Bibliotherapy has been popular in the form of the nonfiction self-help book for several decades now. But lovers of literature have been using novels as salves — either consciously or subconsciously — for centuries.

图书理疗早就以励志自助类书籍的形式风靡数十载，而文学爱好者有意无意地把小说当成良药的历史更是已有上百年。

Our belief in the effectiveness of fiction as the purest and best form of bibliotherapy is based on our own experience with patients and bolstered by an avalanche of anecdotal evidence.

我们坚信小说是图书理疗中最纯粹且有效的药，这个信念是建立在我们积累的临床经验之上，还有这数不清的传闻佐证。

Sometimes it’s the story that charms; sometimes it’s the rhythm of the prose that works on the psyche, stilling or stimulating. Sometimes it’s an idea or an attitude suggested by a character in a similar quandary or jam.

有些小说的魔力在于故事情节，有些是它的文字以安抚或撩拨的方式治疗心理症状，有些治疗则是小说中身陷类似困境的人物提供了某种想法和态度。

If you lived on a planet as small as the Little Prince’s planet, Asteroid B-612 – so small that you’d have to take great care, after you’d finished washing and dressing each morning, to dig out any baobab shoots that had appeared overnight lest they take over your planet; and that one day you watched the sunset forty-four times, just by moving your chair; you’d be living a simple life that would inculcate in you the habit of carefulness.

因为如果你住的星球小的和小王子的B-612行星一样，小到每天早上梳洗更衣后，必须仔细挖掉昨晚长出的猴面包树苗，免得他们占领整个星球；小到只要挪一挪椅子，就可以在一天内欣赏四十四次日落。那么你会在这种简单的生活里养成细心的习惯。

You would water the one flower that grew on your planet every day, and never forget. You would take the trouble, before you went away on a trip, to rake out your volcanoes, even the extinct one.

你会每天给星球上的一株花浇水，也不会在远行前忘记把所有的火山口都疏通一下，包括那座死火山。

Because you would know that it’s the time and care you spend on things that makes them important. And that if you didn’t take this care, you’d wake up one day to find yourself surrounded by things that were sad, feeling their unimportance themselves.

读过这本书你会明白，对事物倾注的时间和关注才是使它们变得重要的关键，而如果不投入关心，有天醒来你会发现周围的事物都会变得悲伤，因为它们感到自己不受重视。

Whatever the size of your planet when you begin reading The Little Prince, we guarantee it will have shrunk and become much more like Asteroid B-612 by the end. And that afterwards you will live your life with more care.

不管开始读《小王子》时你的星球有多大，我们保证读到最后，你的星球都会缩小，变得像B-612号行星一样，而你也会更细心地过好每一天。

The insights themselves are still nebulous, as learning gained through reading fiction often is—but therein lies its power. In a secular age, I suspect that reading fiction is one of the few remaining paths to transcendence, that elusive state in which the distance between the self and the universe shrinks.

这些感悟本身有些朦胧，但是阅读小说所带来的感悟往往都是这样模糊——不过这也正是它们的力量所在。在这个世俗的时代，读小说恐怕是少数几种能让我们超脱自我的方式了，它似乎缩小了自我与宇宙之间的距离。

Reading fiction makes me lose all sense of self, but at the same time makes me feel most uniquely myself. As Woolf, the most fervent of readers, wrote, a book “splits us into two parts as we read,” for “the state of reading consists in the complete elimination of the ego,” while promising “perpetual union” with another mind.

读小说让我忘记自我，同时又让我能感受到最独特的自我。就像书痴弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫所写的：“读书时，我们好像被书分割成了两半，因为阅读在一方面消除我们的自我，但同时又许诺我们与另一个思想的永久结合。”