I am not a morning person. It’s rare that anyone in Slate’s New York office sees my sullen (悶悶不樂的) 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 (瞬間) of 9, except on the rare, traumatizing occasion that I have an early flight to catch out of JFK.

       我不是個習(xí)慣早起的人。在Slate雜志的紐約辦公室里，很少有人能在上午10點30分之前看到我那張悶悶不樂的面孔。我得先花上一兩個小時，慢條斯理地啜飲盡三杯咖啡，方才覺得有力氣發(fā)電子郵件或是與別人閑聊。我從來沒在早上9點前一秒出過門，僅有的幾次痛苦的例外是為了去肯尼迪機場趕早班飛機。

       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 (強行推銷) 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.”

       按照卡梅倫·吉達里的說法，我在紐約的活法完全是錯誤的。吉達里在他的電子書新作《8點前的曼哈頓》中指出，從日出到早晨8點這段時間的紐約比一天之中的任何時候都更加迷人。他還賣力地向讀者推銷早起的好處?！霸谶@座城市，一個面積34平方英里的小島上就要擠進160萬人；而早上8點之前，這座城市忽然變成了你的私人領(lǐng)地，在大量人群涌入之前可以任由你探索、游玩，”吉達里寫道，“這種感覺真是自由?！?/p>

       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 (法語，意為“生活樂趣”) if I made an effort to start my days earlier. Then I read a line in Manhattan Before 8 that piqued (激發(fā)) 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 (不與他人交往的) tendencies—but was it possible I could avoid people more effectively if I awoke before dawn? I had to find out.

       和大多數(shù)習(xí)慣早起的人一樣，吉達里的話立刻引起了我的懷疑。我一邊讀著他寫的指南，一邊尋思著如果我也努力早點起床，是否也能發(fā)現(xiàn)同樣的生活樂趣。接下來在《8點前的曼哈頓》中讀到的一句話更激起了我的興趣：“我的早起理論圍繞著一個司空見慣的主題：避開人群。”我一直以為自己對早起的厭惡與我不喜歡和人打交道的脾性有關(guān)——可是如果我在黎明之前起床，有沒有可能會更有效地避開人群呢？我得弄清楚這件事。

     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 (的確), 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：我把兩只鬧鐘定到了凌晨4點，并為清晨騎車穿越曼哈頓的探險做好了準備。(的確，日出時間是早上6點，不過在騎行三英里去曼哈頓之前，我得先喝杯咖啡。)我計劃親自考察一下吉達里推薦的四個活動——在布魯克林大橋上看日出，在字母城的第九街咖啡館喝咖啡，散步走完高線公園的全程，然后在聯(lián)合廣場附近一家名為胡氏廚房的健康餐廳吃早餐——并找出我在紐約居住的這七年都錯過了在清晨獨處的哪些樂趣。

       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:

       我發(fā)現(xiàn)，清晨時分不僅外出活動的紐約人比較少，而且在很多情況下，這些紐約人也更為友善。我偶遇的那些人大致可分為六類。

      Police officers. The hours before and shortly after dawn are prime time for cops loitering (閑逛) on the street, shooting the breeze (閑聊) 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 (狠狠地訓(xùn)斥) and a $190 traffic ticket; this early-morning cop seemed to belong to a Bizarro World NYPD.

       警察。 對于在街上游蕩、閑聊和指揮交通的警察來說，黎明前后的時間是最佳時段——而且這些警察和他們朝九晚五的同事比起來明顯要友善得多。在我等待紅燈、準備進入布魯克林大橋上的非機動車道時，一位在路口站崗的警察沖我笑了笑，揮手讓我通過。我上次當著警察的面闖紅燈時，不僅被冷嘲熱諷地訓(xùn)斥了一頓，還收到了一張190美元的交通罰單；這位在清晨上班的警察好像來自一個顛倒世界的紐約市警察局。

       Joggers. “Morning runners in New York City have an unrivaled (無敵的) 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。吉達里寫道：“紐約的晨跑者與這個他們稱為家的地方之間有著無可比擬的親密關(guān)系?！倍宜麄儾幌矚g陌生人來打擾這份親密。我在布魯克林大橋上最先看到的人中就有一個帥氣的慢跑者，他正在向曼哈頓方向跑去。我摘下頭盔，理了理頭發(fā)，把頭盔放在車把前面的車筐里，自行車卻一下翻倒了。我手忙腳亂地把車扶起來，那位慢跑者卻連看都沒看我一眼，繼續(xù)向前跑。后來我在高線公園遇到的慢跑者也是同樣一副刻意對周圍人視而不見的模樣。與警察不同，慢跑者在清晨和一天之中的其他任何時候似乎都是一樣的。

      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 (嬉戲的) 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。我正在布魯克林大橋上看日出時，六七個滿臉朝氣的年輕人走近我，請我為他們拍照。他們說自己一宿沒睡，而當我告訴他們我是為了看日出才特意早起的時候，他們用古怪的眼神看著我。在靠近曼哈頓那一端的橋上，另外一群精力充沛的青少年正躺在橋面上。他們一邊咯咯地笑著，一邊取笑過往的行人。如果你想要體會老邁不堪的感覺，周六拂曉時分的布魯克林大橋就是個好地方。

      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 (在嗅覺上), 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.

       環(huán)衛(wèi)工人。早上8點之前，布魯克林和曼哈頓的大街上空曠得令人愉悅，只有垃圾車偶爾駛過。從我位于布魯克林的公寓到第九街咖啡館的這一路上，我想我遇到了四五輛垃圾車。盡管這些無處不在的垃圾車在嗅覺上令人不快，但在交際方面卻相當討人喜歡：當我沿著艾倫街向北騎行時，一位垃圾車司機中斷了口中的歌聲，向我道早安。這是我在紐約第一次聽到一位駕車人向一位騎車人說出善意的話語。

        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  (淺黃色頭發(fā)的) baby in a striped blue onesie (連體服) 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.

       嬰兒。第九街咖啡館早上7點才正式開始營業(yè)，但當我6點43分到達那里時，店里已經(jīng)有幾位顧客了。就在我拿著咖啡坐下后不久，一個懷抱嬰兒的男人也走進來買咖啡，他懷中的嬰兒一頭黃發(fā)，穿著藍色條紋連體服。45分鐘后，當我來到高線公園時，我立刻就遇到了另外一個胸前抱著身穿連體服嬰兒的男人。沒過一會兒，我又看見一個女人帶著三個可愛至極的小孩兒。吉達里并沒有提醒我，《8點前的曼哈頓》屬于不滿8個月大的曼哈頓居民。不過這一發(fā)現(xiàn)并未令我不快：這些還不會說話的小家伙都挺乖，位置也離得夠遠，萬一其中的某一個開始放聲大哭，我也能很快脫身。

       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 (使惡心). I tapped some notes from the morning into my iPhone; they quickly took a turn for the melodramatic (夸張的). (“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。在我離開高線公園時，我簡直快要哭出來了。陽光刺痛了我的雙眼，天氣也開始悶熱起來。我感覺疲憊、頭暈，還有點惡心。我把早上的一些感受敲入iPhone，很快這些感受就變得演戲般夸張了。(“魔法消失了。我想回家。不明白我為什么要這么做——做這一切?！?唯一令人愉快的是我看到一條上了年紀、胖乎乎非?？蓯鄣牡聡裂蛉龖醒笱蟮嘏吭诟浇娜诵械郎希闹魅苏诤蛣e人談話。我抬頭看去，又看到許多大小不一的狗狗，正被主人牽著在第五大道上小跑。

       In Manhattan Before8, Gidari mentions canine (犬的) companions only in passing (順便), 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點前的曼哈頓》中，吉達里對狗狗同伴們只是順便提及，不過我覺得那一部分寫得很貼切。他寫道：“清晨的曼哈頓只屬于慢跑者、遛狗的人，以及那些試圖在一個永遠喧鬧的城市中尋求些許平靜、安寧的人?！痹谶@次清晨的游歷中，我感受到了此前在紐約街頭從未感受過的平靜和安寧?？墒?，比起我知道我在床上永遠能夠感受到的平靜和安寧來說，它還是差遠了。