It sounds like a very mean and undemocratic thought, trading off the peculiar glamour that isolation has in a Romantic culture – in order to gain an oblique sense of superiority and perhaps pass off an absence of social skills as a virtue.
It is important, therefore, to be clear what is meant here by intelligence.
因此必须搞明白什么是“聪明”？
It has nothing to do with degrees or any of the criteria by which we ordinarily measure cleverness.
聪明与日常衡量它的任何标准(如学位)无关。
What is meant is emotional intelligence, which exists or not in every strata and nook of society.
这里所说的是指情商，它在社会上到处都是而又觅而不得。
Emotional intelligence means a capacity for self-honesty and self-observation; it means, a knack for opening oneself up to the stranger, more exciting, less easily admissible aspects of oneself and at the same time for noticing the many beautiful, peculiar and profound experiences and sensations passing through consciousness.
We cleave tightly to reassuring notions of what normal people are like, which means we exclude a lot – often the richest bit – of what we truly feel, want and think.
We edit out our more generous, wilder, more impatient, more terrifying sides; leaving only the socially admissible husk that we artfully pretend is who we are.
And simultaneously, we ensure that we are never far from something that can take us powerfully away from ourselves, and so miss out on the troubling wonders that streak across the mental horizon at every instant.
Most of what is in our minds remains unfelt and unseen, troubling us only in the small hours.
在我们脑海中，大部分东西仍是不可视和不可感的，往往只在凌晨夜不能寐时带来困扰。
Insomnia is the revenge for all that we tried so hard not to notice in the daylight.
晚上失眠是对我们白天所规避的万事万物的报复。
In this context, emotional intelligence emerges as a species of courage, directed at vanquishing not an external enemy but a fear of being weird or of going mad.
在这种情况下，派情商上场是一种勇气，此举不为征服敌人，而为征服那些使人成为异类或疯子的恐惧。
A certain sort of intelligent person is, above all else, a superior and more committed reporter of their inner states.
与上述不同，真正聪明的人，应该善于并坚定地表达自己的内心。
Or, as Emerson once put it, ’In the minds of geniuses, we find – once more – our own neglected thoughts.’
或者，正如爱默生曾说的那样，“在天才的脑海里，我们能重拾自己曾遗失的思想。”
It is almost certain that people who have devoted themselves to self-honesty and self-observation have an above average chance of meeting with incomprehension, irritation, censorship or boredom when they attempt to share the data from their own minds frankly in company.
Their thoughts (it might be on politics or architecture, family life or sexuality) will sound more threatening, more intense, oblique or tender than is allowed.
That feels lonely, if one is in the mood to frame things like this.
如果一个人在心里这样思考事物，那注定会感到孤独。
There are simply fewer people at large committed to self-honesty and self-observation – and therefore up for exchanging notes on what it’s truly like to be alive.
一般而言，鲜有人能致力于自我坦诚和自我观察，因此乐意交流生活中的真实感受的人自然也就少之又少。
Yet there is one resource that is exceptionally well suited to addressing the feelings of disconnection liable to be felt by the emotionally intelligent: art.
然而，有一种资源非常适合解决感情上的脱节感，这是情商所能感受到的：艺术。
Works of art are humanity’s secret diary: records of all that could not be said in regular social contexts, but which have found a home in the more intimate, honest communication that can take place between an art-work and its audience.
The libraries, cinemas and galleries of the world are repositories for all the sensations that didn’t easily make it into standard interactions and that contain what we need to state, and crave to hear as audiences, in our lonely states.
Therefore, while emotionally intelligent people may have an uncommonly hard time not being lonely with a person, they have an unusually easy time finding company with people who are not in the room, the fancy term for what we call art.
We have perhaps over-privileged certain standard notions of friendship.
人们对友谊也许有超高水准的要求
We may just have to accept that our best friends could have died 250 years ago – and be chatting to us via dabs of paint or within rhyming pentameters.
That said, the goal shouldn’t be a society where art is ever more prevalent and more available when loneliness strikes.
即是说，因为这孤独的潮流而使艺术变得更常见也更可触的社会，不该是我们的目标。
It is perhaps a society where art is ever less necessary – because we have grown better at knowing how to share more of who we are in the ordinary moments of our lives; where we have found a more direct and reliable path out from our loneliness.
