提，因谈话的进行，同时会联想起许多当时的事情，许多当时的人的
面影，这时好象自己仍回归到少年时代去了(11)。我常在这种时候感到一种快乐，同
时也感到一种伤感，那情形好比老妇人突然在抽屉里或箱子里发见了她盛年时的影
片。
逢到和旧友谈话，就不知不觉地把话题转到旧事上去，这是我的习惯。我在这
上面无意识地会感到一种温暖地慰藉。可是这些旧友一年比一年减少了，本来只是屈
指可数的几个，少去一个是无法弥补的。我每当听到一个旧友死去的消息，总要惆怅
多时。
学校教育给我们的好处不但只是灌输知识，最大的好处恐怕还在给与我们求友
的机会上。这好处我到了离学校以后才知道，这几年来更确切地体会到，深悔当时毫
不自觉，马马虎虎地过去了。近来每日早晚在路上见到两两三三的携了手或挽了肩膀
走着的青年学生，我总艳羡他们有朋友之乐，暗暗地要在心中替他们祝福。
Mid-life Loneliness
Xia Mianzun
I am already a middle-aged man. At middle age, I feel sad to find my eyesight and
memory failing, my hair thinning and graying, and myself no longer mentally and
physically as fit as when I was young. I often suffer from a nameless loneliness. The most
intolerable of all is the lack of friendly warmth and comfort due to the gradual passing
away and estrangement of more and more old pals.
Needless to say, the number of acquaintances increases with one’s age. The older one
gets, the more widely traveled one is and the more work experience one has, the more
acquaintances one is supposed to have. But not all acquaintances are friends. We come to
know many people either in the way of business or by mere chance –say, having been at
the same table at a dinner party. We may be on nodding or hand-shaking terms, call each
other “friend”, sometimes write to each other with the salutation of “Dear So-and-So”, etc.,
etc. All these are, in fact, nothing but civilities of social life, as hypocritical as the polite
formula dunshou (kowtow) or baibai (a hundred greetings) used after the signature in
old-fashioned Chinese letter-writing. We may call them social intercourse, but they seem
to have very little in common with genuine friendship.
Real friendship between two persons originates perhaps from the time of life when
they were children playing innocently together. Real friendship is easily formed in primary
or middle school days when, being socially inexperienced and free from the burden of life,
you give little thought to personal gains or losses, and make friends entirely as a result of
similar tastes and interests or congenial disposition. It is sort of “friendship for friendship’s
sake” and is relatively pure in nature. Friendship among people in their 20's, however, is
more or less coloured by personal motives. And friendship among those aged over 30
becomes correspondingly still less pure as it gets even more coloured. Though this is not
necessarily due to "degeneration of public morality", I do have good reasons to call it the
tragedy of life. People at middle age, with the heavy burden of life and much experience in
the ways of the world, have more scruples about this and that, and can not choose but 本 作 品 由 網 友 整 理 上 傳
become more calculating in social dealings till they start scheming against each
other. They always keep a wary eye, as it were, on each other in their association. Such
association is of course fragile, especially in this modern age of prevailing sharp conflicts.
Of all my friends, those I have known since child-hood are most worthy of
remembrance. They are few in number. Some of them live far away and we seldom have
an opportunity to see each other. Some of them are older than I am, and some a few years
younger. But all of us are in late mid-life. Since we have each followed a different course
in life, our ways of thinking, interests and circumstances are bound to differ, and often we
lack mutual understanding somehow or other in our conversation. Nevertheless, when we
talk over old times, we will always agree on things in the past--mostly about things in our
childhood days. While we retell the dream-like childhood days in the course of our
conversation, numerous scenes and persons of bygone days will unfold again before our
eyes, and we will feel like reliving the old days. Often at this moment, I'll feel at once
happy and sad--like an old lady suddenly fishing out from her drawer or chest a photo of
her taken in the bloom of her youth.
W