我的癌症病情稳定下来了。
My cancer was stable.
第二天，我们去见艾玛，她仍然不愿意预测生命周期，但有点松口了：“你现在好转了很多，我们可以改到每六个星期见一次面了。下次见面的时候，我们可以谈谈你未来的生活了。”我感觉到，过去几个月来的那种混乱恐慌在逐渐退却，新的秩序开始慢慢建立。我对未来那种心急火燎的紧张感也放松下来了。
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.
那个周末，有个当地斯坦福神经外科毕业生的聚会，我很期待，因为又有机会寻找一下过去的那个自己了。然而，去了现场才发现，两相比较之下，自己现在的生活显得更不可思议了。我周围这些人，身上洋溢着自信与抱负的气息，他们的生命有着无限的可能性。有的和我同届，有的是前辈。我已经远离他们的生活轨迹了，他们的身体还能够支撑八个小时的残酷手术。他们的生活如同美妙的圣诞颂歌，而我却陷入了“倒带”的苦恼。维多利亚兴高采烈地拆着“礼物”：各种津贴补助、工作机会、发表文章。我本来也应该和她一样的。我的那些前辈则展现着我再也不敢去想的未来：年轻有为，拿各种大奖，升职加薪，乔迁新居。
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.
没人问我接下来有什么打算，这倒是让我松了口气，因为我什么打算也没有。我现在走路倒是不用拐杖了，但人生的前路仍然像瘫痪病人一样，充满不确定：我会成为一个什么样的人，继续走在人生之路上呢，能走多久？继续做一个病人，搞科研，当老师？做生物伦理学家？像艾玛说的那样，再次回到神经外科？在家当奶爸？写东西？我能够，或者说应该，成为一个怎样的人呢？做医生的时候，我也略略体会到那些因为一场病改变一生的病人面对着什么，也正是在那样的时刻，我非常希望和他们携手去探索。那么，这样的绝症，对于一个想要理解死亡的年轻人，难道不是一份很好的礼物吗？还有什么，是比亲身体验更好的理解方法呢？但我之前根本无从知晓，这有多么艰难；我需要去跋涉、探寻与摸索多少艰难险阻。我一直觉得，医生的工作就像把两节铁轨连接到一起，让病人的生命旅程畅通无阻。根本没想到，我自己的死亡之旅，是如此混乱，如此没有方向。我回想更年轻的自己，胸怀大志，要将“人类尚未产生的道德良知锻造进自己的灵魂”；现在，我审视自己的灵魂，才发现锻造的工具太脆弱，锻造的火焰太微弱，就连锻造自己那点小小的良知都有限。
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，是一片毫无特点可言的荒原，我迷失其中，科学研究、细胞分子与无穷无尽的生存数据曲线，都无法指引前进的方向。于是我又转而求助于文学：索尔仁尼琴的《癌病房》，B.S.约翰逊的《不幸的人》，托尔斯泰的《伊凡·伊里奇之死》，内格尔的《心灵与宇宙》，还有伍尔夫、卡夫卡、蒙田、弗罗斯特、格雷维尔等人的作品以及癌症病人的回忆录。无论是谁，只要写的东西与死亡有关，我都如饥似渴地阅读。我寻找那些能够把死亡及其意义解释清楚的字字句句。我要从中开辟一条路，好为自己下个定义；我要在其中探索方向，好继续缓步向前。我“有幸”能亲身体验死亡，所以之前觉得不必再求助文学与学术著作，然而，现在我发现，要理解自己这种直接的体验，还需要将其放回到语言文字之中。海明威也描述过类似的经历：获得丰富的体验，然后退避三舍进行深思，接着将体验付诸文字。我也需要借助这些字字句句，才能前进。
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.
