Old Father Time Becomes a Terror時間老人成了可怕的老人Richard Tomkins理查德·湯姆金斯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. 從前，我們以為技術(shù)發(fā)展會使我們的生活變得更安逸那時我們覺得機器會替代我們工作，我們則有越來越多的時間休閑娛樂 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. 但技術(shù)發(fā)展沒有把我們解放出來，而是使我們成為奴隸。

新技術(shù)紛至沓來，令人目不暇接：一年涌現(xiàn)的技術(shù)創(chuàng)新相當(dāng)于以前一千年而每一項新發(fā)明問世，就進一步吞噬我們的光陰 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，汽車曾使我們希望個人出行會方便得讓人難以想象可如今，城市車輛運行得比馬車時代還要慢，我們因交通堵塞而困在車內(nèi)，徒然浪費生命 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. 飛機也曾有可能為我們拓展新天地。

問題是，飛機提供了新的天地其存在本身產(chǎn)生了對耗時的長途旅行的需求，這種旅行，如越洋購物，或遠道前往地球的另一半?yún)⒓訒h，以前我們是根本無法想象的 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 Similarly, the weekly bath has been replaced by the daily shower, multiplying the hours spent on personal grooming. 在大多數(shù)情況下，技術(shù)發(fā)展并未節(jié)省時間，而是使我們得以做更多的事。

在家里，洗衣機可望使婦女?dāng)[脫繁重的洗衣勞作但事實上，它們促使我們每天，而不是每星期換一次衣服，這就使熨洗衣物的工作量變成原來的7倍同樣地，每周一次的沐浴為每日一次的淋浴所代替，使得用于個人穿著打扮的時間大大增加 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. 與此同時，技術(shù)發(fā)展不僅聽任工作侵入我們的閑暇時間――帶著便攜式電腦去海灘綜合癥――而且添加了收發(fā)傳真、電子郵件和語音郵件這些新的負擔(dān)。

技術(shù)發(fā)展還向我們提供機會，在個人電腦上一連幾小時處理軟件故障，或把因特網(wǎng)上那些無用的信息塞進自己的大腦 7 Technology apart, the Internet points the way to a second reason why we feel so time-pressed: the information explosion. 除去技術(shù)發(fā)展，因特網(wǎng)指出了我們?yōu)楹胃械綍r間如此緊迫的第二個原因：信息爆炸 8 A couple of centuries ago, nearly all the world's 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. 幾個世紀以前，人類積累的幾乎所有知識都能裝在若干哲人的大腦之中。

如今，這些大腦休想容納下一天中產(chǎn)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. 各種消息、事實和見解從世界各個角落大量涌入電視機能收到150個頻道因特網(wǎng)網(wǎng)址多達千百萬雜志、書籍和光盤只讀存儲器的數(shù)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 University's 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世紀，整個國際學(xué)術(shù)界總共只有屈指可數(shù)的幾家科學(xué)刊物，出版一本書是件了不起的大事，”哈佛大學(xué)比較動物學(xué)博物館昆蟲館名譽館長愛德華·威爾遜說。

如今，我本人就訂閱了60或70種期刊雜志，以便自己跟上不斷拓展的學(xué)術(shù)前沿中一個微小部分的發(fā)展動向 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. 我們產(chǎn)生日益加重的時間緊迫感還有一個原因：日漸繁榮富足由于生產(chǎn)的物品與提供的服務(wù)越來越多，我們必須去消費。

在廣告的推動下，我們努力照辦：我們多多購買多多旅游多多玩兒，但得盡力堅持下去于是我們就深受威爾遜所謂的對極大富足不滿之苦――即無休止的選擇所造成的困惑 12 Of course, not everyone is overstressed. "It's a convenient shorthand to say we're 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. 當(dāng)然，并非人人感到時間過度緊迫說我們都缺少時間只是隨意講講，我們應(yīng)該記住，這種說法大約只適用于一半人，”未來基金公司――一家倫敦研究公司――的經(jīng)理邁克爾·威爾莫特說 13 "You've got people retiring early, you've got the unemployed, you've got other people maybe only peripherally involved in the economy who don't have this situation at all. If you're unemployed, your problem is that you've got too muc。