But the good news and a fundamental truth too, is that no one is ever truly boring.

好消息是，事實上沒有真正無聊的人。

They're only in danger of coming across as such when they either fail to understand their deeper selves or don't dare or know how to communicate them to others.

之所以會表現的沈悶乏味多半是連自己都不了解自己，或者對於與他人溝通感到卻步無力。

That there is simply no such thing as an inherently boring person or thing is one of the great lessons of art.

我們必須意識到沒有所謂天生無趣的人或事，這正是藝術很重要的一環。

Many of the most satisfying artworks don't feature exulted or rare elements.

絕大多數令人讚嘆的藝術品並不帶有驚艷的特色或少見的元素。

They are about the ordinary, looked at in a special way with unusual sincerity and openness to unvarnished experience.

它們取材日常，以一種特別的角度呈現出真摯原始而不加修飾的經驗。

Take for example some grasses painted by the danish artist Christian Købke in the suburb of copenhagen in 1833.

拿些草來當作例子吧，由丹麥藝術家 Christian Købke 於 1833 年哥本哈根的市郊所繪。

Outwardly the scene is utterly unremarkable and could initially appear to be deeply unpromising material for a painting and yet, like any great artist, Købke has known how to interrogate his own perceptions in a fresh unclouded, underivative manner and translated them accurately into his medium, weaving a small masterpiece out of the thread of everyday life.

表面上看來這風景實在說不上有什麼特別之處，幾乎可以說是毫無前瞻性的繪畫題材，但是就像所有偉大的藝術家一樣，Købke 最著名就是以他獨到的眼光還有清新脫俗的方式，將題材確實的融入到畫作裡面，穿針引線般將日常生活的點滴變成偉大的傑作。

And just as there's no such thing as a boring riverbank, tree or dandelion, so too there can be no such thing as an inherently boring person.

正如同沒有所謂無趣的河堤、樹木、蒲公英，當然也沒有天生無趣的人。

The human-animal witnessed in its essence with honesty and without artifice is always interesting.

人類本身最質樸的那一面就是有趣的。

When we call a person boring, we're just pointing to someone who's not had the courage or concentration to tell us what it's like to be them.

當我們說這個人真的好無聊喔，我們只是指出他不夠勇敢而專注地去表達自己。

By contrast we invariably prove compelling when we succeed in saying how and what we truly desire, envy, regret, mourn and dream.

相較之下，能夠總是吸引他人注意是因為我們誠實說出真實的慾望、嫉妒、悔恨傷心或者是夢想。

Anyone who faithfully recuperates the real data on what it's like to exist, is guaranteed to have material with which to captivate others.

任何願意敞開心胸忠於表達自我的人，總有源源不絕的話題吸引他人。

The interesting person isn't someone to whom obviously and outwardly interesting things have happened: someone who's traveled the world, met important dignitaries or been present at large geopolitical events.

所謂有趣的人並不是親身經歷過多少有趣的事 : 他們並沒有環遊世界、結識達官貴人，或參與了重要的地緣政治會議。

Nor is it someone who speaks in learned terms about the weighty themes of culture, history or science.

更不像是學者一般，討論有關文化、歷史、或科學等重大議題。

There's someone who's grown into an attentive, self-aware listener and a reliable, honest correspondent of the tremors of their own mind and heart and who can thereby give us faithful account the pathos, drama and strangeness of being alive.

他會是某個善於傾聽並且擁有自我意識的人，他可靠，並給你最真實的回應，他心口合一，給予我們最忠實的建議，無論是生命中哪些感傷、戲劇性和不可思議的時刻。

What then are some of the elements that get in the way of us being as interesting as we in fact are?

那麼究竟是什麼原因阻止了我們當個有趣的人呢？我們明明就充滿趣味啊

Firstly and most crucially, we bore when we lose faith that it really could be our feelings that would stand the best chance of interesting others.

我們會無趣的首要因素是我們失去了信心，不相信我們的心情和感受才是讓人對我們充滿興趣的原因。

Out of modesty and habit we push some of our most interesting perceptions to one side, in order to follow respectable but dead conventions of what might impress.

我們習慣謙虛地將自己最有趣的那一面推到旁邊，無聊的對話只為了曲意承歡給人留下好印象。

When we tell anecdotes we throw the emphasis on the outward details: who was there, when we went, what the temperature was like rather than maintaining our nerve to report on the layer of feelings beneath the facts.

在說著一件趣事時我們著重在一些表面上的細節 : 像是誰也在那兒、我們什麼時候去的、氣溫如何等等，而不是鼓起勇氣去表達內心層面的真實感受。

The moment of guilt, the sudden sexual attraction, the humiliating sulk, the carreer crisis, the strange euphoria at 3 a.m.

那些讓我們深感內疚不安的時刻、那一陣瞬間而來的性吸引力、那些羞愧而讓人生氣的事、職業危機、凌晨三點讓你嗨翻天的東西。

Our neglect of our native feelings isn't just an oversight, it can be a deliberate strategy to keep our minds away from realizations that threaten our ideas of dignity and normality.

我們忽略自我感受並不是個疏失，而是刻意讓自己不去體悟會威脅到我們認知上自尊和正常的感受

We babble inconsequentially to the world because we lack the nerve to look more closely and unflinchingly within.

我們對外總說著無關緊要的話，因為我們膽怯，無法勇敢探索內心世界。

It feels significant that most five-year-olds are far less boring than most 45-year-olds.

值得注意的是大部分的 5 歲小孩子遠比 45 歲的人來的有趣得多。

What makes these children gripping is not so much that they have more interesting feelings than anyone else, far from it, but that they are especially uncensored correspondents of these feelings.

而究竟為什麼這些小孩子能夠吸引著我們，不是因為他們的情緒和感受比其他的人有趣，差得遠呢，而是他們對情感呈現的毫無保留。

Their inexperience of the world means they are still instinctively loyal to themselves and so they will candidly tell us what they really think about Granny and their little brother, what their plans for reforming the planet are and what they believe everyone should do with their boogies.

他們不經世事，因此十分忠於自我，總是直率地說出他們真正的想法，像是有關於阿嬤和弟弟、以及如何重新排列行星的計畫，還有大家應該如何處理鼻屎會比較好。

We are rendered boring not by nature so much as by a fateful will that begins its malevolent reign over us in adolescence to appear normal.

我們的無趣並不是與身俱來而是意志決定的，從青春期開始便惡意支配著我們，要我們在行為舉止上表現正常。

Yet, even when we're honest about our feelings we may still prove boring because we don't know them as well as we should, and so we get stuck at the level of insisting on an emotion rather than explaining it.

然而，儘管誠實面對自己的感受，還是有別人會覺得我們無聊的時候，因為我們不夠瞭解自己的感受，我們會卡在某一個情感層面上，而無法解讀它。

We'll assert with ever greater emphasis that a situation was extremely exciting, or awful, or beautiful, but not be able to provide those around us with any of the sort of related details and examples that would help them viscerally understand why.

我們堅持強調著一件事情如何令人振奮、或是極度糟糕、或者超級美妙，可是就是無法向旁人提供任何與事件連結的細節和例子，好讓他人能夠馬上了解體會。

We can end up boring, not so much because we don't want to share our lives, as because we don't yet know them well enough to do so.

我們可能表現得無趣，不完全是因為拒絕去分享生活點滴，而是我們也還在摸索自我的階段。

Fortunately, the gift of being interesting is neither exclusive nor reliant on exceptional talent.

幸運的是，要做個有趣的人並不是專有的也不需要依賴特別的天賦。

It requires only direction, honesty and focus.

它需要的是方向、誠實以及專注。

The person we call interesting is in essence someone alive to what we all deeply want from social intercourse, which is an uncensored glimpse of what the brief waking dream called life looks like through the eyes of another person, and reassurance we are not entirely alone with all that feels most bewildering, peculiar and intense within us.

我們稱做有趣的人本質是那樣地生氣勃勃，是在社交場合上我們都想要遇到的人，他毫無保留地讓我們在如夢寐一般短暫的時光裡透過他一窺人生，好讓我們感到心安，因為並不是只有我們的內心會上演著不知所措、詭譎奇特和異常強烈的小劇場。