To devote yourself to the creation and enjoyment of beauty, then, can be a serious business—not always necessarily a means of escaping reality, but sometimes a means of holding on to the real when everything else is flaking away into . . . rhetoric and plot. Not too long ago, authorities arrested a brotherhood of Catholic monks in Sicily who were in tight conspiracy with the Mafia, so who can you trust? What can you believe? The world is unkind and unfair. Speak up against this unfairness and in Sicily, at least, you'll end up as the foundation of an ugly new building. What can you do in such an environment to hold a sense of your individual human dignity? Maybe nothing. Maybe nothing except, perhaps, to pride yourself on the fact that you always fillet your fish with perfection, or that you make the lightest ricotta in the whole town?
因此，致力于美的创造与享受，可说是严肃的事——并不见得是逃避现实的手段，有时反倒是抓住现实的手段，在一切都分解为……修辞与情节之时。没多久之前，政府当局在西西里逮捕了一个与黑手党紧密串通的修士会，因此谁能让你信赖？你能相信什么？世界残酷不公。你若在西西里挺身抗议不公，最后可能成为某栋丑陋新厦的地基。在此种环境下，该怎么做才能保有自己的个人尊严？或许什么也不能做。或许除了切鱼的完美本领以及做出全镇最松软的瑞科达乳酪，才能让人引以为傲？

I don't want to insult anyone by drawing too much of a comparison between myself and the long-suffering Sicilian people. The tragedies in my life have been of a personal and largely self-created nature, not epically oppressive. I went through a divorce and a depression, not a few centuries of murderous tyranny. I had a crisis of identity, but I also had the resources (financial, artistic and emotional) with which to try to work it out. Still, I will say that the same thing which has helped generations of Sicilians hold their dignity has helped me begin to recover mine—namely, the idea that the appreciation of pleasure can be an anchor of one's humanity. I believe this is what Goethe meant by saying that you have to come here, to Sicily, in order to understand Italy. And I suppose this is what I instinctively felt when I decided that I needed to come here, to Italy, in order to understand myself.
我不想把自己和长期受苦的西西里人民拿来比较而侮辱任何人。我的人生悲剧属于一种个人性质、大致掌握在自己手中的问题，并非起因于长期受压迫。我经历的是离婚和忧郁症，并非好几世纪的恐怖暴政。我有身份认同的危机，却也拥有各种资源（财务、艺术、感情），想出解决之法。尽管如此，我要说，历代帮助西西里人保有尊严的观念，也帮助我开始找回自己的尊严——亦即，对快乐的鉴赏力，是能成为人性之依靠。我相信歌德说你若想了解意大利就得来西西里，正是这个意思。我想，在我决定必须来意大利时，正是直觉到我必须了解自己。

It was in a bathtub back in New York, reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary, that I first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits and I was so unrecognizable to myself that I probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But I felt a glimmer of happiness when I started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grab onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face-first out of the dirt—this is not selfishness, but obligation. You were given life; it is your duty (and also your entitlement as a human being) to find something beautiful within life, no matter how slight.
在纽约的浴缸里大声念出字典里的意大利词句，使我开始修补自己的灵魂。我的生活裂成碎片，让我认不出自己，在警察局任人指认的话，恐怕连我也指认不出自己。可是当我开始读意大利文时，我感觉到一丝快乐；而当你在经历黑暗时期后，感受到丝毫可能的快乐，就得死命抓住这一点快乐，直到它将你拉出土中——这并非自私，而是义务。你被赋予生命；你有责任（也是你身为人类的权利）去寻找生命当中的美，无论多么微不足道。

I came to Italy pinched and thin. I did not know yet what I deserved. I still maybe don't fully know what I deserve. But I do know that I have collected myself of late—through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures—into somebody much more intact. The easiest, most fundamentally human way to say it is that I have put on weight. I exist more now than I did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when I arrived here. And I will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person—the magnification of one life—is indeed an act of worth in this world. Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody's but my own.
Eat, Pray, Love
我到意大利时瘦骨如柴，那时的我还不清楚自己应得的东西。或许我仍未完全清楚自己应得的东西。但我明白近来我已振作起来——藉着享受无害的快乐——成为一个更完整的人。最简单、最符合人类的说法是，我的体重增加了。现在我的存在比四个月前更有分量。离开意大利的时候，我将比刚来时胖得多。离开的时候，我希望一个人的膨胀——一个人生的扩张——在这世界上是一种有价值的行动。尽管这一回，这个人生恰好不属于别人， 而是属于我自己。