Old Father Time Becomes a Terror时间老人成了可怕的老人Richard Tomkins理查德汤姆金斯1 Once upon a time, technology, we thought, would make our lives easier. Machines were expected to do our work for us, leaving us with ever-increasing quantities of time to waste away on idleness and pleasure. 从前，我们以为技术发展会使我们的生活变得更安逸。那时我们觉得机器会替代我们工作，我们则有越来越多的时间休闲娱乐。 2 But instead of liberating us, technology has enslaved us. Innovations are occurring at a bewildering rate: as many now arrive in a year as once arrived in a millennium. And as each invention arrives, it eats further into our time. 但技术发展没有把我们解放出来，而是使我们成为奴隶。新技术纷至沓来，令人目不暇接：一年涌现的技术创新相当于以前一千年。而每一项新发明问世，就进一步吞噬我们的光阴。 3 The motorcar, for example, promised unimaginable levels of personal mobility. But now, traffic in cities moves more slowly than it did in the days of the horse-drawn carriage, and we waste our lives stuck in traffic jams. 比如，汽车曾使我们希望个人出行会方便得让人难以想象。可如今，城市车辆运行得比马车时代还要慢，我们因交通堵塞而困在车内，徒然浪费生命。 4 The aircraft promised new horizons, too. The trouble is, it delivered them. Its very existence created a demand for time-consuming journeys that we would never previously have dreamed of undertaking - the transatlantic shopping expedition, for example, or the trip to a convention on the other side of the world. 飞机也曾有可能为我们拓展新天地。问题是，飞机提供了新的天地。其存在本身产生了对耗时的长途旅行的需求，这种旅行，如越洋购物，或远道前往地球的另一半参加会议，以前我们是根本无法想象的。 5 In most cases, technology has not saved time, but enabled us to do more things. In the home, washing machines promised to free women from having to toil over the laundry. In reality, they encouraged us to change our clothes daily instead of weekly, creating seven times as much washing and ironing. Similarly, the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower, multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming. 在大多数情况下，技术发展并未节省时间，而是使我们得以做更多的事。在家里，洗衣机可望使妇女摆脱繁重的洗衣劳作。但事实上，它们促使我们每天，而不是每星期换一次衣服，这就使熨洗衣物的工作量变成原来的7倍。同样地，每周一次的沐浴为每日一次的淋浴所代替，使得用于个人穿着打扮的时间大大增加。 6 Meanwhile, technology has not only allowed work to spread into our leisure time - the laptop-on-the-beach syndrome - but added the new burden of dealing with faxes, e-mails and voicemails. It has also provided us with the opportunity to spend hours fixing software glitches on our personal computers or filling our heads with useless information from the Internet. 与此同时，技术发展不仅听任工作侵入我们的闲暇时间带着便携式电脑去海滩综合症而且添加了收发传真、电子邮件和语音邮件这些新的负担。技术发展还向我们提供机会，在个人电脑上一连几小时处理软件故障，或把因特网上那些无用的信息塞进自己的大脑。 7 Technology apart, the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed: the information explosion. 除去技术发展，因特网指出了我们为何感到时间如此紧迫的第二个原因：信息爆炸。 8 A couple of centuries ago, nearly all the worlds accumulated learning could be contained in the heads of a few philosophers. Today, those heads could not hope to accommodate more than a tiny fraction of the information generated in a single day. 几个世纪以前，人类积累的几乎所有知识都能装在若干哲人的大脑之中。如今，这些大脑休想容纳下一天中产生的新信息中的小小一部分。 9 News, facts and opinions pour in from every corner of the world. The television set offers 150 channels. There are millions of Internet sites. Magazines, books and CD-ROMs proliferate. 各种消息、事实和见解从世界各个角落大量涌入。电视机能收到150个频道。因特网网址多达千百万。杂志、书籍和光盘只读存储器的数量也激增。 10 In the whole world of scholarship, there were only a handful of scientific journals in the 18th century, and the publication of a book was an event, says Edward Wilson, honorary curator in entomology at Harvard Universitys museum of comparative zoology. Now, I find myself subscribing to 60 or 70 journals or magazines just to keep me up with what amounts to a minute proportion of the expanding frontiers of scholarship. “在18世纪，整个国际学术界总共只有屈指可数的几家科学刊物，出版一本书是件了不起的大事，”哈佛大学比较动物学博物馆昆虫馆名誉馆长爱德华威尔逊说。“如今，我本人就订阅了60或70种期刊杂志，以便自己跟上不断拓展的学术前沿中一个微小部分的发展动向。” 11 There is another reason for our increased time stress levels, too: rising prosperity. As ever-larger quantities of goods and services are produced, they have to be consumed. Driven on by advertising, we do our best to oblige: we buy more, travel more and play more, but we struggle to keep up. So we suffer from what Wilson calls discontent with super abundance - the confusion of endless choice. 我们产生日益加重的时间紧迫感还有一个原因：日渐繁荣富足。由于生产的物品与提供的服务越来越多，我们必须去消费。在广告的推动下，我们努力照办：我们多多购买多多旅游多多玩儿，但得尽力坚持下去。于是我们就深受威尔逊所谓的对极大富足不满之苦即无休止的选择所造成的困惑。 12 Of course, not everyone is overstressed. Its a convenient shorthand to say were all time-starved, but we have to remember that it only applies to, say, half the population, says Michael Willmott, director of the Future Foundation, a London research company. 当然，并非人人感到时间过度紧迫。“说我们都缺少时间只是随意讲讲，我们应该记住，这种说法大约只适用于一半人，”未来基金公司一家伦敦研究公司的经理迈克尔威尔莫特说。 13 Youve got people retiring early, youve got the unemployed, youve got other people maybe only peripherally involved in the economy who dont have this situation at all. If youre unemployed, your problem is that youve got too muc