《渺小一生》:“你讀過柏拉圖嗎？”

　 He knew French and German. He knew the periodic table. He knew—as much as he didn’t care to—large parts of the Bible almost by memory. He knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot. (And then he knew things he wished he didn’t, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.)

他會法語和德語，他懂化學周期表，而且盡管很不喜歡，他幾乎記得《圣經(jīng)》里的大部分內(nèi)容。他知道如何接生小牛，如何修好電燈的電線，如何疏通堵塞的排水管，如何用最有效率的方法采收核桃，如何辨認菇類有沒有毒，如何把干草打包成一大捆，也知道挑西瓜、蘋果、胡瓜、香瓜時，該敲哪個部位來測試其新鮮程度（另外有些事情他但愿自己不知道，有些事他希望永遠不會再用上，還有些事，當他夜里想到或夢到時，會憎恨或羞愧得蜷縮起身子）。

　 And yet it often seemed he knew nothing of any real value or use, not really. The languages and the math, fine. But daily he was reminded of how much he didn’t know. He had never heard of the sitcoms whose episodes were constantly referenced. He had never been to a movie. He had never gone on vacation. He had never been to summer camp. He had never had pizza or popsicles or macaroni and cheese (and he had certainly never had—as both Malcolm and JB had—foie gras or sushi or marrow). He had never owned a computer or a phone, he had rarely been allowed to go online. He had never owned anything, he realized, not really: the books he had that he was so proud of, the shirts that he repaired again and again, they were nothing, they were trash, the pride he took in them was more shameful than not owning anything at all. The classroom was the safest place, and the only place he felt fully confident: everywhere else was an unceasing avalanche of marvels, each more baffling than the next, each another reminder of his bottomless ignorance. He found himself keeping mental lists of new things he had heard and encountered. But he could never ask anyone for the answers. To do so would be an admission of extreme otherness, which would invite further questions and would leave him exposed, and which would inevitably lead to conversations he definitely was not prepared to have. He felt, often, not so much foreign—for even the foreign students (even Odval, from a village outside Ulaanbaatar) seemed to understand these references—as from another time altogether: his childhood might well have been spent in the nineteenth century, not the twenty-first, for all he had apparently missed, and for how obscure and merely decorative what he did know seemed to be. How was it that apparently all of his peers, whether they were born in Lagos or Los Angeles, had had more or less the same experience, with the same cultural landmarks? Surely there was someone who knew as little as he did? And if not, how was he ever to catch up?

然而他常常覺得，自己好像不懂任何真正有價值或?qū)嵱玫氖虑?。好吧，他很擅長語文和數(shù)學。但每一天總有事情提醒他自己是多么無知。大家總是提起劇情的某某情境喜劇，他從沒聽說過。他從來沒看過電影，從來沒度過假，從來沒參加過夏令營。他沒吃過披薩、棒冰或奶酪通心粉（而且不像馬爾科姆和杰比，他當然也沒吃過鵝肝、壽司或牛骨髓）。他從來沒有電腦或手機，也很少能上網(wǎng)。然后他發(fā)現(xiàn)，自己沒真正擁有過任何東西。他曾經(jīng)很得意擁有的那些書、他補了又補的襯衫，這些根本沒什么，都是垃圾；他因為擁有這些東西而生出的得意比一無所有更丟臉。教室是最安全的地方，也是唯一讓他覺得信心滿滿的地方。其他地方，不管在哪里，都有不斷的驚訝接連而來，一個比一個難對付，每一個都在提醒他有多么無知。他發(fā)現(xiàn)自己總在心里記下他所聽到、碰到的新事物，但永遠沒法拿去找誰問出答案。因為去問就等于承認自己跟其他人極其不同，這樣會招來別人進一步的問題，讓他毫無保障，而且無可避免地要開啟一些他絕對沒有準備要進行的對話。他常常覺得，眼前的一切陌生得像是從一個截然不同的時代跑來的（就連外國學生，甚至來自蒙古烏蘭巴托市外一個小村子的奧得瓦，都懂得這些事物的含義）。顯然他錯過了好多事情，而他真正知道的事情都冷僻又不實用，他的童年像是在19世紀，而非21世紀度過的。他所有的同輩，無論是生于美國洛杉磯或非洲拉各斯，多少有著相同的經(jīng)驗，也有相同的文化里程碑。一定有人知道的跟他一樣少吧？如果沒有，那他怎么可能追趕得上？

　 In the evenings, when a group of them lay splayed in someone’s room (a candle burning, a joint burning as well), the conversation often turned to his classmates’ childhoods, which they had barely left but about which they were curiously nostalgic and certainly obsessed. They recounted what seemed like every detail of them, though he was never sure if the goal was to compare with one another their similarities or to boast of their differences, because they seemed to take equal pleasure in both. They spoke of curfews, and rebellions, and punishments (a few people’s parents had hit them, and they related these stories with something close to pride, which he also found curious) and pets and siblings, and what they had worn that had driven their parents crazy, and what groups they had hung out with in high school and to whom they had lost their virginity, and where, and how, and cars they had crashed and bones they had broken, and sports they had played and bands they had started. They spoke of disastrous family vacations and strange, colorful relatives and odd next-door neighbors and teachers, both beloved and loathed. He enjoyed these divulgences more than he expected—these were real teenagers who’d had the sorts of real, plain lives he had always wondered about—and he found it both relaxing and educational to sit there late at night and listen to them. His silence was both a necessity and a protection, and had the added benefit of making him appear more mysterious and more interesting than he knew he was. “What about you, Jude?” a few people had asked him, early in the term, and he knew enough by then—he was a fast learner—to simply shrug and say, with a smile, “It’s too boring to get into.” He was astonished but relieved by how easily they accepted that, and grateful too for their self-absorption. None of them really wanted to listen to someone else’s story anyway; they only wanted to tell their own.

有些夜晚，當他們一群人躺在某個人的房間里（點著一根蠟燭，也點了一根大麻）談話時，往往會談起各自的童年。童年時代才剛結(jié)束，他們卻異常懷念，而且絕對癡迷。他們敘述童年的各種細節(jié)，但他從來不確定目的是要比較其中的相似程度，還是吹噓自己的與眾不同，因為這兩種帶給他們的樂趣似乎是相同的。他們談到父母規(guī)定他們幾點要回家，以及他們的反叛行為與受到的懲罰（少數(shù)幾個人的父母會打他們，而他們講起挨打的故事簡直是得意，這點也令他想不透）；他們談到寵物和兄弟姐妹，談到穿戴什么惹得父母氣瘋了，談到中學時代跟哪些人玩在一起，他們破處的對象、地點、前后過程，以及撞壞的車、斷掉的骨頭、玩過的運動和組過的樂團。他們談到災難性的家庭度假、各式各樣奇怪的親戚、詭異的隔壁鄰居，還有喜歡跟討厭的老師。他沒想到自己這么愛聽同學的這類傾訴——這些是真實的十來歲青少年，他們經(jīng)歷過他向來好奇的那種真實、平凡的生活——而且他覺得坐在那里聽他們聊到深夜，既輕松又學到好多。他的沉默既是必要的，也是一種保護，額外的好處是讓他顯得更神秘、更有趣?！澳囚玫履隳?？”一開始少數(shù)幾個人問過他，而向來學得很快的他，此時已經(jīng)懂得夠多，只是聳聳肩微笑說：“太無聊了，沒什么好說的?！彼荏@訝，但放心地發(fā)現(xiàn)他們很輕易地就接受了這個說法，也很慶幸他們只關(guān)心自己?？傊?，沒有一個人真想聽其他人的故事，他們只想講自己的。

　 And yet his silence did not go unnoticed by everyone, and it was his silence that had inspired his nickname. This was the year Malcolm discovered postmodernism, and JB had made such a fuss about how late Malcolm was to that particular ideology that he hadn’t admitted that he hadn’t heard of it either.

但他的沉默不是沒有人注意到，也因此替他取了綽號。這是馬爾科姆發(fā)現(xiàn)后現(xiàn)代主義那一年，杰比對于馬爾科姆這么晚才知道大驚小怪，搞得他不敢承認自己也沒聽過。

　 “You can’t just decide you’re post-black, Malcolm,” JB had said. “And also: you have to have actually been black to begin with in order to move beyond blackness.”

“馬爾科姆，你不能就這樣決定你是后黑人。”杰比當時說，“而且呢，你得先實際當過黑人，才能進入到后面的階段。”

　 “You’re such a dick, JB,” Malcolm had said.

“你真的很煩，杰比?！瘪R爾科姆說。

　 “Or,” JB had continued, “you have to be so genuinely uncategorizable that the normal terms of identity don’t even apply to you.” JB had turned toward him, then, and he had felt himself freeze with a momentary terror. “Like Judy here: we never see him with anyone, we don’t know what race he is, we don’t know anything about him. Post-sexual, post-racial, post-identity, post-past.” He smiled at him, presumably to show he was at least partly joking. “The post-man. Jude the Postman.”

“或者呢，”杰比繼續(xù)說，“你必須真的無法歸類，一般的身份詞匯無法適用在你身上。”然后杰比轉(zhuǎn)向他，害他一時之間嚇得整個人僵住，“比方裘德，我們從來沒看他跟任何人交往，不不知道他的種族，我們對他一無所知。后性別、后種族、后身份、后經(jīng)歷，”他朝他微笑，應該是想表示他多少是在開玩笑，“后男人[2]。后男人裘德。”

　 “The Postman,” Malcolm had repeated: he was never above grabbing on to someone else’s discomfort as a way of deflecting attention from his own. And although the name didn’t stick—when Willem had returned to the room and heard it, he had only rolled his eyes in response, which seemed to remove some of its thrill for JB—he was reminded that as much as he had convinced himself he was fitting in, as much as he worked to conceal the spiky odd parts of himself, he was fooling no one. They knew he was strange, and now his foolishness extended to his having convinced himself that he had convinced them that he wasn’t. Still, he kept attending the late-night groups, kept joining his classmates in their rooms: he was pulled to them, even though he now knew he was putting himself in jeopardy by attending them.

“后男人?！瘪R爾科姆跟著說了一遍。裘德從來就不擅長抓住別人的弱點，以便轉(zhuǎn)移自己身上的注意力。而且盡管這個綽號沒跟著他——威廉回到房間聽到時，只翻了個白眼，杰比似乎就沒那么起勁了——但他因此想到，盡管他極力說服自己他已經(jīng)融入大家，努力隱藏自己種種古怪的部分，他其實瞞不了任何人。他們早就知道他很怪，他還以為他已經(jīng)讓他們相信自己并不奇怪，這才更加愚蠢。但他還是繼續(xù)參加那些深夜聚會，繼續(xù)去同學房間。他深受吸引，盡管現(xiàn)在他知道，去參加這些聚會是置自己于險境。

　 Sometimes during these sessions (he had begun to think of them this way, as intensive tutorials in which he could correct his own cultural paucities) he would catch Willem watching him with an indecipherable expression on his face, and would wonder how much Willem might have guessed about him. Sometimes he had to stop himself from saying something to him. Maybe he was wrong, he sometimes thought. Maybe it would be nice to confess to someone that most of the time he could barely relate to what was being discussed, that he couldn’t participate in everyone else’s shared language of childhood pratfalls and frustrations. But then he would stop himself, for admitting ignorance of that language would mean having to explain the one he did speak.

在這些聚會中（他逐漸覺得就像在找家教進行考前惡補，以掩飾自己的文化匱乏），有時他會看到威廉盯著自己，臉上的表情高深莫測，于是很好奇自己的事情威廉猜到了多少。有時他還得阻止自己去跟他說什么。有時他心想，也許他錯了。也許找人坦白也不錯，可以承認他大部分時候都不了解他們在談的話題，承認他沒有其他人都有的童年丟臉事和困惑事。但接著他會阻止自己，因為承認他不懂這些，就意味著他必須解釋自己懂哪些。

　 Although if he were to tell anyone, he knew it would be Willem. He admired all three of his roommates, but Willem was the one he trusted. At the home, he had quickly learned there were three types of boys: The first type might cause the fight (this was JB). The second type wouldn’t join in, but wouldn’t run to get help, either (this was Malcolm). And the third type would actually try to help you out (this was the rarest type, and this was obviously Willem). Maybe it was the same with girls as well, but he hadn’t spent enough time around girls to know this for sure.

如果真要找個人說，他知道他會找威廉。不過三個室友他都很欣賞，只是威廉是他唯一信賴的人。在少年之家時，他很快就發(fā)現(xiàn)男生分成三種：第一種可能會引起打架（這是杰比）；第二種不會加入，但也不會跑去找大人幫忙（這是馬爾科姆）；第三種則會設法幫你脫身（這種人最稀少，顯然就是威廉）?；蛟S女生也可以如此分類，但他跟女生相處的時間不夠多，無法確知。

　 And increasingly he was certain Willem knew something. (Knows what? he’d argue with himself, in saner moments. You’re just looking for a reason to tell him, and then what will he think of you? Be smart. Say nothing. Have some self-control.) But this was of course illogical. He knew even before he got to college that his childhood had been atypical—you had only to read a few books to come to that conclusion—but it wasn’t until recently that he had realized how atypical it truly was. Its very strangeness both insulated and isolated him: it was near inconceivable that anyone would guess at its shape and specificities, which meant that if they did, it was because he had dropped clues like cow turds, great ugly unmissable pleas for attention.

而且他越來越確定，威廉知道些什么（知道什么？比較清醒時，他會在心里反駁自己。你只是想找理由告訴他，然后他會怎么想你？放聰明點，什么都別說，控制一下自己吧）。但這當然說不通。他上大學之前就知道自己的童年很反常——只要讀幾本書就可以得出這個結(jié)論——但直到最近，他才明白到底有多反常。這種奇異性保護了他，同時也孤立了他，他簡直無法想象任何人能猜到那種狀況和獨特性。這表示如果他們猜到了，那是因為他留下了線索，就像一團團巨大而丑陋的牛屎，不可能沒被注意到。

　 Still. The suspicion persisted, sometimes with an uncomfortable intensity, as if it was inevitable that he should say something and was being sent messages that took more energy to ignore than they would have to obey.

總之，那種疑心持續(xù)著，有時還強烈得令人難受，仿佛他無可避免地應該說一些話，而要他忽略接收到的信息反倒更累，還不如干脆順其自然。

　 One night it was just the four of them. This was early in their third year, and was unusual enough for them all to feel cozy and a little sentimental about the clique they had made. And they were a clique, and to his surprise, he was part of it: the building they lived in was called Hood Hall, and they were known around campus as the Boys in the Hood. All of them had other friends (JB and Willem had the most), but it was known (or at least assumed, which was just as good) that their first loyalties were to one another. None of them had ever discussed this explicitly, but they all knew they liked this assumption, that they liked this code of friendship that had been imposed upon them.

某天晚上只有他們四個人。這是在他們剛升大三那年，四個人都頗為難得地對他們形成的小圈子感到舒適，還有一點感傷。他們的確是個小圈子，而且讓他驚訝的是，他竟是其中之一：他們住的那棟宿舍叫虎德館（Hood Hall），校園里大家都說他們是“虎德小子”。他們有各自的朋友（杰比和威廉的朋友最多），但大家知道（至少是如此假設，這樣也不錯）他們對彼此最忠心。他們四個從來沒有明確談過這件事，但心里都明白他們喜歡這個假設，喜歡這個硬加在他們身上的友誼準則。

　 The food that night had been pizza, ordered by JB and paid for by Malcolm. There had been weed, procured by JB, and outside there had been rain and then hail, the sound of it cracking against the glass and the wind rattling the windows in their splintered wooden casements the final elements in their happiness. The joint went round and round, and although he didn’t take a puff—he never did; he was too worried about what he might do or say if he lost control over himself—he could feel the smoke filling his eyes, pressing upon his eyelids like a shaggy warm beast. He had been careful, as he always was when one of the others paid for food, to eat as little as possible, and although he was still hungry (there were two slices left over, and he stared at them, fixedly, before catching himself and turning away resolutely), he was also deeply content. I could fall asleep, he thought, and stretched out on the couch, pulling Malcolm’s blanket over him as he did. He was pleasantly exhausted, but then he was always exhausted those days: it was as if the daily effort it took to appear normal was so great that it left energy for little else. (He was aware, sometimes, of seeming wooden, icy, of being boring, which he recognized that here might have been considered the greater misfortune than being whatever it was he was.) In the background, as if far away, he could hear Malcolm and JB having a fight about evil.

那天晚上的食物是披薩，是杰比訂的，馬爾科姆付錢。還有大麻，是杰比弄來的。屋外下著雨，接著又降下冰雹。冰雹敲著窗玻璃，加上大風搖撼著破舊木頭窗框的聲音，讓他們覺得幸福極了。大麻傳了一圈又一圈，他沒吸（他從來不吸，因為太擔心自己如果失去控制，可能會做出或說出什么），但他可以感覺那煙霧充滿自己的雙眼，像一頭毛茸茸的溫暖野獸壓著他的眼皮。一如往常，每次有其他人出錢買吃的，他就會留神要少吃一點，盡管他還是餓（他緊盯著只剩兩片的披薩，然后才想起來，堅決地別開眼睛），但同時他也深覺滿足。我可以睡覺了，他心想，然后在沙發(fā)上躺下，拉了馬爾科姆的毯子蓋好。愉快而精疲力竭，但那幾年他總是精疲力竭，仿佛每天光是要表現(xiàn)正常，就已經(jīng)累得半死，實在沒力氣多做別的（有時他發(fā)現(xiàn)，不管他的真面目是什么，在他人眼中當個看似呆板、冰冷、無趣的人，才是更大的不幸）。背景聲中，仿佛在很遠的地方，他可以聽到馬爾科姆和杰比在吵有關(guān)邪惡的事情。

　 “I’m just saying, we wouldn’t be having this argument if you’d read Plato.”

“我只是說，如果你讀過柏拉圖，我們就不會吵這個了?！?

　 “Yeah, but what Plato?”

“是嗎，柏拉圖的什么？”

　 “Have you read Plato?”

“你讀過柏拉圖嗎？”

　 “I don’t see—”

“我看不出……”

　 “Have you?”

“你讀過嗎？”

　 “No, but—”

“沒有，可是……”