美食祈祷与恋爱意大利文化 《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 49 (104):玄学危机

《美食祈祷和恋爱》Chapter 49 (104):玄学危机  

When I was nine years old
going on ten
I experienced a true metaphysical crisis. Maybe this seems young for such a thing
but I was always a precocious child. It all happened over the summer beeen fourth and fifth grade. I was going to be turning ten years old in July
and there was something about the transition from nine to ten—from single digit to double di-gits—that shocked me into a genuine existential panic
usually reserved for people turning fifty. I remember thinking that life was passing me by so fast. It seemed like only yesterday I was in kindergarten
and here I was
about to turn ten. Soon I would be a teenager
then middle-aged
then elderly
then dead. And everyone else was aging in hyperspeed
too. Everybody was going to be dead soon. My parents would die. My friends would die. My cat would die. My older sister was almost in high school already; I could remember her going off to first grade only moments ago
it seemed
in her little knee socks
and now she was in high school? Obviously it wouldn't be long before she was dead. What was the point of all this?
The strangest thing about this crisis was that nothing in particular had spurred it. No friend or relative had died
giving me my first taste of mortality
nor had I read or seen anything particular about death; I hadn't even read Charlotte's Web yet. This panic I was feeling at age ten was nothing less than a spontaneous and full-out realization of mortality's inevitable march
and I had no spiritual vocabulary with which to help myself manage it. We were Protestants
and not even devout ones
at that. We said grace only before Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner and went to church sporadically. My dad chose to stay home on Sunday mornings
finding his devotional practice in farming. I sang in the choir because I liked singing; my pretty sister was the angel in the Christmas pageant. My mother used the church as a headquarters from which to anize good works of volunteer service for the munity. But even in that church
I don't remember there being a lot of talking about God. This was New England
after all
and the word God tends to make Yankees nervous.
My sense of helplessness was overwhelming. What I wanted to do was pull some massive emergency brake on the universe
like the brakes I'd seen on the subways during our school trip to New York City. I wanted to call a time out
to demand that everybody just STOP until I could understand everything. I suppose this urge to force the entire universe to stop in its tracks until I could get a grip on myself might have been the beginning of what my dear friend Richard from Texas calls my "control issues." Of course
my efforts and worry were futile. The closer I watched time
the faster it spun
and that summer went by so quickly that it made my head hurt
and at the end of every day I remember thinking
"Another one gone
" and bursting into tears.
我的无助感压倒一切。我想急踩煞车，让宇宙暂停，就像我们学校专程前往纽约市旅行时，我在地下铁看到的煞车。我想叫停，要求大家“停下来”，直到让我搞清楚一切。我想，这种强迫整个宇宙停住脚步、直到我能掌握自己的冲动，可能就是我亲爱的朋友德州理查所谓“控制问题”的开始。当然，我的努力和忧心都是徒劳。我愈仔细观察时间，时间转得愈快，而那年夏天过得如此之快，使我头痛；每天结束时，我记得自己心想，“又一天过去了”，而后失声痛哭。
I have a friend from high school who now works with the mentally handicapped
and he says his autistic patients have a particularly heartbreaking awareness of time's passage
as if they never got the mental filter that allows the rest of us to fet about mortality every once in a while and just live. One of Rob's patients always asks him the date at the beginning of every day
and at the end of the day will ask
"Rob—when will it be February fourth again?" And before Rob can answer
the guy shakes his head in sorrow and says
"I know
I know
never mind . . . not until next year
right?"