前天引用了“瘾君子”德昆西说老柯的一段话，有一点重要信息没有传达出来——多少也怪那书的“断章”和我的“取义”。老西原文还真叫“瘾君子眼中的老柯”（“Samuel Taylor Coleridge. By the English Opium-Eater”），系列发表在Tait’sEdinburgh Magazine (new series 1 (September 1834):509-520; (October 1834): 588-596; (November 1834): 685-690; new series 2(January 1835): 2-10)，后来收入《湖畔诗人回忆》（Recollections of the Lakes and the Lake Poets, edited by DavidWright (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970）——我just有那书，不过这会儿又找不到了——老西说老柯的谈话波澜起伏，“by transitions the most just and logical”，这里的Just别有深意，可从那段引文看不清楚。

老西在那段话后解释了他为什么用just：老柯讲话喜欢跑题（这一点从那段引文也看不清楚），但不会“往而不返”，而能恰到好处地绕回来，却又不同于那些靠语词的勾连来“左右逢源”的谈话（What I mean by saying that his transitionswere “just” is by way of contradiction to that mode of conversation whichcourts variety by means of verbal connexions）。OED有一个just的义项是，Of speech, ideas, opinions,arguments, etc.: In accordance with reason, truth, or fact; right; true;correct. Often with mixture of sense，而老西说just and logical，是把语言的“周到”与逻辑的关联分开说了。

Transition的拉丁词源是transitio，是一个自相矛盾的词儿（像我们的“易”字）：transit, passage；desertion；infection, contagion——不仅过渡，也可能偏离或拐弯儿。所谓verbal connexions，大概就是通过这种词的多义性来玩儿文字游戏，老柯的高明就在于他不这么玩儿也能绕回来。就像Heather J. Jackson说的（见The “logic” of the “wildest odes”, in:Lessons of Romanticism: A Critical Companion, ed. by Thomas Pfau and RobertF. Gleckner, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998），老柯的过渡“无迹可寻”（invisible,occurring in the blank spaces between sentences or stanzas），一如他在物理模型中偏爱能量而非物质，在宗教领域里偏爱神秘而非证据。（Theyconform to Coleridge’s general preference for energy over matter in physical models of the universe and for mystery over evidence in the area of religiousfaith”）。他把“摸不着的力量”化为了精致的概念。

老柯的跑题很有趣，像跑圈儿似的，越跑越远，人家越听越糊涂，感觉他自己都忘了说什么（most people had lost him, and naturally enough supposed that he had lost himself），但最后竟能回到起点。人家跟不上他的跑路，半道离开，带走一串儿跑偏的问题（usually his interlocutors would not have lasted that long and would have left. So they carried away the impression of a series of inexplicable digressions）——这些话也是老西说的，那段引文丢了这些东西，对老柯谈话的印象就大不同了。

博尔赫斯（Jorge Luis Borges）很惊讶老柯的谈话能留下来（后人将它们辑在一块儿叫Table Talk）——与约翰逊博士的连珠妙语（在Boswell的传记里）相比，老柯的酒后乱谈（after-dinner conversations）就不那么招人待见，里面废话忒多。