旅行的藝術:對旅行的期待-5

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德埃桑迪斯曾試圖到英國旅行，在這之前的許多年，他還想過到另一個國家旅行，這個國家就是荷蘭。在動身前，他把荷蘭想象成特尼爾斯[5] 、揚·斯丁 [6] 、倫勃朗 [7] 、奧斯塔德 [8] 的畫作所描繪的地方。他期待那里有簡單的家族生活，同時不乏肆意的狂歡；有寧靜的小庭院，地上鋪的是磚石，還可以看見臉色蒼白的女仆倒牛奶。因此，他到哈勒姆和阿姆斯特丹旅行了一趟，結果當然是大失所望。盡管如此，那些畫作并沒有騙人，荷蘭人的生活確有其簡單和狂歡的一面，也有鋪著磚石的漂亮庭院，能看到一些女傭在倒牛奶，然而，這些珍寶都混雜在一大堆乏味的日常影像中（如餐館、辦公樓、毫無特色的房屋、少有生機的田野等），只不過荷蘭的畫家們從不在他們的作品中展現這些普通的事物而已。旅行時，置身于真實的荷蘭，我們的體驗也因此奇怪而平淡，全然不及在羅浮宮的荷蘭畫作展廳里瀏覽一個下午來得興奮，因為在這幾間展室里，收藏有荷蘭和荷蘭人生活中最美好的方面。

There was one other country that, many years before his intended trip to England, Des Esseintes had wanted to see: Holland. He had imagined the place to resemble the paintings of Teniers and Jan Steen, Rembrandt and Ostade; he had anticipated patriarchal simplicity and riotous joviality; quiet small brick courtyards and pale-faced maids pouring milk. And so he had journeyed to Haarlem and Amsterdam-and been greatly disappointed. It was not that the paintings had lied, there had been some simplicity and joviality, some nice brick courtyards and a few serving women pouring milk, but these gems were blended in a stew of ordinary images (restaurants, offices, uniform houses and featureless fields) which these Dutch artists had never painted and which made the experience of travelling in the country strangely diluted compared with an afternoon in the Dutch galleries of the Louvre, where the essence of Dutch beauty found itself collected in just a few rooms.

雅各布·馮·雷斯達爾：《阿爾克馬爾風景》，1670—1675年

有些荒謬的是，旅程結束后，德埃桑迪斯發(fā)現在博物館里欣賞荷蘭畫作更能讓他體驗到他所熱愛的荷蘭文化的方方面面，而這種體驗，是他帶著16件行李和兩個仆從到荷蘭旅行時所沒有的。

Des Esseintes ended up in the paradoxical position of feeling more in Holland-that is, more intensely in contact with the elements he loved in Dutch culture-when looking at selected images of Holland in a museum than when travelling with sixteen pieces of luggage and two servants through the country itself.