中央咖啡馆理论 | Theory of the Café Central

The Café Central is indeed a coffeehouse unlike any other coffeehouse. It is instead a worldview and one, to be sure, whose innermost essence is not to observe the world at all. Then what do you see? About that, later. So much is experientially certain, that there is nobody in the Café Central who isn't a piece of the Central: that is to say, on whose ego-spectrum the Central color, a mixture of ash-gray and ultra-seasick-green, doesn't appear. Whether the place adapted to the individual, or the individual to the place, is a moot point. I would imagine a reciprocal action. 'Thou art not in the place, the place is in thee," says the Angelic Pilgrim.

中央咖啡馆的确不同于其他咖啡馆。它其实是一种世界观，而且可以肯定的是，其最内在的本质根本不是观察世界。那么你看到了什么？关于这一点，之后会说。在经验上可以肯定的是，在中央咖啡馆里，没有人不是中央的一部分：也就是说，在他的ego光谱上，中央的颜色，一种ash-gray和ultra-seasick-green混合，没有出现。是地方适应个人，还是个人适应地方，这是一个没有意义的问题。我想象的是一种对等的动作，正如Angelic Pilgrim说：“Thou art not in the place, the place is in thee”。

If all the anecdotes related about this coffeehouse were ground up, put in a distillation chamber and gassified, a heavy, iridescent gas, faintly smelling of ammonia, would develop: the so-called air of the Cafe' Central. This defines the spiritual climate of this space, a quite special climate in which unfitness for life, and only this one, thrives in full maintenance of its unfitness. Here weakness develops those powers unique to itself, the fruits of unfruitiulness ripen, and every non-ownership bears interest. Only a real Central-ist will grasp it entirely, one who, when his coffeehouse is shut, has the feeling that he's been thrown out into raw life, abandoned to the unpredictable circumstances, anomalies, and cruelties of the un­known.

如果把所有与这家咖啡馆有关的轶事磨碎，放入蒸馏室并进行气化，就会产生一种沉重的、彩虹色的气体，隐约有氨气的味道：这就是所谓的中央咖啡馆的空气。这定义了这个空间的精神气候，这是一种相当特殊的气候，这气候让不适应生活的人——也只有这种人——在充分保持对生活的不适应的情况下茁壮成长。在这里，弱点发展了它自己独到力量，不结果实的果实成熟了，每一个无所有权者都产生利息。只有真正的中央者才能完全掌握它，这些人在咖啡馆关闭时会有一种感觉，一种被扔到了原始的生活中，被抛弃在不可预测的环境、反常和未知的残酷中的感觉。

The Café Central lies on the Viennese latitude at the meridian of loneliness. Its inhabitants are, for the most part, people whose hatred of their fellow human beings is as fierce as their longing for people, who want to be alone but need companionship for it. Their inner world requires a layer of the outer world as delimiting material; their quivering solo voices cannot do without the support of the chorus. They are unclear natures, rather lost without the certainties which the feeling gives that they are a little part of a whole (to whose tone and color they contribute).

中央咖啡馆位于维也纳的纬度上，处于孤独的经线上。它的栖居者大多是这样的人：对他人的憎恨和对人的渴望一样强烈，想独处，但又需要有伴来独处。他们的内心世界需要一层外部世界作为定界质料；他们颤抖的独唱声离不开合唱声的支持。他们的天性不明确，如果没有那种他们是一个整体的一小部分的确实感（他们贡献着这个整体的音调和色彩），他们就会相当迷失。

The Central-ist is a person to whom family, profession, and political party do not give this feeling. Helpfully, the coffeehouse steps in as an ersatz totality, inviting immersion and dissolution. It is thus understandable that above all women, who can really never be alone and need at least one other person along with them, have a weakness for the Cafe Central. It is a place for people who know how to abandon and be abandoned for the sake of their fate, but who do not have the nerve to live up to this fate. It is a true asylum for people who have to kill time so as not to be killed by it. It is the beloved hearth of those to whom the beloved hearth is an abomina­tion, the refuge of married couples and lovers from the fear of undisturbed togetherness, a first-aid station for the confused who, all their lives in search of themselves and all their lives in flight from themselves, conceal their fleeing ego behind a newspaper, dreary conversations, and card playing, and press the pursuer-ego into the role of kibitzer who has to keep his mouth shut.

作为中央者，家庭、职业和政党都没有给他这种感觉。幸运的是，咖啡馆作为赝品整体而介入，邀请着沉浸与消解。这就解释了为什么，尤其是女性，会喜欢上中央咖啡馆，因为她们真的永远不会独处，至少需要和另一个人相处。这是一个为那些知道如何为了自己的命运而放弃和被放弃，但又没有勇气去面对这种命运的人准备的地方。它是为那些必须消磨时间以免被时间杀死的人而设的真正的庇护所。它是那些对这样一个心爱炉灶感到憎恶的人的心爱炉灶；是已婚夫妇和恋人的避难所，使他们免于对未经扰动的团聚的恐惧；是那些困惑的人的急救站，他们一生都在寻找自己，一生都在逃离自己，把逃离的ego隐藏在报纸、沉闷的谈话和牌局后，而把作为寻求者的ego压制成必须闭嘴的多嘴观众。

The Café Central thus represents something of an organization of the disorganized.

因此，中央咖啡馆代表了某种缺乏组织的组织。

In this hallowed space, each halfway indeterminate individual is credited with a personality. So long as he remains within the boundaries of the coffeehouse, he can cover all his moral expenses with this credit. And any one of them who shows disdain for others' money is granted the anti-bourgeois crown.

在这个神圣的空间里，每一个半数不确定的个人都被赋予一个人格。只要他还在咖啡馆的范围内，他就可以用这个人格支付他所有的道德费用。而他们其中如果任何一个对别人的人格表现出蔑视，就会被授予反布尔乔亚的皇冠。

The Central-ist lives parasitically on the anecdote that circulates about him. That is the main thing, the essential thing. Everything else, the facts of his existence, is in small print, addenda and embellishments that can also be omitted.

中央者寄生在流传的关于他的轶事上。这才是主要的东西，基本的东西。其他的东西，他存在的事实，都是小号字的印刷体，附录，是可以被省略的点缀。

The guests of the Cafe Central know, love, and disdain one another. Even those who are bound by no association regard this nonassociation as association. Mutual aversion itself has the power of association in the Cafe Central; it honors and practices a Freemason-like solidarity. Every-body knows about everybody else. The Cafe is a provincial nest in the womb of the metropolis, steaming of gossip, envy, and backbiting. I think the fish in the aquarium must live like the habitues of this coffeehouse, always in the narrowest circles around one another, always busy without purpose, using the slanting refraction of light of their environment for diverse amusement, always full of expectation, but also full of anxiety lest sometime something new, playing "Sea" with a stern look, fall into the glass tank, onto their artificial miniature sea-bottom. And if, God forbid, the aquarium should turn into a banking house, they would be utterly lost.

中央咖啡馆的客人们相互认识，相互爱戴，也相互蔑视。即使是那些不受协会约束的人，也把这种非协会视为协会。在中央咖啡馆里，相互厌恶本身就具有关联的力量；它尊崇并实践着共济会式的团结一致。每个个体都知道其他每个人的情况。咖啡馆是大都市子宫里的一个省际巢穴，充满了绯闻、妒忌和诽谤。我想，水族馆里的鱼儿一定像咖啡馆里的栖息者一样，总是在最狭窄的圈子里互相围着，总是毫无目的地忙碌着，利用他们环境中光的折射进行各种娱乐，总是充满期待，但也充满焦虑，生怕有什么新东西，playing "Sea" with a stern look，落入玻璃缸，落入他们的人造迷你海床。如果，事与愿违，水族馆变成了银行，他们就会完全迷失。

Naturally, the Central-fish, which share the same few cubic meters of breathing space for so many hours of their lives, no longer have any timidity or reticence. The proper Central-ist leads the private life of others and doesn't play the fence with his own. Supported by the customary inclination of the place to self-mockery and to calm surrender of one's weaknesses, this creates a sphere of suspended sociability in which any kind of prudery withers and dies off. There are Central guests who go about psychically naked, without having to fear that their childlike-innocent nakedness be misinterpreted as shamelessness. Several years ago, the owner of the Café Central tried to accommodate this paradisiacal strain in the character of his regular guests by putting in a palm tree. But the young lady from the Orient did not endure the climate of the locale, despite its rather eastern character. She was hacked into small pieces, and her divided substance found use in the kitchen—either as fuel or as coffee beans—the researchers are not of one mind on the matter.

自然，这些中央鱼，在同一个几立方米的呼吸空间中共享生命种如此多的时间后，不再有任何胆怯和隐忍。得当的中央者介入着别人的私生活，而且不给自己的私生活设置栅栏。在这里，人们习惯于自嘲和平静地交出自己的弱点，这创造了一个悬置的社交性，任何形式的道貌岸然都在其中枯萎和消亡。有一些中央客在精神上赤身裸体，而不必担心他们的童真般的赤裸被误解为无耻。几年前，中央咖啡馆的老板试图通过种植一棵棕榈树来适应他的常客们的这种天堂般的秉性。但这位来自东方的年轻女士并没能忍受当地的气候，尽管它具有相当的东方特色。她被砍成了小块，她被分割的物质在厨房里找到了用武之地——要么作为燃料，要么作为咖啡豆——研究人员在这个问题上意见不一。

The only person who partakes of the most essential charm of this splendid coffeehouse is he who wants nothing there but to be there. Purposelessness sanctifies the stay. Perhaps the guest doesn't really like the place or the people who noisily populate it, but his nervous system imperiously demands the daily dose of Centralin. This can hardly be explained by habit alone. Nor by the fact that the Central-people are always attracted, like the murderer to the scene of the crime, to where they already killed so much time, wiped out entire years. Then what is the explanation? The atmosphere! I can only say: the atmosphere! There are writers, for example, who are unable to carry out their literary chores anywhere but at the Cafe Central. Only there, only at the tables of idleness, is the worktable laid for them, only there, enveloped by the air of indolence, will their inertia become fecundity. There are creative types to whom only in the Central does nothing come to mind, indeed elsewhere far less. There are poets and other industrialists to whom profitable thoughts come only in the Café Central; constipated people to whom only there does the door of relief open; those who long ago lost their appetite for the erotic who only there experience hunger; the silent who only in the Central find their own or somebody else's tongue; and the greedy whose money gland secretes only there.

唯一能享有这个辉煌咖啡馆的最本质魅力的人，是那些只要置身于内，除此之外什么都不想要的人。这种无目的性使他们的逗留变得神圣。也许客人并不真正喜欢这个地方，也不喜欢在这里吵吵闹闹的人，但他的神经系统却迫切地要求每天都要喝上一杯中央素。这很难只用习性解释，也不能用事实——中央的人总会被吸引，就像凶手被吸引到犯罪现场一样，毕竟他们在这里已经消磨了那么多的时间，消灭了整整几年——来解释。那么该如何解释呢？气氛! 我只能说：是气氛! 例如，有些作家除了在中央咖啡馆外，在任何地方都无法进行他们的文学创作工作。只有这里，只有这里的闲置的桌子，才是他们的工作桌；只有这里，这里的懒散空气笼罩下，他们的惰性才会变成高产。有一些有创造力的类型，只有在中央才会想到什么都想不到，其他地方只会更少。有一些诗人和其他实业家，只有在中央咖啡馆才会有赚钱的想法；有一些便秘的人，只有在这里解脱之幽门才会打开；有一些早已失去情欲的人，只有在这里才会体验到饥饿；有一些沉默的人，只有在中央才会找到自己或别人的舌头；还有一些贪婪的人，只有在这里金钱腺体才会开始分泌。

This enigmatic coffeehouse soothes in the peaceless people who visit it something that I like to call cosmic uneasiness. In this place of loose relationships, the relationship to Cod and the stars also loosens. The creature escapes from its compulsory relations to the universe into an irresponsible, sensuous, chance relationship to nothingness. The intimidations of eternity do not penetrate the walls of the Café Central, and between them you enjoy the sweet unconcern of the moment.

这家神秘咖啡馆给它的不得安宁访问者舒缓了一些不安，我喜欢称之为宇宙的不安。在这个关系松散的地方，与上帝和星星的关系也松散了。生物从宇宙的强制性关系中逃脱出来，进入一种不负责任的、感性的、与虚无的偶然关系。永恒的威慑并没有穿透中央咖啡馆的墙壁，在它们之间，你享受着当下甜蜜的漠不关心。

On the love life of the Café Central, on the balance of social distinctions in it, on the literary and political currents by which its frayed shores are washed, on those buried alive in the Central-cavern longingly awaiting their excavation yet hoping that it will not occur, on the masked play of wit and foolishness that in those rooms turns every night into Mardi Gras, on these and other things there is still much to say. But whoever is interested in the Café Central knows all this anyway, and whoever isn't interested in the Café Central we have no interest in.

关于中央咖啡馆的爱情生活，关于其中的社会区隔的平衡，关于冲刷其破碎海岸的文学和政治潮流，关于那些被活埋在中央酒窖里渴望被挖掘却又希望它不会发生的人，关于在那些房间里每天晚上变成马蒂·格拉斯的机智和愚蠢的面具游戏，关于这些和那些的事情，仍然有很多话要说。但无论如何，对中央咖啡馆感兴趣的人都知道这一切，而对中央咖啡馆不感兴趣的人，我们没有兴趣。

It is a coffeehouse, take it as it is! Never will you ever come upon such a place again. What Knut Hamsun says about the city of Christiania in the first sentence of his immortal Hunger applies to it as well: "No one leaves her whom she did not mark."

这是个咖啡馆，就当它是吧！你永远不会再遇到这样的地方了。Knut Hamsun在其不朽的《饥饿》一书的第一句话中对the city of Christiania的评价也适用于它：“所有离开她的人她都标记过”。