主题：关于葡萄最近一系列文章的读书笔记及对葡萄发帖的总结归类 -- 月下

Introduction--It's 3 a.m. Twenty-Four Hours a Day

3 a.m. An impossible time to read a newspaper. A book - perhaps. The television. Or you listen to music, or drink in silence, or listen to the breath of the sleeper beside you - a sound that sometimes comforts, but just as often, if you're willing to admit it, fills you with a nameless unease; you know that person both well and not at all, and there are times when you can't tell which is which. Or there's no one else there, and there isn't going to be. Either way, the night can feel like one huge parking garage in which you can't remember where you left your car.

Sometimes you don't know if your wakefulness is or isn't a fear of dreams, and you wouldn't be sure of what to do if you knew. But what you are doing - standing in the dark, full of conflicting emotions - isn't that what the whole world's doing now? A world tossing and turning, restless with fresh and disturbing impulses, trying to redo itself, rethink itself, realign itself, and trying to live up to its troubled and inarticulate sense of new realities.

That's what everybody's complaining about, not that the world's asleep but that it can't sleep any longer. It's been awakening for about a hundred years now. And people are arguing about exactly what time it is on the historical clock. The anti-nuclear activist Dr. Helen Caldicott, is right about nuclear weapons but wrong about the historical time of day. She says it's ten minutes to midnight. But it was ten minutes to midnight about a hundred years ago, before the discovery of radium and the publication of The Interpretation of Dreams; before Einstein's theories and before motion pictures, and lightbulbs and airplanes and cars; before the first cornet solos of Buddy Bolden and before Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon. By now the world's clock is at about 3 a.m. of the new day, the new civilization. For the new day doesn't start at dawn, the new day starts at midnight.

The new day starts in darkness.

Right now it's 3 a.m. in whatever we will call that period of human history that comes after A.D.

When your clock reads 3 a.m. it's a time of separateness, of loneliness, of restlessness. Nothing on television, nothing in the newspaper, nothing much anywhere suggests that our restlessness, felt so privately, is part of something huge, something alive all over the world: a many-headed restlessness that is the shaky underpinning of nothing less than a worldwide transformation. We all know that technology is marrying all the races and places of our world into a pulsating, panicky whole that is far from knowing what to do with its (with our) imposed unity; and we sense that no culture on earth utilizes more than a small portion of the human brain, the human capacity (perhaps it's this unused part of ourselves that's making us so restless). But the new can't grow in what's already used up. It has to grow in what longs in us, in our loneliness and our restlessness. We make a mistake when we sidestep and placate these feelings, for only in the raw and unformed parts of ourselves - only in this bewildered area within - is there space for the new to take root.

This may not be what you want to hear in your particular share of 3 a.m. So you pour a drink, maybe, and flick on the TV with your remote. Twenty-four-hour news, twenty-four-hour rock videos, twenty-four-hour movies. Here in L.A. you can get the 6 a.m. children's shows in Chicago (the Three Stooges doing in fun what you often wish to do in anger) or the early morning religious programming in Atlanta. You flick through about forty brief bursts of images, flick through them again, and flick them off. The silence is worse now. And if you go to sleep your psyche will provide its own swirl of images. And if you walk out the door - but perhaps you're nervous about taking a walk at 3 a.m., even though your neighborhood is certainly not the worst. And the world is in exactly the same state you are, though it tries to dignify its panic with the word "history."

Who can say where the history of the world and the history of an individual separate? No matter how personal our individual sense of urgency is, that urgency is amplified in a feedback effect by a world that is able neither to meet us nor to leave us alone. No one can make a separate peace. That much is clear. For there's nowhere to hide anymore. The wilderness is washed with acid rain, and human viciousness can strike in the deserts as well as in the cities. There is no land anywhere - no city, no household - that is not touched by the common tumult. One of our most pressing personal problems now is how to meet the astounding, intrusive, and dangerous realities presented by an electronically instant, planet-spanning environment. How do we turn the noise of information into the coherence of vision?

Plainly nobody is going to do it for us. Whether a resonant, resonating world culture evolves out of all this cacophony is strictly up to us - all fo us and some of us and each of us, at one and the same time. By a culture I mean a living web of thought that contains, rather than is contained by, the particulars of the environment. For right now we are surrounded, and intruded upon, by our technological environment, and culture as we've known it has been shattered. Its pieces are still alive but there is no longer a sense of a whole. We long for, we search for, we are trying to create, a new culture that can make sense of, and give human proportion to, the technologies through which humankind is now evolving.

That's an easy thing to say and a difficult thing to live. Yet one doesn't decide to live out these concerns. We live, and these dilemmas come at us from the depths. There is no such thing anymore as minding your own business. And that fact is part of the nature of the problem, of the environment, and of the changes it has wrought in us.

In such a world, 3 a.m. can suddenly strike in the middle of the afternoon.

This book has been written in the hope that it might contain a few pages that could satisfy at 3 a.m. Most books today simplify a theory into an artifact and attempt to market that artifact for mass consumption. Here, there is no overall, cover-all thoery applied from cover to cover. That kind of forced unity seems false to me. It is not the world we live in and I doubt that it resembles the world we're approaching. How could there be a single subject or theory for a book meant to be received by our 3 a.m. restlessness, whether that restlessness strikes early in the morning or in the brightness of afternoon? For at 3 a.m. you're apt to think of anything, and anything you think of is apt to take on numinous properties. It may be your marriage or world politics; it may be a rock'n'roll song or the homework assignment your kid showed you last night; it may be thoughts of sex or images from a movie you saw weeks or years ago; it may be memories of the sixties or fantasies of the future. All of that will be in here, as one's consciousness shifts backward and forward through a world that, in turn, shifts around and within us as we pry through ourselves.

But the book has a pattern, as all books must. That pattern is simply to begin with thoughts of the intimate life (marriage, sex); to the social life (rock'n'roll, mass movements); to media, then to history, then a vision of the present, then a vision of the future. The book makes a spiraling, circular movement, then, from the intimate outward.

That is all the unity that seemed realistic or possible to me in a world where we are so scattered and desperate.

I think of the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and how when the townspeople fell asleep their bodies were duplicated by alien "pods" from outer space. Only if the hero and heroine could keep awake could they resist being taken over by the body snatchers. In just that way, our consciousness is in danger of being overpowered by the surrounding cacophony. We have got to keep awake till the dawn of the new culture that must be taking shape out of all this chaos. Or is that a rash hope? Since only the future can answer us, we must keep faith with that future.

But faith is too abstract a concept for most of us now. I like to think of it as dancing. For this is a time of tremendous movement, and dancing is the embracing of movement. Within a dance there are many changes and there is the necessity to remain centered within those changes. We dance among shadows and we cast shadows as we dance. And something moves within our movement: the unity of the dancer with what is danced. Such is the dance of the self with the outside world, and the dance of the self with our inner worlds. The thought dance, the love dance, the work dance - the grace we strive for, and the sense of movement that is sometimes all that keeps us alive.

Survival is a frightened word. Think of it as dancing. The new day starts at midnight. We have to dance till dawn.