清晨掠影： 别样曼哈顿

kobe

I am not a morning person. It’s rare that anyone in Slate’s New York office sees my sullen (闷闷不乐的) face before 10:30 a.m. I require three cups of coffee, sipped slowly over the course of an hour or two, before I feel capable of even sending an email to or making small talk with another human being. I never, ever leave my apartment before the crack (瞬间) of 9, except on the rare, traumatizing occasion that I have an early flight to catch out of JFK.

我不是个习惯早起的人。在Slate杂志的纽约办公室里，很少有人能在上午10点30分之前看到我那张闷闷不乐的面孔。我得先花上一两个小时，慢条斯理地啜饮尽三杯咖啡，方才觉得有力气发电子邮件或是与别人闲聊。我从来没在早上9点前一秒出过门，仅有的几次痛苦的例外是为了去肯尼迪机场赶早班飞机。

According to Cameron Gidari, I’m approaching life in New York all wrong. In his new ebook, Manhattan Before 8, Gidari argues that the Big Apple is more charming between sunrise and 8 a.m. than at any other time of day or night. He also makes a hard sell (强行推销) for getting up early: “Before 8 a.m., a city of 1.6 million people crammed onto a thirty-four-square-mile island suddenly becomes your private sanctuary, open to explore and enjoy before it is descended upon by the masses,” he writes. “The feeling is positively freeing.”

按照卡梅伦•吉达里的说法，我在纽约的活法完全是错误的。吉达里在他的电子书新作《8点前的曼哈顿》中指出，从日出到早晨8点这段时间的纽约比一天之中的任何时候都更加迷人。他还卖力地向读者推销早起的好处。“在这座城市，一个面积34平方英里的小岛上就要挤进160万人；而早上8点之前，这座城市忽然变成了你的私人领地，在大量人群涌入之前可以任由你探索、游玩，”吉达里写道，“这种感觉真是自由。”

Like most morning people, Gidari immediately earned my skepticism. Reading his guidebook, I began to wonder whether I might discover a similar joie de vivre (法语，意为“生活乐趣”) if I made an effort to start my days earlier. Then I read a line in Manhattan Before 8 that piqued (激发) my interest even more: “My morning philosophies center around a common theme: crowd avoidance.” I’d always thought my distaste for getting up early was correlated with my misanthropic (不与他人交往的) tendencies—but was it possible I could avoid people more effectively if I awoke before dawn? I had to find out.

和大多数习惯早起的人一样，吉达里的话立刻引起了我的怀疑。我一边读着他写的指南，一边寻思着如果我也努力早点起床，是否也能发现同样的生活乐趣。接下来在《8点前的曼哈顿》中读到的一句话更激起了我的兴趣：“我的早起理论围绕着一个司空见惯的主题：避开人群。”我一直以为自己对早起的厌恶与我不喜欢和人打交道的脾性有关——可是如果我在黎明之前起床，有没有可能会更有效地避开人群呢？我得弄清楚这件事。



And that’s how it happened that last Friday night: I set two alarms for 4 a.m. and prepared for an early-morning adventure cycling through Manhattan. (Granted (的确), the sun wouldn’t rise till 6, but I wasn’t about to bike three miles to Manhattan without having coffee first.) My plan was to investigate four of Gidari’s recommendations—watching the sun rise from the Brooklyn Bridge, drinking coffee at Ninth Street Espresso in Alphabet City, strolling the length of the High Line, and eating breakfast at a health restaurant called Hu Kitchen near Union Square—and to find out what solitary morning pleasures I’d been missing out on in seven years of living in New York.

于是，上周五的晚上，我做了如下安排：我把两只闹钟定到了凌晨4点，并为清晨骑车穿越曼哈顿的探险做好了准备。(的确，日出时间是早上6点，不过在骑行三英里去曼哈顿之前，我得先喝杯咖啡。)我计划亲自考察一下吉达里推荐的四个活动——在布鲁克林大桥上看日出，在字母城的第九街咖啡馆喝咖啡，散步走完高线公园的全程，然后在联合广场附近一家名为胡氏厨房的健康餐厅吃早餐——并找出我在纽约居住的这七年都错过了在清晨独处的哪些乐趣。

I discovered that not only are there fewer New Yorkers out and about early in the morning, but in many cases they are also nicer New Yorkers. The occasional people I encountered fell into roughly six categories:

我发现，清晨时分不仅外出活动的纽约人比较少，而且在很多情况下，这些纽约人也更为友善。我偶遇的那些人大致可分为六类。

Police officers. The hours before and shortly after dawn are prime time for cops loitering (闲逛) on the street, shooting the breeze (闲聊) with one another and directing traffic—and they are distinctly friendlier than their 9-to-5 colleagues. As I was waiting at a red light to enter the Brooklyn Bridge bike and pedestrian path, the officer who was manning the intersection smiled at me and waved me through. The last time I’d run a red light in front of a police officer, I’d received a sarcastic dressing down (狠狠地训斥) and a $190 traffic ticket; this early-morning cop seemed to belong to a Bizarro World NYPD.

警察。 对于在街上游荡、闲聊和指挥交通的警察来说，黎明前后的时间是最佳时段——而且这些警察和他们朝九晚五的同事比起来明显要友善得多。在我等待红灯、准备进入布鲁克林大桥上的非机动车道时，一位在路口站岗的警察冲我笑了笑，挥手让我通过。我上次当着警察的面闯红灯时，不仅被冷嘲热讽地训斥了一顿，还收到了一张190美元的交通罚单；这位在清晨上班的警察好像来自一个颠倒世界的纽约市警察局。



Joggers. “Morning runners in New York City have an unrivaled (无敌的) intimacy with the place they call home,” writes Gidari, and it’s an intimacy they don’t like to have interrupted by strangers. One of the first people I saw on the Brooklyn Bridge was a cute jogger making his way toward Manhattan. I took off my helmet, smoothed my hair, and put the helmet in the basket on the handlebars of my bike. My bike promptly fell over. As I scrambled to pick it up again, the jogger continued on his way without even looking at me. The joggers I saw later on the High Line maintained a similar willful ignorance of everyone around them. Unlike police officers, joggers seem just the same early in the morning as they are every other time of day.

慢跑者。吉达里写道：“纽约的晨跑者与这个他们称为家的地方之间有着无可比拟的亲密关系。”而且他们不喜欢陌生人来打扰这份亲密。我在布鲁克林大桥上最先看到的人中就有一个帅气的慢跑者，他正在向曼哈顿方向跑去。我摘下头盔，理了理头发，把头盔放在车把前面的车筐里，自行车却一下翻倒了。我手忙脚乱地把车扶起来，那位慢跑者却连看都没看我一眼，继续向前跑。后来我在高线公园遇到的慢跑者也是同样一副刻意对周围人视而不见的模样。与警察不同，慢跑者在清晨和一天之中的其他任何时候似乎都是一样的。

Teenagers. As I was watching the sunrise from the Brooklyn Bridge a group of six or seven fresh-faced young things approached me and asked me to take their picture. They told me they’d stayed up all night and looked at me funny when I told them I’d woken up for the express purpose of watching the sun rise. Closer to the Manhattan side of the bridge, a separate group of coltish (嬉戏的) teens lay on the planks of the bridge, giggling and making fun of passers-by. If you want to feel very, very old, the Brooklyn Bridge at dawn on a Saturday is the place to be.

青少年。我正在布鲁克林大桥上看日出时，六七个满脸朝气的年轻人走近我，请我为他们拍照。他们说自己一宿没睡，而当我告诉他们我是为了看日出才特意早起的时候，他们用古怪的眼神看着我。在靠近曼哈顿那一端的桥上，另外一群精力充沛的青少年正躺在桥面上。他们一边咯咯地笑着，一边取笑过往的行人。如果你想要体会老迈不堪的感觉，周六拂晓时分的布鲁克林大桥就是个好地方。

Garbage collectors. The streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan were delightfully empty before 8 a.m., except for the occasional garbage truck. I believe I passed four or five garbage trucks on my way from my apartment in Brooklyn to Ninth Street Espresso. Though the trucks’ ubiquity was offensive olfactorily (在嗅觉上), it was quite pleasant socially: On my way up Allen Street, a man driving a garbage truck interrupted the song he was singing to say good morning to me, marking the first time I’ve ever witnessed a motorist say something nice to a cyclist in New York City.

环卫工人。早上8点之前，布鲁克林和曼哈顿的大街上空旷得令人愉悦，只有垃圾车偶尔驶过。从我位于布鲁克林的公寓到第九街咖啡馆的这一路上，我想我遇到了四五辆垃圾车。尽管这些无处不在的垃圾车在嗅觉上令人不快，但在交际方面却相当讨人喜欢：当我沿着艾伦街向北骑行时，一位垃圾车司机中断了口中的歌声，向我道早安。这是我在纽约第一次听到一位驾车人向一位骑车人说出善意的话语。



Babies. Ninth Street Espresso officially opens at 7, but there were already a couple of patrons inside when I arrived at 6:43. A man holding a towheaded(浅黄色头发的) baby in a striped blue onesie (连体服) walked in and placed an order shortly after I sat down with my coffee. When I arrived at the High Line 45 minutes later, I immediately crossed paths with another man holding a onesie-clad baby against his chest, and I soon passed a woman supervising a trio of achingly adorable tots (小孩). Gidari did not warn me that Manhattan Before8 was for Manhattanites Before 8 Months, but I wasn’t displeased with the discovery: The preverbal set was well-behaved and sparsely distributed enough that I could have made an easy escape if one of them had begun wailing.

婴儿。第九街咖啡馆早上7点才正式开始营业，但当我6点43分到达那里时，店里已经有几位顾客了。就在我拿着咖啡坐下后不久，一个怀抱婴儿的男人也走进来买咖啡，他怀中的婴儿一头黄发，穿着蓝色条纹连体服。45分钟后，当我来到高线公园时，我立刻就遇到了另外一个胸前抱着身穿连体服婴儿的男人。没过一会儿，我又看见一个女人带着三个可爱至极的小孩儿。吉达里并没有提醒我，《8点前的曼哈顿》属于不满8个月大的曼哈顿居民。不过这一发现并未令我不快：这些还不会说话的小家伙都挺乖，位置也离得够远，万一其中的某一个开始放声大哭，我也能很快脱身。

Dogs. By the time I departed the High Line, I was about ready to begin wailing. The sun hurt my eyes. It was getting hot and sticky. I felt tired, lightheaded, and slightly nauseated (使恶心). I tapped some notes from the morning into my iPhone; they quickly took a turn for the melodramatic (夸张的). (“The magic is broken. I want to go home. I wonder why I’m doing this—any of this.”) The only bright spot was a very cute, chubby, elderly German shepherd lazing on the sidewalk nearby as his owner carried on a conversation. I looked up and saw many other dogs, large and small, trotting up and down Fifth Avenue on leashes.

狗。在我离开高线公园时，我简直快要哭出来了。阳光刺痛了我的双眼，天气也开始闷热起来。我感觉疲惫、头晕，还有点恶心。我把早上的一些感受敲入iPhone，很快这些感受就变得演戏般夸张了。(“魔法消失了。我想回家。不明白我为什么要这么做——做这一切。”)唯一令人愉快的是我看到一条上了年纪、胖乎乎非常可爱的德国牧羊犬正懒洋洋地趴在附近的人行道上，它的主人正在和别人谈话。我抬头看去，又看到许多大小不一的狗狗，正被主人牵着在第五大道上小跑。

In Manhattan Before8, Gidari mentions canine (犬的) companions only in passing (顺便), but it’s in a section of the book that I found apt. “Early-morning Manhattan belongs solely to the joggers, the dog walkers, and the people looking for a little peace and quiet in a city of perpetual noise,” he writes. On my early-morning adventure, I found more peace and quiet than I’ve ever witnessed before on the streets of New York. But it didn’t come close to the peace and quiet I know I’ll always be able to find in my bed.

在《8点前的曼哈顿》中，吉达里对狗狗同伴们只是顺便提及，不过我觉得那一部分写得很贴切。他写道：“清晨的曼哈顿只属于慢跑者、遛狗的人，以及那些试图在一个永远喧闹的城市中寻求些许平静、安宁的人。”在这次清晨的游历中，我感受到了此前在纽约街头从未感受过的平静和安宁。可是，比起我知道我在床上永远能够感受到的平静和安宁来说，它还是差远了。