然不够。” |
| This is an unsatisfying ending, given the evidence they have laid out in the preceding pages. |
| 鉴于他们在前文中列出的证据，这个结局并不令人满意。 |
| We live in a society where people in crisis are often left to deteriorate, though seldom in such a visible and florid way. The reason to unpack these tragedies is to try to be better, to patch the holes. Our culture gives elites a pass for substance abuse. Our laws make it difficult to treat people without their consent. When wealthy celebrities unravel, they do not need sycophants. It is an ugly story. There is plenty of blame to go around. |
| 在我们生活的这个社会里，处于危机中的人们往往被任由堕落，尽管很少以如此显眼而炽烈的方式。之所以将这些悲剧揭开，是为了能做出改变，修补漏洞。我们的文化纵容精英去滥用药物。我们的法律规定，未经当事人同意的情况下，很难对他们进行治疗。富有的名人走向崩溃时，需要的不是阿谀奉承的人。这是一个丑陋的故事。有很多东西需要为此负责。 |
| WONDER BOY: Tony Hsieh, Zappos and the Myth of Happiness in Silicon Valley | By Angel Au-Yeung and David Jeans | Illustrated | 384 pp. | Henry Holt & Company | $32 |
| 《神奇小子——谢家华、Zappos和硅谷的幸福神话》|作者：安吉尔·欧阳、戴维·金斯|有插图|384页|亨利·霍尔特出版社|32美元 |
OK阅读网 版权所有(C)2017 | 联系我们