[ABSTRACT] 提要
“90岁老人的大脑和3岁孩子是一样的。”David Shields试图通过平实地展示自身的经历(melding personal history)来让读者正确认识死亡,勇敢面对生活。他的书出人意料地令人感动(surprisingly moving),让我们来看看节选自书中的文字。
[EXCERPT] 摘录
A fetus doesn’t sit passively in its mother’s womb and wait to be fed. Its placenta aggressively sprouts blood vessels that invade its mother’s tissues to extract nutrients. A mother and her unborn child engage in an unconscious struggle over the nutrients she will provide it. Pregnancy is, as the evolutionary biologist David Haig says, a tug of war: each side pulls hard; the flag tied to the middle of the rope barely moves. Existence is warfare.
Human beings have existed for 250,000 years; during that time, 90 billion individuals have lived and died. You’re one of 6.5 billion people now on the planet, and 99.9 percent of your genes are the same as everyone else’s. The difference is in the remaining 0.1 percent—one nucleotide base in every 1,000.
You’re born with 350 bones (long, short, flat, and irregular); as you grow, the bones fuse together: an adult’s body has 206 bones. Approximately 70 percent of your body weight is water—which is about the same percentage of the earth’s surface that is water.
A newborn baby, whose average heart rate is 120 beats per minute, makes the transition from a comfortable, fluid-filled environment to a cold, air-filled one by creating a suction 50 times stronger than the average adult breath. I was a breech birth, the danger of which is that the head (in this case, my head) comes out last, which dramatically increases the possibility that the umbilical cord will get wrapped around the neck (in this case, my neck). I entered the world feet first, then remained in the hospital an extra week to get a little R & R in a warm incubator that my father guarded like a goalie whenever anyone came within striking distance. If I laid still for more than a few minutes, my father reportedly pounded on the glass dome. I wasn’t dead, Dad. I was only sleeping. All my life I’ve pretended to seek a cold, air-filled environment (danger), but really what I’m drawn to is that comfortable, fluid-filled environment (safety).
[COMMENT] 点评
“Shields undergoes his midlife crisis and comes out the other side—more accessible than ever before, more tender, ‘nicer.’ And yet The Thing About Life adroitly sidesteps sentimentality—very hard to do when the core of it is a son’s love for his cranky, tenacious, irascible, geriatric, Jewish father. I love this book.”—David Guterson
(责编:张雯)
