《渺小一生》:之后，你再也沒什么好害怕的了。

　 She was ready. “Then I’d seriously consider it.”

她已經(jīng)有所準(zhǔn)備：“那我就會認(rèn)真考慮?！?

　 I hadn’t been expecting this, either. “Leez,” I said, “we should do what you want to do.” This wasn’t completely magnanimous; it was mostly cowardly. In this case, as with many things, I was happy to cede the decision to her.

我沒想到她會這樣回答?！袄蛉幔蔽艺f，“我們應(yīng)該照你的意思去做?！边@不完全是我寬宏大量，多半是出于懦弱。在這件事上，就像在很多事情上一樣，我樂于讓她做決定。

　 She sighed. “We don’t have to decide tonight. We have some time.” Four weeks, she didn’t need to say.

她嘆氣：“不必今天就決定。我們還有一些時間?！彼槐卣f，我也知道，還有四周的時間可以考慮。

　 In bed, I thought. I thought those thoughts all men think when a woman tells them she’s pregnant: What would the baby look like? Would I like it? Would I love it? And then, more crushingly: fatherhood. With all its responsibilities and fulfillments and tedium and possibilities for failure.

那天晚上我躺在床上，思索著所有男人碰到女人跟他說她懷孕了都會想的事情：生出來的嬰兒會是什么樣子？我會喜歡他嗎？我會愛他嗎？然后，更壓倒性的是：為人父親。有那么多責(zé)任、條件、煩悶和失敗的可能性。

　 The next morning, we didn’t speak of it, and the day after that, we didn’t speak of it again. On Friday, as we were going to bed, she said, sleepily, “Tomorrow we’ve got to discuss this,” and I said, “Absolutely.” But we didn’t, and we didn’t, and then the ninth week passed, and then the tenth, and then the eleventh and twelfth, and then it was too late to easily or ethically do anything, and I think we were both relieved. The decision had been made for us—or rather, our indecisiveness had made the decision for us—and we were going to have a child. It was the first time in our marriage that we’d been so mutually indecisive.

次日早晨我們沒有談這件事，隔一天我們也沒談。到了星期五我們要上床睡覺時，她很困地說：“明天我們得討論這件事了?！蔽艺f：“那當(dāng)然。”但是我們沒談，一直沒談，然后第九周過去了，接著是第十周，然后第十一周和第十二周也過去了。要做什么都太晚了，不但困難，也不合倫理。此時我想，我們都松了一口氣。時間幫我們做了決定（應(yīng)該說，我們的不決定，幫我們做了決定），我們就要有小孩了。結(jié)婚以來第一次，我們兩人都這么猶豫不決。

　 We had imagined that it would be a girl, and if it was, we’d name it Adele, for my mother, and Sarah, for Sally. But it wasn’t a girl, and we instead let Adele (who was so happy she started crying, one of the very few times I’d seen her cry) pick the first name and Sally the second: Jacob More. (Why More, we asked Sally, who said it was for Thomas More.)

我們原先想象會生一個女孩，如果是，我們就要給她取名阿黛爾，沿用我母親的名字；中間名是薩拉，是薩莉的正式名。但結(jié)果不是女孩，于是我們請阿黛爾取首名（她高興得哭出來，是我極少數(shù)看到她哭的一次），薩莉取中間名：雅各布·摩爾。（我們問薩莉，為什么是莫爾？她說是因為托馬斯·莫爾的緣故。）

　 I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.

有人覺得父母對子女的愛比較崇高、比較有意義、比較重要、比較了不起，但我從來不是那種人（我知道你也不是）。在雅各布出生之前我不覺得是那樣，他出生之后我也沒有改變想法。但是父母對子女的愛的確很奇特，那種愛的基礎(chǔ)不是出于身體上的吸引，也不是出于愉悅感或才智，而是出于恐懼。有孩子之前你從來不知恐懼為何物；或許就是這種恐懼騙得我們以為這種愛比較重大，但其實恐懼本身才更重大。每一天，你的第一個想法不是“我愛他”，而是“他怎么樣了”，一夜之間，整個世界忽然被重新安排，成了種種恐怖的障礙賽場地。我抱著他等候過馬路時，一想到我的小孩或任何小孩要在這樣的生活中幸存，真是太荒謬了。那概率就像晚春的蝴蝶存活的概率一樣低（你知道，就是那些小小的白蝴蝶），有時我看到那些小蝴蝶在空中搖晃著飛翔，總是差點撞死在汽車的擋風(fēng)玻璃上。

　 And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours.

另外，讓我告訴你我學(xué)到的兩件事。第一件事，不管子女年紀(jì)多大，或他們是在什么時候、怎么樣成為你的子女，一旦你決定把某個人想成你的子女，事情就改變了。之前你從他們身上得到的一切樂趣，你對他們的所有感覺，全被那種恐懼壓過去了。那不是生物學(xué)上的恐懼，而是超生物學(xué)的。那不是源自要確保一個人的基因密碼存活下去，而更接近一種渴望，渴望證明自己不被這個世界的計謀和挑戰(zhàn)侵犯，渴望擊敗那些試圖摧毀你所擁有的事物的力量。

　 The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

第二件事情是：當(dāng)子女死了，種種預(yù)期中的感覺你都會有。這些感覺，有太多人詳盡記錄下來了，我就不在這里一一列出了。只不過要說一聲，那些關(guān)于悲痛的文字都一樣，這種一致是有原因的——因為其實那些感受都沒有偏離主軸。有時你覺得這種感覺比較多、那種感覺比較少，有時你覺得感覺的順序不對，有時你覺得某種感覺持續(xù)得比較久、另一種感覺比較短暫；但那些感覺總是一樣的。

　 But here’s what no one says—when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

沒有人說過的是，當(dāng)你的小孩死了，一部分的你（非常小、但不可忽略的一部分）也松了一口氣。因為，從你成為父母的那一天起，一直在你預(yù)期中、你日夜擔(dān)心且為之做好準(zhǔn)備的那一刻，終于來到了。

　 Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is.

啊，你告訴自己，終于來到了，就是現(xiàn)在了。

　 And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

之后，你再也沒什么好害怕的了。

　 Years ago, after the publication of my third book, a journalist once asked me if you could tell right away whether a student had a mind for law or not, and the answer is: Sometimes. But often, you’re wrong—the student who seemed so bright in the first half of the semester becomes steadily less so as the year goes on, and the student about whom you never thought one thing or another is the one who emerges as a dazzler, someone you love hearing think.

幾年前，我的第三本書出版后，有記者問我能否一眼看出學(xué)生適不適合讀法律。我的答案是：有時候。但往往你會看走眼，上半學(xué)期看起來似乎很聰明的學(xué)生持續(xù)退步，而一個你原先根本沒注意的學(xué)生卻逐漸散發(fā)光芒，你想要聽他講出自己的想法。

　 It’s often the most naturally intelligent students who have the most difficult time in their first year—law school, particularly the first year of law school, is really not a place where creativity, abstract thought, and imagination are rewarded. In this way, I often think—based upon what I’ve heard, not what I know firsthand—that it’s a bit like art school.

天資最聰穎的學(xué)生，第一年往往過得最辛苦。法學(xué)院，尤其是法學(xué)院的第一年，真的是不太鼓勵鍛煉創(chuàng)造力、抽象思考能力和想象力。我常常覺得，在這方面（根據(jù)我聽說的，并非第一手信息）有點類似藝術(shù)學(xué)院。

　 Julia had a friend, a man named Dennys, who was as a boy a tremendously gifted artist. They had been friends since they were small, and she once showed me some of the drawings he made when he was ten or twelve: little sketches of birds pecking at the ground, of his face, round and blank, of his father, the local veterinarian, his hand smoothing the fur of a grimacing terrier. Dennys’s father didn’t see the point of drawing lessons, however, and so he was never formally schooled. But when they were older, and Julia went to university, Dennys went to art school to learn how to draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted, and it was always Dennys’s sketches that the professor selected to pin up on the wall for praise and critique.

朱麗婭有個朋友叫丹尼斯，從小就非常有藝術(shù)才華。他們小時候就很要好，有回她拿他10歲或12歲畫的東西給我看，都是一些小素描：幾只鳥在啄地，他沒有表情的圓臉，或是他的獸醫(yī)父親撫摸著一只滿臉痛苦的狗。丹尼斯的父親看不出上繪畫課有什么用，所以丹尼斯從沒受過正式訓(xùn)練。等到他們年紀(jì)稍長，朱麗婭去上大學(xué)時，丹尼斯則去了藝術(shù)學(xué)院學(xué)習(xí)繪畫。他說，第一個星期，他們可以隨心所欲畫任何東西，教授總是挑出丹尼斯的素描，釘在墻上，供大家贊美與批評。

　 But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.

但接下來，他們開始學(xué)習(xí)如何繪畫：本質(zhì)上，就是重新學(xué)畫畫。第二個星期，他們只畫橢圓：寬的橢圓、胖的橢圓、瘦的橢圓。第三個星期，他們畫圓：三維空間的圓、二維空間的圓。然后畫一朵花、一個花瓶、一只手，再來是一顆頭、一具身體。隨著每周的訓(xùn)練，丹尼斯畫得越來越糟。等到學(xué)期末，他的畫就再也沒被釘?shù)綁ι狭?。對于繪畫，他變得很局促不安。現(xiàn)在他看到一只狗，它尾巴上的長毛輕輕掃過地面，他看到的不再是一只狗，而是盒子上接著一個圓。當(dāng)他試著畫的時候，他擔(dān)心的是比例，而不是要抓住那只狗的神韻。

　 He decided to speak to his professor. We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it.

他決定找教授談?wù)?。我們的用意就是要擊垮你，丹尼斯，他的教授說，只有真正有才華的人，才有辦法重新站起來。

　 “I guess I wasn’t one of the truly talented,” Dennys would say. He became a barrister instead, lived in London with his partner.

“那我想我不是真正有才華的人?！钡つ崴拐f。他后來成為出庭律師，和他的伴侶住在倫敦。

　 “Poor Dennys,” Julia would say.

“可憐的丹尼斯。”朱麗婭說。