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Obituary | Creation and destruction
讣告 |创造与毁灭
英文部分选自经济学人20261017期讣告板块
Obituary | Creation and destruction
讣告 |创造与毁灭
Annie Dillard wanted to know the mind of God
安妮·迪拉德毕生求索，欲窥见上帝的心意
The nature writer and “theologian” died on September 15th, aged 81
自然作家兼“神学家”安妮·迪拉德于9月15日去世，享年81岁
She could never forget the moth. It hatched from a cocoon kept by her teacher in a Mason jar, a huge Polyphemus silk moth with, potentially, velvety brown wings bearing a bright blue eyespot. At the moment of hatching, its wings produced a hardening varnish that would enable them to spread. Then it could fly. But the jar was too small, and the varnish worked too fast. The moth, when released on the street, could only walk. But it struggled gamely on with its useless lumps of wings, heading somewhere. In Annie Dillard’s mind, it was still going.
安妮·迪拉德永远忘不了那只飞蛾。它从老师的梅森罐里破茧而出，是一只体型硕大的多眼天蚕蛾，本该生有丝绒质感的棕色翅膀，翅面带有一枚亮蓝色的眼斑. 破茧之际，翅膀会分泌硬化液，完成舒展后便可飞行。但罐子太小，硬化液又凝固得太快，那只飞蛾被放到街上时，只能爬行。它拖着两团无用的畸形翅块，依旧倔强地奋力向前，朝着某个方向挣扎挪动。在安妮·迪拉德的脑海里，它始终在前行。
She was the only one to see it as it went. She was often a sole observer, quietly noting. A goldfinch shaking a seeding thistle until the down floated, “blind and sweet”, all over the landscape. A mosquito biting a poisonous copperhead. A leaf still curled like a thin, pale flame in its bud on a tulip tree. Frogs leaping like flares through a mesh of blue-green algae, “surfacing to awareness”. Another frog on the bank of Tinker Creek, stock still, as a giant water bug slowly liquidised its insides and sipped its life away.
那只飞蛾挣扎前行的模样，只有她一人完整目睹。她常常是唯一的在场观察者，安静地记录下所有细节。金翅雀摇动结籽的蓟草，絮毛便“漫无目的且唯美地”飘遍四野。蚊子叮咬剧毒的铜头蝮。鹅掌楸的芽苞里，一片叶子仍蜷着，像一簇细弱而苍白的火苗。青蛙像一枚枚信号弹，穿过蓝绿藻织成的网，“浮出水面，抵达意识”。汀克溪岸边还有一只青蛙，纹丝不动，任由一只巨型负子蝽慢慢把它的内脏化成浆汁,一口口啜尽它的生命.
It was Tinker Creek that made her famous. The book she wrote about her thoughts and sightings there, “Pilgrim at Tinker Creek”, won her a Pulitzer in 1975, when she was only 28. She was the youngest woman to win one, and the first in the man’s world of nature-writing. But fame was the last thing she wanted. All she had needed for years was that damp, broken ground near Roanoke, Virginia, the sycamore log on which she sat, the noisy creek with its silvery shiners swarming in the shallows, and the Osage orange tree from which rose, once, a hundred red-winged blackbirds. When the Pulitzer news came, she was washing spinach. She wouldn’t have to do that any more, the pressman said. But she would, and did.
汀克溪，是她的成名之地。她把在这片溪畔的所思所见写成《汀克溪的朝圣者》，1975年，年仅28岁的她凭借这部作品斩获普利策奖，成为该奖项史上最年轻的女性得主，也是在男性长期主导的自然写作领域里，第一位摘得这项荣誉的女性。可名声偏偏是她最不渴求的东西。多年来，她心之所向，不过是弗吉尼亚州罗阿诺克附近那片潮湿、坑洼不平的土地，是那根她坐过的悬铃木圆木，是那条喧闹的小溪和浅滩上成群穿梭的银色小鱼，是那棵上百只红翅黑鹂曾在此振翅起飞的桑橙树。普利策奖的消息传来时，她正在洗菠菜。一位新闻工作者对她说，她以后再也不用洗菠菜了。可她还是会洗，后来也一直保持这个习惯。
Before too long she fled from the unbearable fussing, decamping with her writer husband to Washington state and the islands off the coast. From her various exile places she produced essays, poetry, philosophy, journalism, two novels and an autobiography. For preference she wrote in very small spaces, usually log cabins, facing away from the view. Inevitably people compared her to Henry David Thoreau, the 19th-century naturalist who had been the subject of her master’s thesis, but she didn’t agree. Unlike him, she didn’t live in most of her cabins; half of “Tinker Creek” had been written, after hours, in a public library. Her favourite writer was not him, but Primo Levi, because he wrote the truth.
没过多久，她逃离了令人难以忍受的大惊小怪的追捧，与作家丈夫一起迁居华盛顿州，在海岸外的岛屿上安了家。她在一处处辗转的隐居地，笔耕不辍，写下了散文、诗歌、哲学、新闻报道、两部小说和一部自传。她偏好在很小的空间里写作，通常是小木屋，落座时特意背对窗外的风景。人们难免拿她与亨利·戴维·梭罗相比——这位19世纪的博物学家还是她硕士论文的研究对象——她却不以为然。和梭罗不一样，这些木屋大多只是她临时写作的地方而非长住；一半篇幅的《汀克溪的朝圣者》是业余时间里在公共图书馆里写成。她最喜欢的作家不是梭罗，而是普里莫·莱维，原因是后者的文字忠于真相。
Nor did she think of herself as a nature writer. All she saw and noted was part of an overwhelming question: why, among the prodigal beauties and intricacies of the world, was there so much destruction? Why were there thousands of barbules on the wing of a wild goose that any predator might devour? What was the creator—if there was a creator—thinking? Why was there so much care, then none? She loved to watch hatchings and unfoldings. But the hatchlings were immediate food for something else, and each leaf shrivelled in two seasons. This couldn’t all be some cynical show, though she sometimes called it that. Perhaps it was more a case that God could do anything, so he did. Wildly, freely.
她从未将自己定义为自然作家。她观察并记录的一切，都围绕一个核心问题展开：在这个遍布极致美感与复杂构造的世界中，为何毁灭的占比如此之高？为什么大雁翅膀有数以千计的羽小枝，却又随时可能被捕食者吞噬？造物主如果真的存在，其意欲何为？为何如此用心雕琢, 转眼便弃之不顾? 她喜欢观察生物的孵化和舒展的过程。但幼雏转眼会成为其他生物的口粮，每片叶子不出两个季节就会枯萎。她嘴上偶尔也会说，这一切不过是一场玩世不恭的表演。或许更合理的解释是：上帝无所不能，于是他便肆意妄为，狂放野蛮，无拘无束。
And what was she, amid all this? Nothing important. She was not needed in creation. Her life seemed no more than the tunnels made by miner larvae on a leaf, “a faint tracery on the surface of mystery”. Yet she contained multitudes. She could see, with her naked eye, through two million light years as far as the Andromeda galaxy. She could explore endlessly, as she did, and reflect on her explorations. Those were not, in the end, about understanding nature. She was more of a theologian.
而在这浩瀚万物中，她又算什么？无足轻重。造物过程，从来不缺她这一角色。她的生命渺小得就像潜叶虫幼虫在叶面啃出的蜿蜒虫道，不过是“奥秘表层一道若隐若现的细纹”。 但她的内心却装下了万千宇宙。她能凭肉眼望穿两百万光年的虚空，直抵仙女座星系。 她可以无止境地探索，她一生都在这么做，再把所有探索沉淀为深度思辨。归根结底，这些探索并非单纯为了理解自然。 她本质上更像一位神学家。
Religion didn’t feature much at all as she was growing up, tomboyish and comfortably middle-class, in Pittsburgh. Books did. They swept her away. From the age of five, she reckoned she read 100 books a year. She wanted to know and remember everything: history, geography, geology, minerology, criminology, the names of trees and the names of birds. She read and re-read “The Field Book of Ponds and Streams”. As with her sightings in nature, so with the written word. Someone had to read these books.
宗教在她的成长中几乎从未占据过重要位置。那时的她是个假小子，在匹兹堡过着舒适优渥的中产日子。书籍才是她生活的重心，文字如潮，将她深深裹挟。从五岁起，她估摸着自己一年能读上百本书。她什么都想知晓，什么都想记住：历史、地理、地质、矿物、犯罪学，还有各种树的名字、各种鸟的名字。她把《池塘与溪流野外手册》翻来覆去地读。她在观察自然时是这样较真，面对文字也抱着同样的态度:总得有人认真读完这些书.
On the writing of books, though, she had strong opinions, laid out in 1989 in “The Writing Life”. That life was far from a state of sedentary inspiration. It was arduous, tough and necessarily cruel. The writer’s first line of words was a probe into the unknown, digging a path; once she had arrived in a new, promising place, the path had to be erased. Cut the umbilical cord. Everything written up til then probably had to go, even the favourite passages and the load-bearing walls; even, sometimes, the whole original point of the thing. Ruthlessness was essential; no excess. If a book got stuck, or out of control, it must be visited every day, as if the writer were a lion-tamer with a chair shouting “Simba!” Mastery had to be reasserted, and not just—as she asserted hers—with near-continuous coffee and Vantage cigarettes.
但谈及写作，她的态度始终鲜明笃定。她在1989年的《写作生活》里把这些想法讲得很清楚。写作这事，绝不是干坐在那里等灵感降临。它艰辛，艰难，而且难免残酷。落笔的第一句话，是往未知里探路，是开凿出一条道来；等抵达一片充满希望的新地方，这条路又得抹掉。脐带要剪断。之前写下的东西，多半都得扔掉，哪怕是得意的段落，哪怕是承重墙，也照扔不误；有时候，连当初为什么要写这本书的出发点都得一并放弃。心要狠，文字不容赘余。一本书要是卡住了、失控了，就得天天去盯着它，像个驯狮人举着椅子冲它喊“辛巴！”一样。掌控权必须拿回来，而且照她自己的话说，光靠一杯接一杯的咖啡和万塔吉香烟，是拿不回来的。
In the middle of “The Writing Life” she recorded a peculiar event: the apparently spontaneous combustion of a typewriter. It was a portable Smith-Corona, so not attached to power. The explosion shook the house, and she raced upstairs to find the device erupting with fire and ash. As she tried to douse the flames, sparks burned holes in her shirt. It might have been a careless cigarette, but she did not say so. In her telling there was just, suddenly, fire. It was often around. As a child, she wanted to run so fast that she would throw out sparks. At Tinker Creek she saw, at sunset, some divine power “rolling along the mountain ridges like a fireball”. At moments of “seeing truly” the grass was wholly fire, and the backyard cedar became a tree of lights. She felt lifted then, resounding “like a beaten bell”. Yet only she had noticed those things, as only she had seen the death of the Tinker Creek frog, or the crippled moth staggering on. Only she was meant not to miss that horror and that beauty. That was what she was for.
《写作生活》中，她记下了一件怪事：一台打字机自己烧了起来。那是台便携的史密斯科罗纳打字机，压根没插电。爆炸震得整栋房子都在晃，她冲上楼，看见那台机器正往外喷火冒灰。她扑火的时候，火星在衬衫上烫出了好几个洞。起因也可能是一根没掐灭的烟头，但她没这么说。在她的叙述里，火就是凭空冒出来的。火这种东西，其实常在她身边出现。小时候，她恨不得自己跑得飞快，快到脚底迸出火星。在汀克溪，她见过日落时某种神圣的力量“像火球一样滚过山脊”。在那些“真正看见”的时刻，整片草地都化作了火焰，后院的雪松成了一棵光做的树。她觉得自己被托了起来，像“一口被敲响的钟”那样回响不绝。可这些，只有她看见了；就像只有她看见了汀克溪那只青蛙的死，看见了那只残翅飞蛾的挣扎前行。唯有她，注定不能错过那份恐怖，也不能错过那份美。 这，就是她存在的全部意义。
翻译组：
Benjamin，初学翻译，爱红酒，爱美食
Cassie，ECNU口译小菜鸡，体制内摸爬滚打教书匠
Qianna，对语言有点敏感，对逻辑十分执拗，对摇滚太过着迷
审校组：
Xia Jiehai， 创作者
Shulin，非上上智，无了了心
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本期感想：
Very，男，电气民工，经济学人资浅爱好者
前几天和女儿讨论光的折射时，谈到了这种现象的本质，其实是光在传播时，总是选择耗时最短的路径。但是她眨眨眼睛问道，为什么是选择这条路径呢？如果是选择，难道自然是一个人吗？
我那时回答不了这个问题，于是我便回答道，我也不知道呀，我去想想，如果想到了什么，再来和你说。
于是这几天我一直在思考这个问题，选择这种行为确实带有一种主体性的属性，但究竟是我们在用词时可以选择了一种让人容易理解的说词还是自然确实具有这种表征呢？在查阅许多资料后，我看到了2个似乎还有一些道理的解释（只能说是假设的解释）：一是从量子力学角度看，其实粒子从A点到B点，并不是只走一条“最小”的路径，而是同时尝试了所有可能的路径，只是在“相消干涉“后，剩下的就只是那条最小路径了。也就是说其余的路径在叠加后已经自我毁灭了。第二种解释则说，只有这条路才是能量最低的路径，其它路径由于能量消耗高，是不稳定的状态，转瞬即逝，而这条最小路径才是稳定的。
确实人们一开始会认为如果这种路径是最优的，那是否会存在一段前时期来验证这个最优性（譬如苹果从树上落下前会从各个方向先落一遍，然后找到这个从上往下落的最优路径），但是显然事实是我们并没有观察到这种现象，亦或是这种现象发生在我们观察不到的情况下。于是莱布尼茨和莫佩尔蒂就将这种前置判断认定为上帝的预设。
当然可以从各个方面来否定这种假设，而且就如同我前面所讲的，现代量子力学也表明了，其实自然没有这种拟人的属性，而是很笨地把所有路径都走了一遍，相互干涉后留下了我们所能见到的这条路径。
由此我想到了自己的人生，在过往的岁月里，面对各种可能性，我有过也做过千百次选择，无论是主动还是被动，无论是爱情还是学习，或是工作。最终只会是留下一种路径，成为了现在的我。其它人生的路径也都走了一遍，而留下了事实的这条。我们总是在后悔（可能是潜意识里）当初没有选择那条可能现在看来是更好的路，但我想说的是，在那时的状态，那条路就是当时的驻点，也就是人生在那时能够维持稳定的选择。
也许我带了一丝机械宿命论的感觉，但是我仍然觉得人既然是一种自然界的产物，想必也是一样的吧。
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