双语·当呼吸化为空气 不久就要毕业了

不久就要毕业了，我却有种坐立不安的感觉，似乎有很多问题还没解决，我还有很多东西要学习。我申请了斯坦福的英语文学硕士，被录取了。我已经把语言视作一种几乎超自然的力量，存在于人与人之间，让我们那一厘米厚头盖骨下隐藏的大脑沟通共享。只有在人与人之间，一个单词才有意义。而生命是否有意义，某种程度上要看我们建立的关系的深度。就是人类的关联性加强了生命的意义。不过，不知怎么地，这个过程存在于大脑和身体里，也受生理原因的驱使，可能被打破，可能会失败。我一直在思考，我们所经历的人生的“语言”，比如激情、饥饿与爱，一定通过某种方式，与神经元、消化道和心脏的跳动产生联系，不管这联系多么错综复杂。
As graduation loomed, I had a nagging sense that there was still far too much unresolved for me, that I wasn’t done studying. I applied for a master’s in English literature at Stanford and was accepted into the program. I had come to see language as an almost supernatural force, existing between people, bringing our brains, shielded in centimeter-thick skulls, into communion. A word meant something only between people, and life’s meaning, its virtue, had something to do with the depth of the relationships we form. It was the relational aspect of humans—i. e., “human relationality”—that undergirded meaning. Yet somehow, this process existed in brains and bodies, subject to their own physiologic imperatives, prone to breaking and failing. There must be a way, I thought, that the language of life as experienced—of passion, of hunger, of love—bore some relationship, however convoluted, to the language of neurons, digestive tracts, and heartbeats.

在斯坦福，我很幸运地师从理查德·罗蒂，他大概是同时代在世哲学家中最伟大的一位。在他的指导下，我开始看清构建语汇系统的所有原则，并掌握一系列工具，能用特定的方法、从特定的角度去理解人类的生命。伟大的文学作品能提供属于它本身的工具，吸引和催促读者去运用它们的语汇系统。我的论文研究的是沃尔特·惠特曼的作品。一个世纪前，这位诗人也和我一样，被同样的问题缠绕困扰，上下求索，努力去理解和描述他所说的“生理与精神共存之人”。
At Stanford, I had the good fortune to study with Richard Rorty, perhaps the greatest living philosopher of his day, and under his tutelage I began to see all disciplines as creating a vocabulary, a set of tools for understanding human life in a particular way. Great literary works provided their own sets of tools, compelling the reader to use that vocabulary. For my thesis, I studied the work of Walt Whitman, a poet who, a century before, was possessed by the same questions that haunted me, who wanted to find a way to understand and describe what he termed “the Physiological-Spiritual Man.”

论文收尾，我只得出一个结论：和我们一样，惠特曼也没能建立一个连贯完整的“生理与精神共存”的语汇系统。不过，至少他失败的各种方式都很有启发性。我也越来越确定，自己已经不想继续文学研究了，因为我猛然意识到，文学研究主要关注的很多东西，都太政治化，而且反科学。我的一位论文导师说，我想在文学界为自己找到一个圈子是很难的，因为，大多数英语文学博士对科学的反应，“就像猿猴看到火，特别恐惧”。我有点找不到人生的方向了。我的论文《惠特曼和人格的医疗化》收获了好评，但太“异端”了，精神病学与神经学历史的内容和文学批评所占比例一样多。这篇文章在英语系显得格格不入，我也是。
As I finished my thesis, I could only conclude that Whitman had had no better luck than the rest of us at building a coherent“physiological-spiritual” vocabulary, but at least the ways in which he’d failed were illuminating. I was also increasingly certain that I had little desire to continue in literary studies, whose main preoccupations had begun to strike me as overly political and averse to science. One of my thesis advisers remarked that finding a community for myself in the literary world would be difficult, because most English PhDs reacted to science, as he put it, “like apes to fire, with sheer terror.” I wasn’t sure where my life was headed. My thesis— “Whitman and the Medicalization of Personality”—was well-received, but it was unorthodox, including as much history of psychiatry and neuroscience as literary criticism. It didn’t quite fit in an English department. I didn’t quite fit in an English department.