21世纪大学新英语读写译教程 第三册 课文翻译 课件 ppt Unit5.pptVIP

Today the words hobbyist and amateur have derogatory overtones. Leisure products are sold to us as if we were joining a high-tech, high adrenalin profession, all sponsors’ logos and promises of performance enhancement. In the age of The X Factor there seems to be this increasingly common idea that everyone has a right to follow their dreams and become a professional star, whether talented or not. As Simon Cowell will tell you, it is not practical or really desirable for most people to jack in their job and pursue their unrealistic hopes. Better to become an enthusiastic amateur. We are losing sight of the fact that a huge part of the pleasure derived from practising a hobby is because it is just that — a hobby. The pleasure is in the doing, whether we are any good or not. I have always thought that when someone is concentrating and absorbed in doing something they love, such as a singer in a choir, their face takes on a certain beauty. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called this state “flow”, perfectly pitched between anxiety and boredom. He thought that when someone was in a state of flow he or she was at their happiest. I want to celebrate the hobby. I’ve had hobbies all my life. As a child I made model aeroplanes, soldiers, cars, tanks and ships. In my teens and twenties I was a mad keen skateboarder, in my thirties it was mountain-bike racing. I’m a lifelong motorcycle fanatic. Recently I have had an enthusiasm for radio-controlled car racing. All these have fed at some time into pieces of work and I can trace my creative roots back to happy times spent with an Airfix kit, hallucinating the Battle of Britain, high on glue fumes (how sad I was to hear that the future of Airfix is now in doubt after Humbrol, its parent company, went into administration). A core thread in my art developed not in the white heat of philosophical debate but in the warm glow of fellow hobbyists. I learned pottery at evening classes among enthusias