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双语·当呼吸化为空气 真是太梦幻了

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2022年07月01日

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真是太梦幻了。也就是那个时候,我恍然大悟:这只是梦幻而已。我们不可能搬来威斯康星。万一我这两年癌症严重复发呢?露西得孤孤单单在这里,远离朋友和家人,仅凭一己之力照顾病入膏肓的丈夫和新生的孩子。我近乎暴怒地抵挡着想接受这份工作的欲望,也意识到,癌症已经彻底颠覆了我对人生的规划打算。过去几个月来,我一直全力以赴,想让生活恢复到癌症之前的轨迹,否认癌症对我的生活造成了任何影响。然而,现在的我,不管多么希望感觉到胜利的喜悦,还是感到癌症如同螃蟹的大钳子,紧紧夹住我,阻止我前进。癌症的诅咒是奇怪而紧张的存在,也是对我的极大挑战,对于死神的步步逼近,我既不能无视,也不能任其摆布。就算现在死神蛰伏起来,他的阴影也时刻笼罩着我。
It was like a fantasy. And in that moment, it hit me: it was a fantasy. We could never move to Wisconsin. What if I had a serious relapse in two years? Lucy would be isolated, stripped of her friends and family, alone, caring for a dying husband and new child. As furiously as I had tried to resist it, I realized that cancer had changed the calculus. For the last several months, I had striven with every ounce to restore my life to its precancer trajectory, trying to deny cancer any purchase on my life. As desperately as I now wanted to feel triumphant, instead I felt the claws of the crab holding me back. The curse of cancer created a strange and strained existence, challenging me to be neither blind to, nor bound by, death’s approach. Even when the cancer was in retreat, it cast long shadows.

一开始丢掉斯坦福那个教授职位的时候,我安慰自己,要管理一个实验室,至少需要有二十年的计划。现在,我觉得这安慰其实是不折不扣的真理。弗洛伊德一开始就是个成功的神经科学家,后来他认识到,神经科学还需要至少一个世纪的时间,才能满足他在了解心灵和思想方面真正的抱负,于是丢开显微镜,另起炉灶。我的感觉跟他可能有点像。通过研究来创造神经外科的变革就像一个长期的赌局,因为我的病,这个赌局几乎没有了胜算。我所剩的筹码不多,不想押在实验室里了。我耳边又响起艾玛的话:你必须弄明白,自己最看重的是什么。
When I’d first lost the professorship at Stanford, I’d consoled myself with the idea that running a lab made sense only on a twenty-year time scale. Now I saw that this was, in fact, true. Freud started his career as a successful neuroscientist. When he realized neuroscience would need at least a century to catch up with his true ambition of understanding the mind, he set aside his microscope. I think I felt something similar. Transforming neurosurgery through my research was a gamble whose odds had been made too long by my diagnosis; the lab wasn’t the place I wanted to plunk the remainder of my chips. I could hear Emma’s voice again: You have to figure out what’s most important to you.

如果我已经不想再问鼎神经外科与神经系统科学这两座高峰了,那我想干什么呢?
If I no longer sought to fly on the highest trajectory of neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, what did I want?

当个爸爸?
To be a father?

做个神经外科医生?
To be a neurosurgeon?

教书?
To teach?

我也不知道。不过,就算我不知道自己要什么,也还是有收获,这收获并非来自希波克拉底、迈蒙尼德或者奥斯勒,而是我独有的顿悟:医者的职责,不是延缓死亡或让病人重回过去的生活,而是在病人和家属的生活分崩离析时,给他们庇护与看顾,直到他们可以重新站起来,面对挑战,并想清楚今后何去何从。
I didn’t know. But if I did not know what I wanted, I had learned something, something not found in Hippocrates, Maimonides, or Osler: the physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.

现在,我那些属于外科医生的骄傲自负实在毫无用处。我的确是本着对病人尽职尽责的态度,全心全意地救死扶伤,但说穿了这就是暂时的责任,是转瞬即逝的全心全意。解决了严重的健康危机,病人醒来了,身上的管子拔掉了,然后出院了,病人和家属继续生活,但事情永远不会和以前一样了。医生的话能安抚人心,就像神经外科医生的手术刀能减缓大脑的疾病。然而,这其中的不确定性与后续的发病率,还是需要继续去克服、去缠斗。
My own hubris as a surgeon stood naked to me now: as much as I focused on my responsibility and power over patients’ lives, it was at best a temporary responsibility, a fleeting power. Once an acute crisis has been resolved, the patient awakened, extubated, and then discharged, the patient and family go on living—and things are never quite the same. A physician’s words can ease the mind, just as the neurosurgeon’s scalpel can ease a disease of the brain. Yet their uncertainties and morbidities, whether emotional or physical, remain to be grappled with.

艾玛没有让我恢复原来的个人特性,而是保护了我创造新特性的能力。终于,我明白,必须去创造新的自我了。
Emma hadn’t given me back my old identity. She’d protected my ability to forge a new one. And, finally, I knew I would have to.

大斋节的第三个星期日,明澈通透的春日清晨,我们夫妻俩和我的父母一起去了教堂。他们俩从亚利桑那飞来过周末。我们一起坐在长长的木凳子上,妈妈和坐在旁边的一家人攀谈起来,先是对那位母亲说,她小女儿的眼睛真好看,接着迅速聊起格局更大的话题。她充分展示了一个倾听者、好闺密和联结者的高超能力。牧师读《圣经》的时候,我突然情不自禁地偷笑起来。这段《圣经》文字中,沮丧的耶稣说了一些隐喻,而使徒们非要去做一些字面的解释:
On a crystalline spring morning on the third Sunday of Lent, Lucy and I went to church with my parents, who had flown in from Arizona for a weekend visit. We sat together in a long wooden pew, and my mother struck up a conversation with the family sitting next to us, first complimenting the mother on her baby daughter’s eyes, then quickly moving on to matters of greater substance, her skills as a listener, confidante, and connector fully evident. During the pastor’s Scripture reading, I suddenly found myself chuckling. It featured a frustrated Jesus whose metaphorical language receives literal interpretation from his followers:

耶稣回答说:“凡喝这水的,还要再渴;人若喝我所赐的水就永远不渴;我所赐的水,要在他里头成为泉源,直涌到永生。”妇人说:“先生,请把这水赐给我,叫我不渴,也不用来这么远打水。”
Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again; but whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” The woman said to him, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.”

……这其间,门徒对耶稣说:“拉比,请吃。”耶稣说:“我有食物吃,是你们不知道的。”门徒就彼此对问说:“莫非有人拿什么给他吃吗?”
. . . Meanwhile, the disciples urged him, “Rabbi, eat.” But he said to them, “I have food to eat of which you do not know.” So the disciples said to one another, “Could someone have brought him something to eat?”

正是这样的文字,很明显地讽刺了对《圣经》进行拘于字面意义来理解的行为,也让我在对基督教长期的疏离之后得以回归。大学以后,我对上帝和耶稣的概念逐渐变得贫乏(这个词算是用得比较委婉了)。当时我一头扎进坚不可摧的无神论。对抗基督教思想的主要武器,就是基督教义在实际运用中的失败。启蒙的理性当然更说得通,更能解释身边的种种;“奥卡姆剃刀理论”当然也将信众们从盲目的信仰中解放出来。没有证据能证明上帝的存在,所以,信仰上帝并不合理。
It was passages like these, where there is a clear mocking of literalist readings of Scripture, that had brought me back around to Christianity after a long stretch, following college, when my notion of God and Jesus had grown, to put it gently, tenuous. During my sojourn in ironclad atheism, the primary arsenal leveled against Christianity had been its failure on empirical grounds. Surely enlightened reason offered a more coherent cosmos. Surely Occam’s razor cut the faithful free from blind faith. There is no proof of God; therefore, it is unreasonable to believe in God.

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