大卫 布鲁克斯 （DAVID BROOKS）
有时我觉得自己每天都在挣扎，不想成为一个肤浅的自己。浅化自己的第一个驱动力是技术，技术产品包括手机缩小了人的注意力范围，时刻都有诱人的分心。第二个驱动因素是一切事情的政治化。和很多人一样，我把太多时间花在了政治上，这包括可预见的党派纷争、竞选人分析、微信群对骂、还有特朗普说了什么等等。
所以我试图找到个对策。我发现可以逃往艺术。
我在找大家小时候都有过的经历：被一个冒险故事所包围，以至于拒绝放下它去吃晚饭；沉浸在一段音乐中，以至于感到原始的激情在体内跳动；遇到一幅美丽的画作，感觉就像走进了另一个世界。
对于这种经历，通常的描述说法是说你在一本书或一首歌中迷失了自己——迷失了空间和时间。但更准确的说法是，一件艺术品平息了通常在内心咆哮的自我意识的声音。一件艺术品是通往更深层次思想领域的门户，它打开了我们内心隐藏的、半意识的王国，在那里情绪从中涌现，道德情操可以被发现——那些即时的、类似审美的反应，那些使我们厌恶残忍行为而钦佩慷慨行为的反应。
艺术就是在那个深层次上对我们起作用，也是真正重要的层次。你给我一个在每个问题上都不同意我的人，但他有一颗善良的心——有能力同情他人，参与他们的痛苦、渴望和梦想——好吧，我愿意整天和那个人在一起。你给我一个在每个细节上都同意我的人，但他有一颗冷酷、怨恨的心——好吧，我不想和他或她有任何关系。
艺术家通常不着手改善他人；他们只是想创造一个完美的体验表达方式。但他们的艺术有可能使旁观者人性化。这是怎么做到的呢？
首先，美促使我们先远离自我中心而给他人他事某种关注。自我为中心倾向于总是将自己的观点强加于事物。而美会让你大吃一惊，促使你在既定的跑道上停下脚步，做个深呼吸，然后敞开心扉，这样你才能接受它所提供给你的东西，你这时通常会带着一种孩子般的敬畏和崇敬。它训练你以更耐心、公正和谦虚的方式看待世界。在《善的主权》一书中，小说家兼哲学家艾瑞斯·默多克写道，“美德试图刺破自私意识的面纱，让你加入真实的世界。”
其次，艺术作品拓宽了你的情感宝库。当你读一首诗或看到一件雕塑时，你并没有学到新的事实，但你有了新的体验。英国哲学家罗杰斯克鲁顿写道，“莫扎特的朱庇特交响曲好像是人类欢乐和创造力闸门，那种美对它的听众来说仿佛扑面而来；普鲁斯特的读者则被引导着穿过迷人的童年世界，从而理解这些欢乐的日子离奇地预言着他们包含着我们后来的种种悲伤。”
这些经历为我们提供了一种情感知识——如何感受和表达情感，如何同情悲伤的人，如何分享看到孩子成长的父母的满足感。
第三，艺术教会你通过另一个人的眼睛看世界，通常是一个比你看得更深的人。当然，毕加索的《格尔尼卡》是一部政治艺术作品，讲述了西班牙内战中的一场暴行，但它并没有像纪录片那样再现那场战争中的确切场景。它更深入地给我们一种纯粹的恐怖体验，更广泛的痛苦体验，以及导致它的人类嗜血的现实。
当然，《隐形人》是一部关于种族不平等的政治小说，但正如拉尔夫·埃里森后来所写的那样，他试图写的不仅仅是一部种族抗议的小说，也是一部他认为“任何有价值的小说都应该对比较人性进行的戏剧性研究”。
我把自己拖到博物馆之类的地方，担心在政治和技术时代，艺术在公共生活中变得不那么重要。在这个时代，我们似乎不像其他时代的人那样辩论小说和艺术突破，艺术和文学界本身已经被孤立的群体思维所愚弄，这助长了美国文化的非人性化。
但我们仍然可以上演我们的小叛乱，时不时戒掉我们的政治瘾，享受思想的自由发挥、非教条主义的精神以及最好的艺术还能提供的高度和提升肾上腺素的知觉状态。今年早些时候，我在惠特尼参观了几次爱德华·霍珀 (Edward Hopper) 的秀，我得以通过那个人的眼光看纽约——小街上的闲置房间，以及里面孤立的人们。我忘记了我读过的大部分内容，但那些画面在脑海中历历在目。
David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and, most recently, “The Second Mountain.” @nytdavidbrooks
I sometimes feel I’m in a daily struggle not to become a shallower version of myself. The first driver of shallowization is technology, the way it shrinks attention span, fills the day with tempting distractions. The second driver is the politicization of everything. Like a lot of people, I spend too much of my time enmeshed in politics — the predictable partisan outrages, the campaign horse race analysis, the Trump scandal du jour.
So I’m trying to take countermeasures. I flee to the arts.
I’m looking for those experiences we all had as a kid: becoming so enveloped by an adventure story that you refuse to put it down to go have dinner; getting so exuberantly swept up in some piece of music that you feel primeval passions thumping within you; encountering a painting so beautiful it feels like you’ve walked right into its alternative world.
The normal thing to say about such experiences is that you’ve lost yourself in a book or song — lost track of space and time. But it’s more accurate to say that a piece of art has quieted the self-conscious ego voice that is normally yapping away within. A piece of art has served as a portal to a deeper realm of the mind. It has opened up that hidden, semiconscious kingdom within us from which emotions emerge, where our moral sentiments are found — those instant, esthetic-like reactions that cause us to feel disgust in the presence of cruelty and admiration in the presence of generosity.
The arts work on us at that deep level, the level that really matters. You give me somebody who disagrees with me on every issue, but who has a good heart — who has the ability to sympathize with others, participate in their woes, longings and dreams — well, I want to stay with that person all day. You give me a person who agrees with me on every particular, but who has a cold, resentful heart — well, I want nothing to do with him or her.
Artists generally don’t set out to improve other people; they just want to create a perfect expression of their experience. But their art has the potential to humanize the beholder. How does it do this?
First, beauty impels us to pay a certain kind of attention. It startles you and prompts you to cast off the self-centered tendency to always be imposing your opinions on things. It prompts you to stop in your tracks, take a breath and open yourself up so that you can receive what it is offering, often with a kind of childlike awe and reverence. It trains you to see the world in a more patient, just and humble way. In “The Sovereignty of Good,” the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch writes that “virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”
Second, artworks widen your emotional repertoire. When you read a poem or see a piece of sculpture, you haven’t learned a new fact, but you’ve had a new experience. The British philosopher Roger Scruton wrote, “The listener to Mozart’s Jupiter symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”
These experiences furnish us with a kind of emotional knowledge — how to feel and how to express feelings, how to sympathize with someone who is grieving, how to share the satisfaction of a parent who has seen her child grow.
Third, art teaches you to see the world through the eyes of another, often a person who sees more deeply than you do. Sure, Picasso’s “Guernica” is a political piece of art, about an atrocity in the Spanish Civil War, but it doesn’t represent, documentarylike, an exact scene in that war. It goes deeper to give us an experience of pure horror, the universal experience of suffering, and the reality of human bloodlust that leads to it.
Of course “Invisible Man” is a political novel about racial injustice, but as Ralph Ellison later wrote, he was trying to write not just a novel of racial protest, but also a “dramatic study in comparative humanity which I felt any worthwhile novel should be.”
I haul myself off to museums and such with the fear that in a political and technological age, the arts have become less central to public life, that we don’t seem to debate novels and artistic breakthroughs the way people did in other times, that the artistic and literary worlds have themselves become stultified by insular groupthink, and this has contributed to the dehumanization of American culture.
But we can still stage our mini-rebellions, kick our political addictions from time to time, and enjoy the free play of mind, the undogmatic spirit and the heightened and adrenalized states of awareness that the best art still provides. Earlier this year I visited the Edward Hopper show at the Whitney a couple of times, and I got to see New York through that man’s eyes — the spare rooms on side streets, and the isolated people inside. I forget most of what I read, but those images stay vivid in the mind.