双语·当呼吸化为空气 她扫完地 我们就到里面去了

她扫完地，我们就到里面去了。艾比盖尔走到收银机那儿，拿起一本她放在那儿的平装书。“拿着，”她朝我扔过来，“这本书你该看看的。你一直在读那些特别有文化的破书，怎么就不可以看看低级趣味的东西？”那是一本五百页的小说，《撒旦：不幸的卡斯勒医生的心理疗法与治愈》，作者杰里米·莱文。我把书拿回家，一天就看完了。这书没什么内涵，本应该很有趣的，但真的没什么意思。不过里面倒是漫不经心地提出了一个假设：思想不过就是大脑运转的产物。我被这个想法震撼了，甚至动摇了我对这个世界幼稚的理解。当然这个假说一定是正确的，否则要我们的大脑干什么用呢？尽管我们拥有自由的意志，但仍然是有机生物体，大脑是我们的器官，也遵循一切物理定律！文学是人类的一大财富和意义，而通过某种方式实现文学价值的，就是大脑这个机器。这真是神奇的魔法。那天晚上，在自己房间里，我打开已经翻来覆去看过好几十遍的红色斯坦福课程总目录，手里拿着一支荧光笔。之前我已经标记了很多文学课程。现在，我开始寻找生物和神经系统科学的相关课程了。
The floors swept, we went inside. Abigail walked to the cash register and picked up a paperback she’d stashed there. “Here,” she said, tossing it at me. “You should read this. You’re always reading such high-culture crap— why don’t you try something lowbrow for once?”It was a five-hundred-page novel called Satan: His Psychotherapy and Cure by the Unfortunate Dr. Kassler, J.S.P.S., by Jeremy Leven. I took it home and read it in a day. It wasn’t high culture. It should have been funny, but it wasn’t. However, it did make the throwaway assumption that the mind was simply the operation of the brain, an idea that struck me with force; it startled my naive understanding of the world. Of course, it must be true—what were our brains doing, otherwise? Though we had free will, we were also biological organisms—the brain was an organ, subject to all the laws of physics, too! Literature provided a rich account of human meaning; the brain, then, was the machinery that somehow enabled it. It seemed like magic. That night, in my room, I opened up my red Stanford course catalog, which I had read through dozens of times, and grabbed a highlighter. In addition to all the literature classes I had marked, I began looking in biology and neuroscience as well.

几年后，我仍然没怎么去想工作和事业，但已经快要拿到英语文学和人体生物学的学位了。我学习的最大动力，不是成就感，而是一种求知欲，我非常认真地想要探究，是什么让人类的生命充满意义？我仍然认为，文学是精神生活的最高境界，而神经系统科学则探索大脑最为优雅的规律。“意义”这个概念，很是让人捉摸不定，但也难以和人与人之间的关系以及道德价值观割裂开来。T.S.艾略特的《荒原》中就有令人难忘的诗句，深刻地表明了孤独隔绝的生活没有意义，以及对人情纽带的强烈渴望。艾略特那些比喻也渗透进我自己的写作语言。其他作家也让我产生共鸣。比如纳博科夫，他清醒地意识到，自己遭遇世事变迁之后，会对别人的遭遇麻木无情。康拉德，他坚定地认为人与人之间错误的交流沟通会对他们的生活产生深刻的影响。在我眼里，文学不仅描写了别人的生活，还为我们提供了道德反思最丰富的资料。我几次试图涉足分析哲学，但非常枯燥，没有那种乱糟糟的兴奋感，也没有真实生活的分量。
A few years later, I hadn’t thought much more about a career but had nearly completed degrees in English literature and human biology. I was driven less by achievement than by trying to understand, in earnest: What makes human life meaningful? I still felt literature provided the best account of the life of the mind, while neuroscience laid down the most elegant rules of the brain. Meaning, while a slippery concept, seemed inextricable from human relationships and moral values. T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land resonated profoundly, relating meaning-lessness and isolation, and the desperate quest for human connection. I found Eliot’s metaphors leaking into my own language. Other authors resonated as well. Nabokov, for his awareness of how our suffering can make us callous to the obvious suffering of another. Conrad, for his hypertuned sense of how miscommunication between people can so profoundly impact their lives. Literature not only illuminated another’s experience, it provided, I believed, the richest material for moral reflection. My brief forays into the formal ethics of analytic philosophy felt dry as a bone, missing the messiness and weight of real human life.

大学生涯中，我对人生意义进行的研究，一直非常学术，如同僧侣修道。而形成这种意义的，恰恰是人与人之间的关系，我想要去建立和加强这种关系，就和我的研究方式发生了冲突。如果说没有自省的人生不值得过，那么没有真正活过的人生还值得自省吗？大二的暑假快到了，我申请了两份工作：一个是在科学氛围浓厚的亚特兰大国家灵长类研究中心做实习研究员；一个是在塞拉高山营厨房打下手。塞拉高山营是一个斯坦福校友的家庭度假营地，在原始高山湖落叶湖的岸边，紧临埃尔多拉多国家森林公园的荒芜原野保护区，可以饱览荒凉空旷之美。关于这个营地，有很多文学描写，看上去我会度过一生中最棒的暑假。说实话，申请成功的时候，我真是受宠若惊。不过，我又了解到，猕猴已经有了初级的文化形式，这让我十分想去灵长类研究中心一探生命意义的自然起源。换句话说，我要么去研究生命的意义，要么就去亲自经历和体验生命的意义。
Throughout college, my monastic, scholarly study of human meaning would conflict with my urge to forge and strengthen the human relationships that formed that meaning. If the unexamined life was not worth living, was the unlived life worth examining? Heading into my sophomore summer, I applied for two jobs: as an intern at the highly scientific Yerkes Primate Research Center, in Atlanta, and as a prep chef at Sierra Camp, a family vacation spot for Stanford alumni on the pristine shores of Fallen Leaf Lake, abutting the stark beauty of Desolation Wilderness in Eldorado National Forest. The camp’s literature promised, simply, the best summer of your life. I was surprised and flattered to be accepted. Yet I had just learned that macaques had a rudimentary form of culture, and I was eager to go to Yerkes and see what could be the natural origin of meaning itself. In other words, I could either study meaning or I could experience it.