the people of the abyss

深渊居民

作者介绍

杰克·伦敦，美国作家。他的创作思想较为复杂，受到过马克思、斯宾塞、尼采等多人影响，具有浓重的社会主义倾向，不过其本人是无政府主义者。他的思想倾向或许和他的生平有关，他农民出身，早年从事重体力劳动，后来当了记者和职业作家。有一段经历或许可以体现某种社会制度的本质，以及解释他的思想根源：“奥克兰电车公司录用了他，每天在地下室铲煤13个小时，全年无休，月薪30美元。仅仅干了一个月，杰克已经严重消瘦筋疲力尽。他听说这原是2个人干的活儿，现在他一人干，工资却还不到一半。没多久，被他顶替的工人中的一个，因为无力养活妻儿，自杀了。”

关于本书

是一部纪实文学，作者深入伦敦东区，考察当地人的生活，写下这部震撼世界的作品。书中有很多内容是值得我们深思的，当时世界上最强大的大英帝国，为什么在繁华的伦敦却有几十万人连温饱都很勉强？而当时还并不是世界一极的美国，即使在几年前经历过经济危机和衰退，人们的平均收入和生活水平却远远超过当时的大英帝国伦敦东区的人们。书中描述情景之惨烈，使人不忍心看第二遍。具有深意的是，书中描绘了深渊之中的人们只能不断下坠和堕落的可悲场景，而一场小小的变故则会急剧加快这个过程。但是更可悲的是，百年前的惨状在两个甲子之后却在世界上另一个强大的国家上演了。

一些摘抄和思考

这是书的前几章，开始描写一些底层人民的悲惨生活

When before I inquired the way of a policeman, I was usually asked, “Bus or ’ansom, sir?” But now the query became, “Walk or ride?” Also, at the railway stations, a third-class ticket was now shoved out to me as a matter of course.

看来哪都一样。

His two daughters beat him home from church—and pretty girls they were in their Sunday dresses; withal it was the certain weak and delicate prettiness which characterises the Cockney lasses, a prettiness which is no more than a promise with no grip on time, and doomed to fade quickly away like the colour from a sunset sky.

for one appears to be considered sufficient for a poor man’s family in which to cook and eat and sleep. When I asked for two rooms, the sublettees looked at me very much in the manner,y … Not only did the houses I investigated have no bath-tubs, but I learned that there were no bath-tubs in all the thousands of houses I had seen. Under the circumstances, with my wife and babies and a couple of lodgers suffering from the too great spaciousness of one room, taking a bath in a tin wash-basin would be an unfeasible undertaking.

作者经历过贫困生活，显然大概了解美国底层群众的生活。然而，即使是穷人，在那个时代的美国，已经摆脱了一个房间用来吃饭、睡觉、做饭，而且家里有浴缸。那个时代最富有的国家，真是难以想象。

And then she explained the process of saturation, by which the rental value of a neighbourhood went up, while its tone went down.“You see, sir, our kind are not used to crowding in the way the others do. We need more room. The others, the foreigners and lower-class people, can get five and six families into this house, where we only get one. So they can pay more rent for the house than we can afford. …”

这部分在120年后还是这么写实，呵呵。。。

“Up at half-past five,” “to bed the last thing at night,” “workin’ fit ter drop,” thirteen years of it, and for reward, grey hairs, frowzy clothes, stooped shoulders, slatternly figure, unending toil in a foul and noisome coffee-house that faced on an alley ten feet between the walls, and a waterside environment that was ugly and sickening, to say the least.

不知道那时候英国有没有人指责杰克·伦敦恶意写实

He had never learned to read, and had never felt the need for it—a vain and useless accomplishment, he held, at least for a man of his station in life…And in the course of this he had also hammered out a philosophy of life, an ugly and repulsive philosophy, but withal a very logical and sensible one from his point of view.

真是看到这已经没法往下看了。。。

a missus rowin’, kids squallin’, no coal t’ make the kettle sing, an’ the kettle up the spout, that’s wot I’d get. … Jest take my counsel, matey, an’ don’t ’ave ’em. … The word “home” aroused nothing but unpleasant associations. In the low wages of his father, and of other men in the same walk in life, he found sufficient reason for branding wife and children as encumbrances and causes of masculine misery. An unconscious hedonist, utterly unmoral and materialistic, he sought the greatest possible happiness for himself, and found it in drink.

贫贱夫妻百事哀

yet I was forced to confess that he was right in not marrying on four pounds ten in London Town. … And day by day I became convinced that not only is it unwise, but it is criminal for the people of the Abyss to marry. hey are the stones by the builder rejected. There is no place for them, in the social fabric, while all the forces of society drive them downward till they perish. At the bottom of the Abyss they are feeble, besotted, and imbecile. If they reproduce, the life is so cheap that perforce it perishes of itself. The work of the world goes on above them, and they do not care to take part in it, nor are they able. Moreover, the work of the world does not need them. There are plenty, far fitter than they, clinging to the steep slope above, and struggling frantically to slide no more.

百年前的英国工人，不愿意结婚生孩子了。即使是杰克伦敦，也认为他是对的。这些人将不断下滑。。。

In short, the London Abyss is a vast shambles. Year by year, and decade after decade, rural England pours in a flood of vigorous strong life, that not only does not renew itself, but perishes by the third generation. Competent authorities aver that the London workman whose parents and grand-parents were born in London is so remarkable a specimen that he is rarely found.

你要不说是伦敦我还以为你说的是那个哪儿呢，真像，真像

Witness last saw her alive on the previous Monday. She lived quite alone. Mr. Francis Birch, relieving officer for the Holborn district, stated that deceased had occupied the room in question for thirty-five years. When witness was called, on the 1st, he found the old woman in a terrible state, and the ambulance and coachman had to be disinfected after the removal. Dr. Chase Fennell said death was due to blood-poisoning from bed-sores, due to self-neglect and filthy surroundings, and the jury returned a verdict to that effect.

这段也有意思，越看越像了

后面杰克伦敦开始反复阐述下滑这个观点

The content of these people is manifestly great, for, relative to the wretchedness that encompasses them, they are well off.
But at the best, it is a dull, animal happiness, the content of the full belly. The dominant note of their lives is materialistic. They are stupid and heavy, without imagination. The Abyss seems to exude a stupefying atmosphere of torpor, which wraps about them and deadens them. … This would not be so bad if it were all; but it is not all. The satisfied torpor in which they are sunk is the deadly inertia that precedes dissolution. There is no progress, and with them not to progress is to fall back and into the Abyss. In their own lives they may only start to fall, leaving the fall to be completed by their children and their children’s children. Man always gets less than he demands from life; and so little do they demand, that the less than little they get cannot save them.

At the best, city life is an unnatural life for the human; but the city life of London is so utterly unnatural that the average workman or workwoman cannot stand it. Mind and body are sapped by the undermining influences ceaselessly at work. Moral and physical stamina are broken, and the good workman, fresh from the soil, becomes in the first city generation a poor workman; and by the second city generation, devoid of push and go and initiative, and actually unable physically to perform the labour his father did, he is well on the way to the shambles at the bottom of the Abyss.If nothing else, the air he breathes, and from which he never escapes, is sufficient to weaken him mentally and physically, so that he becomes unable to compete with the fresh virile life from the country hastening on to London Town to destroy and be destroyed.

又是一段悲惨现实，到底说哪呢，是伦敦吗？

They, at least, are dying, that is the point; while these have yet to go through the slow and preliminary pangs extending through two and even three generations.

然后是一些工作环境的描写

由于不太清楚那个时代的平均收入水平和换算关系，确实无法了解到底有多苦，不过从杰克伦敦笔下来看，那些人的工资实在是低的可怜，然而他们每天至少工作10小时，这已经是少的了。更可恶的是，恶劣的居住环境、破旧的衣物、量少质劣的食物。

and this, between six and seven o’clock in the evening of August 20, year of our Lord 1902, in the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen

如果是这样，即使日不落又有什么意义呢？

Their advice, by the way, was brief, and to the point; it was to get out of the country.

那个年代就流行润学了。

Several men in the line had been to the United States, and they were wishing that they had remained there, and were cursing themselves for their folly in ever having left. England had become a prison to them, a prison from which there was no hope of escape. … They envied me my youth and strength, which would sooner or later get me out of the country. These they no longer possessed.

人们羡慕可以润的人

while the men themselves ascribe their homelessness to foreign immigration, especially of Polish and Russian Jews, who take their places at lower wages and establish the sweating system.

就这样伦敦这点地方还有移民进来卷。。。

From all of which I drew the conclusion that a poorhouse porter, who commonly draws a yearly salary of from seven to nine pounds, is a very finicky and important personage, and cannot be treated too fastidiously by—paupers.

I cannot convey by printed speech the insufferable way in which he said this. He seemed to me to revel in that he was a man in authority, able to say to half a thousand ragged wretches, “you may eat or go hungry, as I elect.”

还有一些小鬼难缠的案例，看来哪都不缺这样的人

the men who … and too inured to hell on earth to be frightened by hell to come.

又是一些惨状

Seven and twenty centuries agone! And it is all as true and apposite to-day in the innermost centre of this Christian civilisation whereof Edward VII. is king.

impressed with the ungratefulness of the poor.

这句话真可笑

England has sent forth “the best she breeds” for so long, and has destroyed those that remained so fiercely…It could not be otherwise. The most complacent Britisher cannot hope to draw off the life-blood, and underfeed, and keep it up forever.

接下来作者开始阐述想法

when two men were after the one job wages were bound to fall. Had he gone deeper into the matter, he would have found that even the union, say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to displace the union men…
when two men were after the one job wages were bound to fall. Had he gone deeper into the matter, he would have found that even the union, say twenty thousand strong, could not hold up wages if twenty thousand idle men were trying to displace the union men…
There is a general decline in wages throughout the land, which, giving rise to labour disputes and strikes, is taken advantage of by the unemployed, who gladly pick up the tools thrown down by the strikers.Sweating, starvation wages, armies of unemployed, and great numbers of the homeless and shelterless are inevitable when there are more men to do work than there is

这里其实说了一个问题，就是工会并不是与资本家斗争的，工会的本质是排斥其他工人，这样才能改变供需关系进而提高工人工资。

然后作者又提及了堕落的问题。整个17章都是作者的观点。

18章开始举数字说明情况，说明英国工人的收入水平很低，维持生活极为困难。

接下来是一些有意思的内容

No human of an African village would allow such a promiscuous mixing of young men and women, boys and girls.
咱也不知道这是说哪呢，是说伦敦吗？

然后又阐述了堕落的现象。紧接着说了女性相对于男性的从属地位。

To me, at least, it would be enough to condemn modern society as hardly an advance on slavery or serfdom, if the permanent condition of industry were to be that which we behold, that ninety per cent. of the actual producers of wealth have no home that they can call their own beyond the end of the week; have no bit of soil, or so much as a room that belongs to them; have nothing of value of any kind, except as much old furniture as will go into a cart; have the precarious chance of weekly wages, which barely suffice to keep them in health; are housed, for the most part, in places that no man thinks fit for his horse; are separated by so narrow a margin from destitution that a month of bad trade, sickness, or unexpected loss brings them face to face with hunger and pauperism . . .

这段是作者引用另一个英国历史学家的话，其实也说明了那个时代就有很多人开始思考这种不合理性。

Now I contend that the least a man who does his day’s work should have is a room to himself, where he can lock the door and be safe in his possessions; where he can sit down and read by a window or look out; where he can come and go whenever he wishes; where he can accumulate a few personal belongings other than those he carries about with him on his back and in his pockets; where he can hang up pictures of his mother, sister, sweet-heart, ballet dancers, or bulldogs, as his heart listeth—in short, one place of his own on the earth of which he can say: “This is mine, my castle; the world stops at the threshold; here am I lord and master.” He will be a better citizen, this man; and he will do a better day’s work.

再次直接表达观点。现在发达国家已经基本实现这种生活了。

But there is no need further to multiply instances. In London the slaughter of the innocents goes on on a scale more stupendous than any before in the history of the world. …Also, at times, so peculiarly are they made, they will take half a million of these rents and profits and send it away to educate the black boys of the Soudan.

现在这些来到了世界上另一片土地了，确实挺像的。。。

作者更深的思考

整本书的第26、27章应该全文通读，因此不做引用。

我们是否让一般人过得更好了？ 都能算得上是诛心之问了。

Somebody’s Opinion

120年前，当时最强大的国家——大英帝国——的首都——伦敦——的东区的贫困居民，过着凄惨的生活。应该说，所有人都认为这个制度出现了问题。这就不是一种好的制度，更不是文明的体现。值得庆幸的是，随着时间的流逝，欧美发达国家都拜托了这种落后的“挖人矿”的发展模式，成为了世界上最幸福而且最富强的国家。然而，两个甲子之前的惨状，却在世界上另一个角落再次发生了。真是一种幻灭。然而：“英国资产阶级竭力向民众灌输这样一种意识:资本家的财富就是整个民族的财富,资本家的事业就是全民族的事业,垄断资本的对外扩张被当作全民族的利益,‘伦敦东区最贫困的爱国者, 只要一想起英国的工业和财富,也会不由自主地挺起胸膛’。”