雙語·當呼吸化為空氣 我的癌癥病情穩(wěn)定下來了

我的癌癥病情穩(wěn)定下來了。
My cancer was stable.

第二天，我們?nèi)ヒ姲?，她仍然不愿意預測生命周期，但有點松口了：“你現(xiàn)在好轉(zhuǎn)了很多，我們可以改到每六個星期見一次面了。下次見面的時候，我們可以談談你未來的生活了?！蔽腋杏X到，過去幾個月來的那種混亂恐慌在逐漸退卻，新的秩序開始慢慢建立。我對未來那種心急火燎的緊張感也放松下來了。
When we met Emma the next day she still refused to talk prognosis, but she said, “You’re well enough that we can meet every six weeks now. Next time we meet, we can start to talk about what your life might be like.” I could feel the chaos of the past months receding, a sense of a new order settling in. My contracted sense of the future began to relax.

那個周末，有個當?shù)厮固垢Ｉ窠?jīng)外科畢業(yè)生的聚會，我很期待，因為又有機會尋找一下過去的那個自己了。然而，去了現(xiàn)場才發(fā)現(xiàn)，兩相比較之下，自己現(xiàn)在的生活顯得更不可思議了。我周圍這些人，身上洋溢著自信與抱負的氣息，他們的生命有著無限的可能性。有的和我同屆，有的是前輩。我已經(jīng)遠離他們的生活軌跡了，他們的身體還能夠支撐八個小時的殘酷手術。他們的生活如同美妙的圣誕頌歌，而我卻陷入了“倒帶”的苦惱。維多利亞興高采烈地拆著“禮物”：各種津貼補助、工作機會、發(fā)表文章。我本來也應該和她一樣的。我的那些前輩則展現(xiàn)著我再也不敢去想的未來：年輕有為，拿各種大獎，升職加薪，喬遷新居。
A local meeting of former Stanford neurosurgery graduates was happening that weekend, and I looked forward to the chance to reconnect with my former self. Yet being there merely heightened the surreal contrast of what my life was now. I was surrounded by success and possibility and ambition, by peers and seniors whose lives were running along a trajectory that was no longer mine, whose bodies could still tolerate standing for a grueling eight-hour surgery. I felt trapped inside a reversed Christmas carol: Victoria was opening the happy present—grants, job offers, publications—I should be sharing. My senior peers were living the future that was no longer mine: early career awards, promotions, new houses.

沒人問我接下來有什么打算，這倒是讓我松了口氣，因為我什么打算也沒有。我現(xiàn)在走路倒是不用拐杖了，但人生的前路仍然像癱瘓病人一樣，充滿不確定：我會成為一個什么樣的人，繼續(xù)走在人生之路上呢，能走多久？繼續(xù)做一個病人，搞科研，當老師？做生物倫理學家？像艾瑪說的那樣，再次回到神經(jīng)外科？在家當奶爸？寫東西？我能夠，或者說應該，成為一個怎樣的人呢？做醫(yī)生的時候，我也略略體會到那些因為一場病改變一生的病人面對著什么，也正是在那樣的時刻，我非常希望和他們攜手去探索。那么，這樣的絕癥，對于一個想要理解死亡的年輕人，難道不是一份很好的禮物嗎？還有什么，是比親身體驗更好的理解方法呢？但我之前根本無從知曉，這有多么艱難；我需要去跋涉、探尋與摸索多少艱難險阻。我一直覺得，醫(yī)生的工作就像把兩節(jié)鐵軌連接到一起，讓病人的生命旅程暢通無阻。根本沒想到，我自己的死亡之旅，是如此混亂，如此沒有方向。我回想更年輕的自己，胸懷大志，要將“人類尚未產(chǎn)生的道德良知鍛造進自己的靈魂”；現(xiàn)在，我審視自己的靈魂，才發(fā)現(xiàn)鍛造的工具太脆弱，鍛造的火焰太微弱，就連鍛造自己那點小小的良知都有限。
No one asked about my plans, which was a relief, since I had none. While I could now walk without a cane, a paralytic uncertainty loomed: Who would I be, going forward, and for how long? Invalid, scientist, teacher? Bioethicist? Neurosurgeon once again, as Emma had implied? Stay-at-home dad? Writer? Who could, or should, I be? As a doctor, I had had some sense of what patients with life-changing illnesses faced—and it was exactly these moments I had wanted to explore with them. Shouldn’t terminal illness, then, be the perfect gift to that young man who had wanted to understand death? What better way to understand it than to live it? But I’d had no idea how hard it would be, how much terrain I would have to explore, map, settle. I’d always imagined the doctor’s work as something like connecting two pieces of railroad track, allowing a smooth journey for the patient. I hadn’t expected the prospect of facing my own mortality to be so disorienting, so dislocating. I thought back to my younger self, who might’ve wanted to “forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race”; looking into my own soul, I found the tools too brittle, the fire too weak, to forge even my own conscience.

自己的死亡，是一片毫無特點可言的荒原，我迷失其中，科學研究、細胞分子與無窮無盡的生存數(shù)據(jù)曲線，都無法指引前進的方向。于是我又轉(zhuǎn)而求助于文學：索爾仁尼琴的《癌病房》，B.S.約翰遜的《不幸的人》，托爾斯泰的《伊凡·伊里奇之死》，內(nèi)格爾的《心靈與宇宙》，還有伍爾夫、卡夫卡、蒙田、弗羅斯特、格雷維爾等人的作品以及癌癥病人的回憶錄。無論是誰，只要寫的東西與死亡有關，我都如饑似渴地閱讀。我尋找那些能夠把死亡及其意義解釋清楚的字字句句。我要從中開辟一條路，好為自己下個定義；我要在其中探索方向，好繼續(xù)緩步向前。我“有幸”能親身體驗死亡，所以之前覺得不必再求助文學與學術著作，然而，現(xiàn)在我發(fā)現(xiàn)，要理解自己這種直接的體驗，還需要將其放回到語言文字之中。海明威也描述過類似的經(jīng)歷：獲得豐富的體驗，然后退避三舍進行深思，接著將體驗付諸文字。我也需要借助這些字字句句，才能前進。
Lost in a featureless wasteland of my own mortality, and finding no traction in the reams of scientific studies, intracellular molecular pathways, and endless curves of survival statistics, I began reading literature again: Solzhenitsyn’s Cancer Ward, B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates, Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, Nagel’s Mind and Cosmos, Woolf, Kafka, Montaigne, Frost, Greville, memoirs of cancer patients—anything by anyone who had ever written about mortality. I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. The privilege of direct experience had led me away from literary and academic work, yet now I felt that to understand my own direct experiences, I would have to translate them back into language. Hemingway described his process in similar terms: acquiring rich experiences, then retreating to cogitate and write about them. I needed words to go forward.