懷舊的“四十年黃金定律”

你有沒有發現流行文化總會颳起一陣陣的“復古風”和“懷舊風”？你有沒有總結過這陣風具有什麼樣的規律呢？Adam Gopnik發在《紐約客》的一篇文章就爲我們揭開了美國流行文化的“四十年黃金定律”（The Golden Forty-Year Rule）。

The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past.
人們懷舊的主要場景一般都是那些發生或是我們以爲發生在四五十年之前的情景。

What drives the cycle isn’t, in the first instance, the people watching and listening; it’s the producers who help create and nurture the preferred past and then push their work on the audience.
主導這種“懷舊週期”的並不是流行文化的受衆，而是信息的生產者。這些生產者將他們自己所向往的過去重新創造發揚光大，並把這些成果推向廣大的受衆。

Though pop culture is most often performed by the young, the directors and programmers and gatekeepers—the suits who control and create its conditions, who make the calls and choose the players—are, and always have been, largely forty-somethings.
儘管流行文化通常是在年輕人身上體現出來的，但流行文化的指導者、編排者和把關者——包括服裝師、場景設計師、聯絡人和選擇演員的工作人員——基本上都是四十歲左右的人。

Forty years past is the potently fascinating time just as we arrived, when our parents were youthful and in love, the Edenic period preceding the fallen state recorded in our actual memories.
四十年前他們剛到這個世界上，那時父母們還年輕、還在享受愛情。比起後來的記憶中墮落的狀態，那是一段伊甸園一般的美好時光。

The forty-year rule is, of course, not immutable, and its cycle carries epicycles within it: the twenty-year cycle, for instance, by which the forty-somethings recall their teen-age years. But it is the forty-years-on reproduction of a thing that most often proves more concentrated and powerful than the original.
所謂的“四十年黃金定律”當然不是鐵打不變的，例如四十年的大週期中還包含着一個二十年的小週期，即四十歲左右的人開始回憶他們的少年歲月。不過事實證明還是四十年之後的複製更有力量。

And so, if we can hang on, it will be in the twenty-fifties that the manners and meanings of the Obama era will be truly revealed: only then will we know our own essence.
因此，如果我們再等一等，我們這個時代的習慣和含義就會在2050年被真正的揭示出來：只有到了那時我們才能夠了解我們自己的本質。