She was ready. “Then I’d seriously consider it.”

她已经有所准备：“那我就会认真考虑。”

　 I hadn’t been expecting this, either. “Leez,” I said, “we should do what you want to do.” This wasn’t completely magnanimous; it was mostly cowardly. In this case, as with many things, I was happy to cede the decision to her.

我没想到她会这样回答。“莉柔，”我说，“我们应该照你的意思去做。”这不完全是我宽宏大量，多半是出于懦弱。在这件事上，就像在很多事情上一样，我乐于让她做决定。

　 She sighed. “We don’t have to decide tonight. We have some time.” Four weeks, she didn’t need to say.

她叹气：“不必今天就决定。我们还有一些时间。”她不必说，我也知道，还有四周的时间可以考虑。

　 In bed, I thought. I thought those thoughts all men think when a woman tells them she’s pregnant: What would the baby look like? Would I like it? Would I love it? And then, more crushingly: fatherhood. With all its responsibilities and fulfillments and tedium and possibilities for failure.

那天晚上我躺在床上，思索着所有男人碰到女人跟他说她怀孕了都会想的事情：生出来的婴儿会是什么样子？我会喜欢他吗？我会爱他吗？然后，更压倒性的是：为人父亲。有那么多责任、条件、烦闷和失败的可能性。

　 The next morning, we didn’t speak of it, and the day after that, we didn’t speak of it again. On Friday, as we were going to bed, she said, sleepily, “Tomorrow we’ve got to discuss this,” and I said, “Absolutely.” But we didn’t, and we didn’t, and then the ninth week passed, and then the tenth, and then the eleventh and twelfth, and then it was too late to easily or ethically do anything, and I think we were both relieved. The decision had been made for us—or rather, our indecisiveness had made the decision for us—and we were going to have a child. It was the first time in our marriage that we’d been so mutually indecisive.

次日早晨我们没有谈这件事，隔一天我们也没谈。到了星期五我们要上床睡觉时，她很困地说：“明天我们得讨论这件事了。”我说：“那当然。”但是我们没谈，一直没谈，然后第九周过去了，接着是第十周，然后第十一周和第十二周也过去了。要做什么都太晚了，不但困难，也不合伦理。此时我想，我们都松了一口气。时间帮我们做了决定（应该说，我们的不决定，帮我们做了决定），我们就要有小孩了。结婚以来第一次，我们两人都这么犹豫不决。

　 We had imagined that it would be a girl, and if it was, we’d name it Adele, for my mother, and Sarah, for Sally. But it wasn’t a girl, and we instead let Adele (who was so happy she started crying, one of the very few times I’d seen her cry) pick the first name and Sally the second: Jacob More. (Why More, we asked Sally, who said it was for Thomas More.)

我们原先想象会生一个女孩，如果是，我们就要给她取名阿黛尔，沿用我母亲的名字；中间名是萨拉，是萨莉的正式名。但结果不是女孩，于是我们请阿黛尔取首名（她高兴得哭出来，是我极少数看到她哭的一次），萨莉取中间名：雅各布·摩尔。（我们问萨莉，为什么是莫尔？她说是因为托马斯·莫尔的缘故。）

　 I have never been one of those people—I know you aren’t, either—who feels that the love one has for a child is somehow a superior love, one more meaningful, more significant, and grander than any other. I didn’t feel that before Jacob, and I didn’t feel that after. But it is a singular love, because it is a love whose foundation is not physical attraction, or pleasure, or intellect, but fear. You have never known fear until you have a child, and maybe that is what tricks us into thinking that it is more magnificent, because the fear itself is more magnificent. Every day, your first thought is not “I love him” but “How is he?” The world, overnight, rearranges itself into an obstacle course of terrors. I would hold him in my arms and wait to cross the street and would think how absurd it was that my child, that any child, could expect to survive this life. It seemed as improbable as the survival of one of those late-spring butterflies—you know, those little white ones—I sometimes saw wobbling through the air, always just millimeters away from smacking itself against a windshield.

有人觉得父母对子女的爱比较崇高、比较有意义、比较重要、比较了不起，但我从来不是那种人（我知道你也不是）。在雅各布出生之前我不觉得是那样，他出生之后我也没有改变想法。但是父母对子女的爱的确很奇特，那种爱的基础不是出于身体上的吸引，也不是出于愉悦感或才智，而是出于恐惧。有孩子之前你从来不知恐惧为何物；或许就是这种恐惧骗得我们以为这种爱比较重大，但其实恐惧本身才更重大。每一天，你的第一个想法不是“我爱他”，而是“他怎么样了”，一夜之间，整个世界忽然被重新安排，成了种种恐怖的障碍赛场地。我抱着他等候过马路时，一想到我的小孩或任何小孩要在这样的生活中幸存，真是太荒谬了。那概率就像晚春的蝴蝶存活的概率一样低（你知道，就是那些小小的白蝴蝶），有时我看到那些小蝴蝶在空中摇晃着飞翔，总是差点撞死在汽车的挡风玻璃上。

　 And let me tell you two other things I learned. The first is that it doesn’t matter how old that child is, or when or how he became yours. Once you decide to think of someone as your child, something changes, and everything you have previously enjoyed about them, everything you have previously felt for them, is preceded first by that fear. It’s not biological; it’s something extra-biological, less a determination to ensure the survival of one’s genetic code, and more a desire to prove oneself inviolable to the universe’s feints and challenges, to triumph over the things that want to destroy what’s yours.

另外，让我告诉你我学到的两件事。第一件事，不管子女年纪多大，或他们是在什么时候、怎么样成为你的子女，一旦你决定把某个人想成你的子女，事情就改变了。之前你从他们身上得到的一切乐趣，你对他们的所有感觉，全被那种恐惧压过去了。那不是生物学上的恐惧，而是超生物学的。那不是源自要确保一个人的基因密码存活下去，而更接近一种渴望，渴望证明自己不被这个世界的计谋和挑战侵犯，渴望击败那些试图摧毁你所拥有的事物的力量。

　 The second thing is this: when your child dies, you feel everything you’d expect to feel, feelings so well-documented by so many others that I won’t even bother to list them here, except to say that everything that’s written about mourning is all the same, and it’s all the same for a reason—because there is no real deviation from the text. Sometimes you feel more of one thing and less of another, and sometimes you feel them out of order, and sometimes you feel them for a longer time or a shorter time. But the sensations are always the same.

第二件事情是：当子女死了，种种预期中的感觉你都会有。这些感觉，有太多人详尽记录下来了，我就不在这里一一列出了。只不过要说一声，那些关于悲痛的文字都一样，这种一致是有原因的——因为其实那些感受都没有偏离主轴。有时你觉得这种感觉比较多、那种感觉比较少，有时你觉得感觉的顺序不对，有时你觉得某种感觉持续得比较久、另一种感觉比较短暂；但那些感觉总是一样的。

　 But here’s what no one says—when it’s your child, a part of you, a very tiny but nonetheless unignorable part of you, also feels relief. Because finally, the moment you have been expecting, been dreading, been preparing yourself for since the day you became a parent, has come.

没有人说过的是，当你的小孩死了，一部分的你（非常小、但不可忽略的一部分）也松了一口气。因为，从你成为父母的那一天起，一直在你预期中、你日夜担心且为之做好准备的那一刻，终于来到了。

　 Ah, you tell yourself, it’s arrived. Here it is.

啊，你告诉自己，终于来到了，就是现在了。

　 And after that, you have nothing to fear again.

之后，你再也没什么好害怕的了。

　

　 Years ago, after the publication of my third book, a journalist once asked me if you could tell right away whether a student had a mind for law or not, and the answer is: Sometimes. But often, you’re wrong—the student who seemed so bright in the first half of the semester becomes steadily less so as the year goes on, and the student about whom you never thought one thing or another is the one who emerges as a dazzler, someone you love hearing think.

几年前，我的第三本书出版后，有记者问我能否一眼看出学生适不适合读法律。我的答案是：有时候。但往往你会看走眼，上半学期看起来似乎很聪明的学生持续退步，而一个你原先根本没注意的学生却逐渐散发光芒，你想要听他讲出自己的想法。

　 It’s often the most naturally intelligent students who have the most difficult time in their first year—law school, particularly the first year of law school, is really not a place where creativity, abstract thought, and imagination are rewarded. In this way, I often think—based upon what I’ve heard, not what I know firsthand—that it’s a bit like art school.

天资最聪颖的学生，第一年往往过得最辛苦。法学院，尤其是法学院的第一年，真的是不太鼓励锻炼创造力、抽象思考能力和想象力。我常常觉得，在这方面（根据我听说的，并非第一手信息）有点类似艺术学院。

　 Julia had a friend, a man named Dennys, who was as a boy a tremendously gifted artist. They had been friends since they were small, and she once showed me some of the drawings he made when he was ten or twelve: little sketches of birds pecking at the ground, of his face, round and blank, of his father, the local veterinarian, his hand smoothing the fur of a grimacing terrier. Dennys’s father didn’t see the point of drawing lessons, however, and so he was never formally schooled. But when they were older, and Julia went to university, Dennys went to art school to learn how to draw. For the first week, he said, they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted, and it was always Dennys’s sketches that the professor selected to pin up on the wall for praise and critique.

朱丽娅有个朋友叫丹尼斯，从小就非常有艺术才华。他们小时候就很要好，有回她拿他10岁或12岁画的东西给我看，都是一些小素描：几只鸟在啄地，他没有表情的圆脸，或是他的兽医父亲抚摸着一只满脸痛苦的狗。丹尼斯的父亲看不出上绘画课有什么用，所以丹尼斯从没受过正式训练。等到他们年纪稍长，朱丽娅去上大学时，丹尼斯则去了艺术学院学习绘画。他说，第一个星期，他们可以随心所欲画任何东西，教授总是挑出丹尼斯的素描，钉在墙上，供大家赞美与批评。

　 But then they were made to learn how to draw: to re-draw, in essence. Week two, they only drew ellipses. Wide ellipses, fat ellipses, skinny ellipses. Week three, they drew circles: three-dimensional circles, two-dimensional circles. Then it was a flower. Then a vase. Then a hand. Then a head. Then a body. And with each week of proper training, Dennys got worse and worse. By the time the term had ended, his pictures were never displayed on the wall. He had grown too self-conscious to draw. When he saw a dog now, its long fur whisking the ground beneath it, he saw not a dog but a circle on a box, and when he tried to draw it, he worried about proportion, not about recording its doggy-ness.

但接下来，他们开始学习如何绘画：本质上，就是重新学画画。第二个星期，他们只画椭圆：宽的椭圆、胖的椭圆、瘦的椭圆。第三个星期，他们画圆：三维空间的圆、二维空间的圆。然后画一朵花、一个花瓶、一只手，再来是一颗头、一具身体。随着每周的训练，丹尼斯画得越来越糟。等到学期末，他的画就再也没被钉到墙上了。对于绘画，他变得很局促不安。现在他看到一只狗，它尾巴上的长毛轻轻扫过地面，他看到的不再是一只狗，而是盒子上接着一个圆。当他试着画的时候，他担心的是比例，而不是要抓住那只狗的神韵。

　 He decided to speak to his professor. We are meant to break you down, Dennys, his professor said. Only the truly talented will be able to come back from it.

他决定找教授谈谈。我们的用意就是要击垮你，丹尼斯，他的教授说，只有真正有才华的人，才有办法重新站起来。

　 “I guess I wasn’t one of the truly talented,” Dennys would say. He became a barrister instead, lived in London with his partner.

“那我想我不是真正有才华的人。”丹尼斯说。他后来成为出庭律师，和他的伴侣住在伦敦。

　 “Poor Dennys,” Julia would say.

“可怜的丹尼斯。”朱丽娅说。