Active Play or Passive Entertainment? 主动的玩乐还是被动的消遣?

Our diurnal existence is divided into two phases, as distinct as day and night. We call them work and play. We work so many hours a day. And, when we have allowed the necessary minimum for such activities as eating and shopping, the rest we spend in various activities which are known as recreations, an elegant word which disguises the fact that we usually do not even play in our hours of leisure, but spend them in various forms of passive enjoyment or entertainment―not playing football but watching football matches;not acting but theatre-going;Not walking but riding in a motor coach.

人们的每天的生存状态可以一分为二，像白天和黑夜那样清晰可辨。我们将之称为工作和娱乐。每天，我们在工作上花费许多小时，再把花在诸如吃饭、购物等必不可少、无法再减的活动的时间扣除，我们把花在其他活动的剩余时间归在娱乐范围。娱乐这个词相当雅致。但掩饰了这样一个事实：即使在休闲的时光中，我们通常并没有玩乐，而是在进行各种各样被动的享乐或娱乐中——不是踢足球而只是看足球比赛，不是登台演出而是看人演戏，不是散步行走而是搭乘汽车。

We need to make, therefore, a hard-and-fast distinction not only between work and play but equally between active play and passive entertainment. It is, I suppose, the decline of active play―of amateur sport―and the enormous growth of purely receptive entertainment which has given rise to a sociological interest in the problem. If the greater part of the population, instead of indulging in sport, spend their hours of leisure viewing television programmers, there will inevitably be a decline in health and physique.

因此，我们需要不仅对工作和娱乐做出严格的区别，而且要同样严格地区分主动的玩乐和被动的消遣。在我看来，正是由于主动的玩乐——业余体育运动衰退和纯粹接受性消遣的疯狂膨胀，导致了社会学家对这一问题的关注。假如人口的大多数不是参加体育活动，而是把闲暇时光花在“看”电视节目上，人们的健康和体质都会不可避免地下降。