双语·当呼吸化为空气 序言

序言
FOREWORD

亚伯拉罕·维基斯
Abraham Verghese

写下这些文字时，我突然想到，这本书的序言，其实最好作为后记来读，因为涉及保罗·卡拉尼什的一切，时间都是倒着来的。比如说，我是在保罗死后，才真正认识他的。（请宽恕我吧。）当他已经不在人世，才成了我亲密的朋友。
It occurs to me, as I write this, that the foreword to this book might be better thought of as an afterword. Because when it comes to Paul Kalanithi, all sense of time is turned on its head. To begin with—or, maybe, to end with—I got to know Paul only after his death. (Bear with me.) I came to know him most intimately when he’d ceased to be.

2014年2月初，一个难忘的下午，我在斯坦福见到了他。他刚刚在《纽约时报》发表了一篇特稿——《我还能活多久》，这篇文章引起了强烈反响，众多读者纷纷回应。发表之后的几天内，传播速度极其迅猛。（我专攻传染病，所以原谅我没有用“病毒”来形容。）余波未了，他便与我联系，说要来聊聊，问问著作权代理、编辑和图书出版之类的问题。他想写一本书，就是这一本，这本你正在捧读的书。我还记得阳光透过我办公室窗外的玉兰树，照亮眼前的一幕：保罗和我面对面坐着，好看的双手稳稳地放在面前；脸上留着先知一样的络腮胡；深色的眼睛上下打量着我。在我的记忆中，这一幕有点像维米尔的画，像针孔照相机呈现的作品。还记得当时我心想，你得记住这一幕。因为映在我视网膜上的一切都太珍贵了。还因为，由于保罗已经被诊断出了癌症，我想到他将死的命运，更意识到自己也是个必死的凡人。那天下午，我们聊了很多。他当时是神经外科的住院总医师。我们的工作曾经也许有过交集，但也没能想起有过哪位共同的病人。他告诉我，他在斯坦福本科学的是英语和生物学，之后又继续留在本校，攻读了英语文学的硕士学位。
I met him one memorable afternoon at Stanford in early February 2014. He’d just published an op-ed titled “How Long Have I Got Left?” in The New York Times, an essay that would elicit an overwhelming response, an outpouring from readers. In the ensuing days, it spread logarithmically. (I’m an infectious diseases specialist, so please forgive me for not using the word viral as a metaphor.) In the aftermath of that, he’d asked to come see me, to chat, to get advice about literary agents, editors, the publishing process—he had a desire to write a book, this book, the one you are now holding in your hands. I recall the sun filtering through the magnolia tree out-side my office and lighting this scene: Paul seated before me, his beautiful hands exceedingly still, his prophet’s beard full, those dark eyes taking the measure of me. In my memory, the picture has a Vermeer-like quality, a camera obscura sharpness. I remember thinking, You must remember this, because what was falling on my retina was precious. And because, in the context of Paul’s diag-nosis, I became aware of not just his mortality but my own. We talked about a lot of things that afternoon. He was a neurosurgical chief resident. We had probably crossed paths at some point, but we hadn’t shared a patient that we could recall. He told me he had been an English and biology major as an undergraduate at Stanford, and then stayed on for a master’s in English literature.

我们聊了他对写作和阅读与生俱来的热爱。我有点吃惊，他本来轻轻松松就可以成为一名英文教授，而且，曾经也好像要走这条路。然而，就像和他同名的保罗前往大马士革途中时一样，他也感觉到了冥冥中的召唤，成了一名医师。但他一直希望以某种形式实现自己的文学梦。也许有一天，写本书什么的。他本以为自己时间还多。本来就是嘛！然而，现在，时间，成为他最稀缺的东西。
We talked about his lifelong love of writing and reading. I was struck by how easily he could have been an English professor—and, indeed, he had seemed to be headed down that path at one point in his life. But then, just like his namesake on the road to Damascus, he felt the calling. He became a physician instead, but one who always dreamed of coming back to literature in some form. A book, perhaps. One day. He thought he had time, and why not? And yet now time was the very thing he had so little of.

我还记得他温柔又带点嘲弄意味的笑容，尽管已经枯瘦憔悴，脸上还是带着一丝顽皮。他已经和癌症过招许久，身心俱疲，但最近一次生物疗法起到了良好的效果，让他有时间考虑接下来的事情。他说，学医的时候，一直觉得自己会成为精神科医生，没想到爱上了神经外科。他爱的不仅仅是大脑的错综复杂和经过训练可以做惊人手术的满足感，还有对那些饱受痛苦的人深切的爱与同情。他们的遭遇，和他能够实现的可能，是他入行的主要原因。他给我讲的时候轻描淡写，相比之下，我有些曾经做过他助手的学生跟我谈得比较多，他们总是说起保罗这可贵的品质——他坚定地相信自己的工作有道德上的意义和价值。接着，我们又谈了他面临死亡的现实。
I remember his wry, gentle smile, a hint of mischief there, even though his face was gaunt and haggard. He’d been through the wringer with this cancer but a new biological therapy had produced a good response, allowing him to look ahead a bit. He said during medical school he’d assumed that he would become a psychiatrist, only to fall in love with neurosurgery. It was much more than a falling in love with the intricacies of the brain, much more than the satisfaction of training his hands to accomplish amazing feats—it was a love and empathy for those who suffered, for what they endured and what he might bring to bear. I don’t think he told me this as much as I had heard about this quality of his from students of mine who were his acolytes: his fierce belief in the moral dimension of his job. And then we talked about his dying.

那次之后，我们通过电子邮件保持联系，但再也没见过面了。不仅是因为我被各种各样的工作淹没了，还因为我有种强烈的感觉，一定要尊重他的时间。见不见我，要让保罗来定。我觉得他现在最不需要的，就是来维持一段新的友谊。不过，我倒是常常想起他，也想起他的妻子。我想问他有没有在写东西，找到时间来写了吗。多年来，作为一个忙碌的医师，我很难找到时间写作。我想告诉他，一位著名作家曾经用同情的语气和我谈起这个永恒的难题：“如果我是个神经外科医生，说我必须撇下家里的客人，去做紧急开颅手术，没人会说什么。但如果我说，我得把客人撇在客厅，到楼上去写作……”我想知道，保罗会不会觉得这话很滑稽。毕竟，他还真的可以说自己要去做开颅手术！反正很合理！然后他就可以离开去写东西了。
After that meeting, we kept in touch by email, but never saw each other again. It was not just that I disappeared into my own world of deadlines and responsibilities but also my strong sense that the burden was on me to be respectful of his time. It was up to Paul if he wanted to see me. I felt that the last thing he needed was the obligation to service a new friendship. I thought about him a lot, though, and about his wife. I wanted to ask him if he was writing. Was he finding the time? For years, as a busy physician, I’d struggled to find the time to write. I wanted to tell him that a famous writer, commiserating about this eternal problem, once said to me, “If I were a neurosurgeon and I announced that I had to leave my guests to go in for an emergency craniotomy, no one would say a word. But if I said I needed to leave the guests in the living room to go upstairs to write. . . ” I wondered if Paul would have found this funny? After all, he could actually say he was going to do a craniotomy! It was plausible! And then he could go write instead.

写作这本书的同时，保罗在《斯坦福医学》上发表了一篇很出色的短文，主要探讨时间的问题。我也有篇相同主题的文章，就和他的并排在一起。不过，等杂志拿到手，我才看到保罗的文章。读着他的字字句句，我又产生了读《纽约时报》那篇文章时的感受：保罗写的东西，真是令人叫绝。他随便写点什么，都会充满冲击力。但他的选材可不是随随便便的，他专注于写时间，写生病之后时间对于他的意义。这样的主题，让他的文章变得那样尖锐深刻，令人沉痛。
While Paul was writing this book, he published a short, remarkable essay in Stanford Medicine, in an issue that was devoted to the idea of time. I had an essay in the same issue, my piece juxtaposed to his, though I learned of his contribution only when the magazine was in my hands. In reading his words, I had a second, deeper glimpse of something of which there had been a hint in the New York Times essay: Paul’s writing was simply stunning. He could have been writing about anything, and it would have been just as powerful. But he wasn’t writing about anything—he was writing about time and what it meant to him now, in the context of his illness. Which made it all so incredibly poignant.

不过，除了主题，我必须要说的是，他的文笔也令人难忘。他的笔尖仿佛有“点石成金”的魔力。
But here’s the thing I must come back to: the prose was unforgettable. Out of his pen he was spinning gold.

我一再捧读保罗这篇文章，努力去理解他想表达的东西。他的文章如同美妙的音乐，有点加尔威·金耐尔的感觉，几乎可以称之为散文诗了。（“如果有一天／你与爱人／在米拉波桥头／咖啡馆里／锌吧台上／向上的敞开的酒杯里盛着美酒……”这是金耐尔的一首诗，我曾在爱荷华的一家书店听他现场背诵过，全程没有低头看稿。）但保罗的文字中还有别的东西，来自一片古老的土地，来自锌吧台的年代之前。几天后，我再次捧读他的文章，终于想明白了：保罗的文字，颇得托马斯·布朗的神韵，1642年，布朗写了《一个医生的信仰》，用的都是古英语的拼写和语法。还是个年轻医生时，我对那本书颇为着迷，总是一读再读，就像一个农民立志要抽干一个泥塘，以完成父辈未竟之事。尽管难于登天，我还是迫切地想探究书中的奥妙，有时沮丧地放到一边，接着又拿起来。我不知道自己能否从书中汲取到什么，但有时我会一字一句地读出声来，感觉里面的确有写给我的东西。我觉得自己似乎缺乏了什么关键的感官，让那些字母无法尽情歌唱，展露它们的意义。无论我多努力，仍然看不透书中的奥义。
I reread Paul’s piece again and again, trying to understand what he had brought about. First, it was musical. It had echoes of Galway Kinnell, almost a prose poem. (“If one day it happens / you find yourself with someone you love / in a café at one end /of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar / where wine stands in upward opening glasses. . . ” to quote a Kinnell line, from a poem I once heard him recite in a bookstore in Iowa City, never looking down at the paper.) But it also had a taste of something else, something from an antique land, from a time before zinc bars. It finally came to me a few days later when I picked up his essay yet again: Paul’s writing was reminiscent of Thomas Browne’s. Browne had written Religio Medici in the prose of 1642, with all its archaic spellings and speech. As a young physician, I was obsessed with that book, kept at it like a farmer trying to drain a bog that his father before had failed to drain. It was a futile task, and yet I was desperate to learn its secrets, tossing it aside in frustration, then picking it up again, unsure that it had anything for me but, in sounding the words, sensing that it did. I felt that I lacked some critical receptor for the letters to sing, to impart their meaning. It remained opaque, no matter how hard I tried.

那你一定会问了——为什么？为什么我这么不屈不挠？谁在乎《一个医生的信仰》？
Why, you ask? Why did I persevere? Who cares about Religio Medici ?

嗯，我的偶像威廉·奥斯勒就在乎。奥斯勒是现代医学之父，于1919年逝世。他很钟爱这本书，总是放在床头柜上，还要求用这本书来陪葬。那时候，我没能从书中悟出奥斯勒悟出的东西。经过多次努力，经过几十年的岁月，这本书的真意终于展现在我眼前。（一个比较新的版本用了现代英语的行文方式，也有助于理解。）我发现，关键是要把内容大声读出来，那种抑扬顿挫的韵律也是至关重要的：我们身负奇迹而行，却在自身之外寻找奇迹：作为人类摇篮的非洲和她的奇观，都蕴含在我们身体里；我们是自然大胆冒险的造物，研究自然者，如若睿智，则提纲挈领，研究人类足矣，其他人则孜孜以求，埋首于分裂的碎片与浩繁的卷帙。等你读到保罗这本书的最后一段，大声读出来吧，也会感受到同样的韵律节奏，可能让你情不自禁地跺起脚来打起拍子……但就像读布朗的作品一样，冲动之后，你会掩卷深思。在我看来，保罗，就是布朗的化身。（或者，按照我时间倒转的说法，布朗是保罗·卡拉尼什的化身。是啊，真是让人晕头转向。）
Well, my hero William Osler cared, that’s who. Osler was the father of modern medicine, a man who died in 1919. He had loved the book. He kept it on his night-stand. He’d asked to be buried with a copy of Religio Medici. For the life of me, I didn’t get what Osler saw in it. After many tries—and after some decades—the book finally revealed itself to me. (It helped that a newer edition had modern spellings.) The trick, I discovered, was to read it aloud, which made the cadence inescapable: “We carry with us the wonders, we seek without us: There is all Africa, and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature, which he that studies, wisely learns in a compendium, what others labour at in a divided piece and endless volume.” When you come to the last paragraph of Paul’s book, read it aloud and you will hear that same long line, the cadence you think you can tap your feet to. . . but as with Browne, you will be just off. Paul, it occurred to me, was Browne redux. (Or given that forward time is our illusion, perhaps it’s that Browne was Kalanithi redux. Yes, it’s head-spinning stuff.)

然后，保罗去世了。我去斯坦福的教堂参加了他的追悼会。那是个很华丽的地方，我经常在没人时跑去坐着，欣赏教堂里的光影，享受静谧的一刻，出来的时候总会觉得焕然一新。追悼会那天，教堂里人头攒动。我坐在一边，听保罗最亲密的朋友、他的牧师和他的弟弟讲述一个个关于他的故事，都很动人，也有一些很苦楚。是的，保罗已经去世了，但我有种奇怪的感觉，自己正在慢慢地了解他，这种了解超越了那次在我办公室的会面，超越了他写的那几篇文章。在斯坦福纪念教堂里，他活在这些故事中。高耸的圆顶很适合用来纪念这个男人，他的身体已经化归尘土，然而形象依然如此亲切鲜活。他活在美丽的妻子和可爱的小女儿身体里，活在悲痛的双亲与手足心中，活在这教堂里众多好友、同事和过去的病人的表情中。后来户外的招待会上，大家共聚一堂，他也在场。我看到人们脸上带着平静的微笑，仿佛刚刚在教堂中见证了极其优美而深远的事物。也许我脸上也带着同样的表情：在一场追悼仪式上，在一片颂扬称赞之声中，在一起流下的眼泪里，我们找到了生命的意义。而在招待会上，我们喝水解渴，进食果腹，和素未谋面的陌生人交谈，因为保罗，我们有了亲密的联系。这其中，也有着更为深远的意义。
And then Paul died. I attended his memorial in the Stanford church, a gorgeous space where I often go when it is empty to sit and admire the light, the silence, and where I always find renewal. It was packed for the service. I sat off to one side, listening to a series of moving and sometimes raucous stories from his closest friends, his pastor, and his brother. Yes, Paul was gone, but strangely, I felt I was coming to know him, beyond that visit in my office, beyond the few essays he’d written. He was taking form in those tales being told in the Stanford Memorial Church, its soaring cathedral dome a fitting space in which to remember this man whose body was now in the earth but who nevertheless was so palpably alive. He took form in the shape of his lovely wife and baby daughter, his grieving parents and siblings, in the faces of the legions of friends, colleagues, and former patients who filled that space; he was there at the reception later, outdoors in a setting where so many came together. I saw faces looking calm, smiling, as if they had witnessed something profoundly beautiful in the church. Perhaps my face was like that, too: we had found meaning in the ritual of a service, in the ritual of eulogizing, in the shared tears. There was further meaning residing in this reception where we slaked our thirst, fed our bodies, and talked with complete strangers to whom we were intimately connected through Paul.

然而，一直等到保罗去世两个月后，我终于拿到你现在捧读的这本书时，才感觉自己终于进一步了解了他。能和他做朋友，真是我的福气。读完你即将开始读的这本书后，我坦白，自己实在甘拜下风：他的文字中，有种诚恳正直，让我惊羡不已。
But it was only when I received the pages that you now hold in your hands, two months after Paul died, that I felt I had finally come to know him, to know him better than if I had been blessed to call him a friend. After reading the book you are about to read, I confess I felt inadequate: there was an honesty, a truth in the writing that took my breath away.

做好准备，找个地方坐下，见证勇气的模样。看一看需要多么勇敢，才能如此剖析和袒露自己。但最重要的是，你会见证虽死犹生的奇迹，死去之后，仍然能用你的文字对他人的生命产生深远的影响。当今世界，信息爆炸，我们常常淹没在屏幕中，眼睛牢牢盯着手上那块嗡嗡响的长方形发光体，时时刻刻都在注意着那些碎片化的东西。现在，请你停一停，与我英年早逝的同事进行一次心灵的对话。他虽死去，却永远年轻，永远存在于回忆之中。倾听保罗吧。在他字里行间的沉默中，倾听你自己的回应。他要传递的信息就在书中。我已然明了。我希望你也一样去感受。这是一份礼物。我已经无须在保罗和你之间传话了。
Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after you are gone, by your words. In a world of asynchronous communication, where we are so often buried in our screens, our gaze rooted to the rectangular objects buzzing in our hand, our attention consumed by ephemera, stop and experience this dialogue with my young departed colleague, now ageless and extant in memory. Listen to Paul. In the silences between his words, listen to what you have to say back. Therein lies his message. I got it. I hope you experience it, too. It is a gift. Let me not stand between you and Paul.

本书涉及的事件全部基于卡拉尼什医生回忆的真实经历。不过，书中出现的病人均为化名。除此之外，所有医学案例中的细节，比如病人的年龄、性别、种族、职业、家属、住址、病史和诊断，全部进行了修改。卡拉尼什医生的同事、朋友和治疗他的医师也全部为化名，只有一人除外。若因化名和细节修改引起的任何雷同，纯属巧合，无意冒犯。
EVENTS DESCRIBED ARE BASED on Dr. Kalanithi’s memory of real-world situations. However, the names of all patients discussed in this book—if given at all—have been changed. In addition, in each of the medical cases described, identifying details—such as patients’ages, genders, ethnicities, professions, familial relationships, places of residence, medical histories, and/or diagnoses— have been changed. With one exception, the names of Dr. Kalanithi’s colleagues, friends, and treating physicians have also been changed. Any resemblance to persons living or dead resulting from changes to names or identifying details is entirely coincidental and unintentional.