Why is a two-year-old so terrible? Because she is systematically testing the fascinating and, to her, utterly novel notion that something that gives her pleasure might not actually give someone else pleasure—and the truth is that as adults we never lose that fascination.
为什么两岁的孩子那么可怕呢?因为在有条例地验证奇妙的事情,对她来说,能带给她愉悦却不能让其他人也开心这可是个全新的概念,事实上大人也没有失去这个想象力。
What is the first thing that we want to know when we meet someone who is a doctor at a social occasion? It isn’t “What do you do?”
We know, sort of, what a doctor does.
当我们想了解我们在一个社交场合上遇见的医生时,首先想到的问题是什么?不是“你是做什么的么”?我们知道医生是做什么。
Instead, we want to know what it means to be with sick people all day long. We want to know what it feels like to be a doctor, because we’re quite sure that it doesn’t feel at all like what it means to sit at a computer all day long, or teach school, or sell cars.
相反,我们想了解的是一整天都和病人在一起是意味着什么。我们想了解的是作为一名医生是什么感觉,因为我们很确定那和我们整天坐在电脑前,或者教书,销售汽车不是同样的感觉。
Such questions are not dumb or obvious. Curiosity about the interior life of other people’s day-to-day work is one of the most fundamental of human impulses, and that same impulse is what led to the writing you now hold in your hands.
这样的问题并不愚蠢或者答案很显然易见。对其他人每天工作内在生活(内情)的好奇是一个最基础的人类冲动,这种相同的冲动引导我去写作你手上这本书的动力。