「現實」這個字是什麼意思？

"What is meant by ‘reality’? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable — now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech — and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away for us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent. That is what remains over when the skin of the day has been cast into the hedge; that is what is left of past time and of our loves and hates. Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality. It is his business to find it and collect it and communicate it to the rest of us."

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

(「現實」這個字是什麼意思？它像是非常無憑、不可恃的東西──一時間在塵埃滾滾的路上，一時間在街上一張報紙上，一時間又在陽光下的一朵水仙花上。它使一室中的許多人欣然色喜，又能使偶然的一句話長鐫心頭。它使一個在星光下向家走去的人，不勝它那份壓抑之感，且使得緘默無聲的世界比喧囂多語之頃更有真實感──隨即，它又在嘈雜的皮卡的里的一輛公共汽車上了。有時候，它寓於距我們遙遙的形象中，使我們難以辨析它的性質。它無論接觸到什麼，皆會使其固定，並使之永存。那就是當一時的皮殼被拋棄，而仍餘留下來的東西。那就是過去的時光以及我們的愛與憎所留下來的東西。我以為作家比其他的人更有機會與現實共存。發現現實、蒐集現實中的一切並將現實傳達給我們，就是他的任務。)

*中文翻譯節自張秀亞譯本，天培出版。