当呼吸化为空气 · 永清

为你读英语美文

为你读英语美文 · 第513期

主播：永清

录制地点：云南·蒙自

When Breath Becomes Air

《当呼吸化为空气》节选

作者：Paul Kalanithi，译者：何雨珈

The lung cancer diagnosis was confirmed. My carefully planned and hard-won future no longer existed. Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. Here we were, finally face-to-face, and yet nothing about it seemed recognizable. Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints of the countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity.

肺癌确诊了。我精心计划和辛苦创造的未来消失得无影无踪。我在工作中那么熟悉的死神，现在亲自来做私人拜访了。我们终于狭路相逢，正面交锋。然而，我似乎一点也认不出面前这位死神。多年来我治疗过无数病人，如今自己站在这个十字路口，我本应该看到和跟随他们密集的脚印，然而眼前却是一片白色沙漠，空空荡荡，艰险残酷，荒无人烟，闪着刺眼的光，仿佛一场暴风雨过境，抹去了所有熟悉的痕迹。

Severe illness wasn’t life-altering, it was life-shattering. It felt less like an epiphany—a piercing burst of light, illuminating What Really Matters—and more like someone had just firebombed the path forward. Now I would have to work around it.

重大疾病不是要改变人生，而是要将你的人生打得粉碎。感觉仿佛神迹降临，强烈的光突然刺进眼睛，照射出真正重要的事情；其实更像有谁刚刚用燃烧弹炸毁了你一心一意前进的道路。现在我必须绕道而行。

Day after day I kept working out, and every tiny increase in strength broadened the possible worlds, the possible versions of me.

我每天都坚持锻炼，力量每增加一点，我的世界就更宽广一点，我自身的可能性也就更多一点。

If I were a writer of books, I would compile a register, with a comment, of the various deaths of men: he who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live. —Michel de Montaigne, “That to Study Philosophy Is to Learn to Die

如果我编书，就要汇编一部人类死亡记录，同时附上以下注解：教会别人死亡的人，同时也能教会人生活。——《探究哲理即是学习死亡》，米歇尔·德·蒙田

The duty of doctors included learning what made that particular patient’s life worth living, and planning to save those things if possible—or to allow the peace of death if not.

医生们的职责，包括去了解病人的生命因为什么而宝贵，而值得一活，并好好计划，可能的话，要尽可能保留这些东西——如果不行的话，就让病人去得安详体面。

Death comes for all of us. For us, for our patients: it is our fate as living, breathing, metabolizing organisms. Most lives are lived with passivity toward death—it’s something that happens to you and those around you. But I had trained for years to actively engage with death, to grapple with it, like Jacob with the angel, and, in so doing, to confront the meaning of a life. We had assumed an onerous yoke, that of mortal responsibility. Our patients’ lives and identities may be in our hands, yet death always wins. Even if you are perfect, the world isn’t. The secret is to know that the deck is stacked, that you will lose, that your hands or judgment will slip, and yet still struggle to win for your patients. You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.

死神不会放过我们任何人。我们和病人，活着，呼吸着，作为正在新陈代谢的生命体，这都是命运的安排。大多数人从生到死，都是被动的——这是你和你身边的人需要接受的现实。但我，多年勤学苦练，积极地与死神纠缠扭打，像雅各布和天使搏斗；在这个过程中，也不断直面和拷问生命的意义。我们背负着无形的枷锁，肩负着生死攸关的责任。也许病人鲜活的生命就握在我们手中，但死神总是最后的胜者。就算你是完美的，这个世界却不是。支撑我们继续下去的秘诀在于，明白打从发牌的那刻起，你已必输无疑，你会手滑，你会判断失误，但即便如此也要拼尽全力为病人奋战到底。你永远无法到达完美的境地，但通过不懈的努力奋斗和追求，你能看见那无限接近完美的渐进曲线。

Lucy：

Living means fully accepting suffering.

活着意味着完全接受痛苦。

Your treatment should match your value.

你的治疗应该和你的价值观匹配。

Engaging in the full range of experience- living and dying, love and loss-is what we get to do. Being human doesn’t happen despite suffering. It happens within it. When we are approaching suffering together, when you choose not to hide from it, our lives don’t diminish, they expand.

体验人生的全部——生与死、爱与失——正是我们活着的意义。成为人并不是在避免痛苦的情况下发生的，而是在痛苦之中实现的。当我们一起面对痛苦，当你选择不逃避它时，我们的生命不会缩小，反而会扩展。

▎主播介绍

永清：毕业于西安外国语大学，第一个FIRE五年计划实践中

后期制作：永清

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