Dear Nick,
亲爱的尼古拉斯，
I hope things are clearing. It did cross my mind, last summer, that you were under strains of an odd sort. I expect, like many another, you’ll spend your life oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking.
我希望一切安好。去年夏天，我的确想到你遭受到一股奇怪的压力。我想，和许多人一样，你的一生都将在跌宕起伏的感情里摇摆不定，这种感情会变成隧道的陷阱，当整个世界似乎都在等待你去感知的时候，却突然逃向了广阔的自由中去。
Nobody’s solved it. You solve it as you get older, when you reach the point where you’ve tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice certain things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things like possessiveness (your own) and a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.
旁人爱莫能助。待你年龄渐长，你会解决这个问题，当你尝尽世间的冷暖，直到可以轻易地牺牲某些东西时，你会更加宽容地对待占有欲(你自身的)等欲望，更包容地接纳痛苦和失去。
I came to America, when I was 27, and lived there three years as if I were living inside a damart sock — I lived in there with your mother. We made hardly any friends, no close ones, and neither of us ever did anything the other didn’t want wholeheartedly to do.
我27岁的时候来到美国，在那里住了三年，好似藏身于达马特袜子里一样——你妈妈亦是如此。我俩几乎没有结交什么朋友，更别提密友了，我们俩也从没有做过对方完全没心思做的事情。
(It meant, Nicholas, that meeting any female between 17 and 39 was out. Your mother banished all her old friends, girlfriends, in case one of them set eyes on me — presumably. And if she saw me talking with a girl student, I was in court. Foolish of her, and foolish of me to encourage her to think her laws were reasonable. But most people are the same. I was quite happy to live like that, for some years.)
(这意味着，尼古拉斯，遇到在17岁到39岁之间的女性简直天方夜谭。你妈妈将她所有的老友、女性朋友都“一赶而尽”，以防哪个跟我看对眼儿——我是这么推测的。如果她看到我和女学生交谈，我一定会被送上法庭。她傻得可爱，而我傻的天真，竟然鼓励她这种做法是合情合理的。大多数人谁不这样呢。我很高兴以这样的模式过了这么些年。
Since the only thing we both wanted to do was write, our lives disappeared into the blank page. My three years in America disappeared like a Rip Van Winkle snooze. Why didn’t I explore America then? I wanted to. I knew it was there. Ten years later we could have done it, because by then we would have learned, maybe, that one person cannot live within another’s magic circle, as an enchanted prisoner.
我俩唯一想做的事情就是创作，我们的生活枯燥的像一张白纸。在美国生活的三年时光，就像瑞普·凡·温克尔打盹一样转瞬即逝。之后我为什么不探索美国？我倒是想。我知道这个念头触手可及。十年后我们可能会这么做，因为那时我们可能已经意识到，一个人无法像被施了魔法的囚犯那样生活在另一个人的魔法圈内。
