Unit5TheTapestryofFriendship课文翻译综合教程四

Unit 5

The Tapestry of Friendship

Ellen Goodman

1It was, in many ways, a slight movie. Nothing actually happened. There was

no big-budget chase scene, no bloody shoot-out. The story ended without any

cosmic conclusions.

film Girlfriend gentle and affecting. Slowly, it

2Yet she found Claudia Weill’s

panned across the tapestry of friendship –showing its fragility, its resiliency, its

role as the connecting tissue between the lives of two young women.

3When it was over, she thought about the movies she had seen this year –Julia，The Turning Point and now Girlfriends. It seemed that the peculiar eye, the

social lens of the cinema, had drastically shifted its focus. Suddenly the Male Buddy

movies had been replaced by the Female Friendship flicks.

4This wasn’t just another binge of trendiness, but a kind of cinema vérité. For once the movies were reflecting a shift, not just from men to women but from one

definition of friendship to another.

5Across millions of miles of celluloid, the ideal of friendship had always been

male –a world of sidekicks and “partners” of Butch Cassidys and Sundance Kids.

There had been something almost atavistic about these visions of attachments – as

if producers culled their plots from some pop anthropology book on male bonding.

Movies portrayed the idea that only men, those direct descendants of hunters and

Hemingways, inherited a primal capacity for friendship. In contrast, they portrayed

women picking on each other, the way they once picked berries.

6Well, that duality must have been mortally wounded in some shootout at the

You’re OK, I’m OK Corral.Now, on the screen, they were at least aware of the

subtle distinction between men and women as buddies and friends.

7About 150 years ago, Coleridge had written, “A woman’s friendship borders more closely on love than man’s. Men affect each other in the reflection of noble or

friendly acts, whilst women ask fewer proofs and more signs and expressions of

attachment.”

8Well, she thought, on the whole, men had buddies, while women had friends.

Buddies bonded, but friends loved. Buddies faced adversity together, but friends

faced each other. There was something palpably different in the way they spent

ther.

their time. Buddies seemed to “do” things together; friends simply “were” toge

9Buddies came linked, like accessories, to one activity or another. People have golf buddies and business buddies, college buddies and club buddies. Men often

keep their buddies in these categories, while women keep a special category for

friends.

10 A man once told her that men weren’t real buddies until they had been

“through the wars” together –

corporate or athletic or military. They had to soldier together, he said. Women, on the other hand, didn’t count themselves as friends

until they had shared three loathsome confidences.

11Buddies hang tough together; friends hang onto each other.

12It probably had something to do with pride. You don’t

show off to a friend;

you show need. Buddies try to keep the worst from each other; friends confess it.

13 A friend of hers once telephoned her lover, just to find out if he was home. She

hung up without a hello when he picked up the phone. Later, wretched with

embarrassment, the friend moaned, “Can you believe me? A thirty-five-year-old

lawyer, making a chi cken call?” Together they laughed and made it better.

14Buddies seek approval. But friends seek acceptance.

15She knew so many men who had been trained in restraint, afraid of each

affection. She wasn’t sure which.

other’s

judgment or awkward with each other’s

Like buddies in the movies, they would die for each other, but never hug each other.

16She had reread Babbitt recently, that extraordinary catalogue of male grievances. The only relationship that gave meaning to the claustrophobic life of

George Babbitt had been with Paul Riesling. But not once in the tragedy of their

lives had one been able to say to the other: You make a difference.

17Even now men shocked her at times with their description of friendship. Does this one have a best friend? “Why, o f course, we see each other every February.”　

Does that one call his most intimate pal long distance? “Why, certainly, whenever

Do those two old chums ever have dinner together? “You

a real reason.”　

there’s

mean alone? Without our wives?”

18Yet, things wer e changing. The ideal of intimacy wasn’t this parallel playmate, this teammate, this trenchmate. Not even in Hollywood. In the double standard of

friendship, for once the female version was becoming accepted as the general ideal.

19After all, a buddy is a fine life-companion. But one’s friends, as Santayana once wrote, “are that part of the race with which one can be human.”