为什么作家迷恋描摹“拖延的死亡”？

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By MEGHAN O’ROURKE July 30, 2013
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为什么作家迷恋描摹“拖延的死亡”？
MEGHAN O’ROURKE 2013年07月30日
Death has been a great literary theme for so long you might think there’d be little left to say on the subject, but in recent decades the literature of death has taken an interesting and novel turn. Writers are recording their own deaths as they happen.
死亡，长期以来都是一个重要的文学题材。因此，你可能会认为，就此主题，能讲的已所剩无几。但是，近几十年来，死亡文学出现了新颖有趣的转机：作家实时记录着自己的死亡。
In “Endpoint” (2009), John Updike chronicles his last years and his struggles with metastatic lung cancer. In “Mortality” (2012), a collection of his final columns for Vanity Fair, Christopher Hitchens documented his brutal experiences with cancer; Roger Ebert did the same in “Life Itself: A Memoir” (2011), as did the Washington Post columnist Marjorie Williams in her shattering essays collected in “The Woman at the Washington Zoo.” Earlier examples include Anatole Broyard’s “Intoxicated by My Illness” (1992), in which the author, a former editor at The New York Times Book Review, muses on dying, having learned he has late-stage prostate cancer; Paul Zweig’s memoir “Departures” (1986); and James Merrill’s final poetry collection, “A Scattering of Salts” (1995). Today’s literature of death consists mainly of a subgenre, the literature of dying.
在《终点》(Endpoint [2009])中，约翰·厄普代克(John Updike)详细记述了他生命的最后几年，以及他与转移性肺癌的斗争。在《人之将死》(Mortality [2012])中，克里斯托弗·希钦斯(Christopher Hitchens)记录了自己患癌的残酷经历，这也成为他为《名利场》杂志专栏供稿的绝笔集；罗杰·伊伯特(Roger Ebert)亦然，成书《生活本身：回忆录》(Life Itself:  A Memoir)；《华盛顿邮报》专栏作家马乔里·威廉姆斯(Marjorie Williams)也将自己惨痛的散文集结为《在华盛顿动物园的女人》(The Woman at the Washington Zoo)。更早一些的例子，包括曾任《〈纽约时报〉书评》杂志编辑的阿纳托尔·布鲁瓦亚尔(Anatole Broyard)，作者得知自己患有晚期前列腺癌，而后便在《沉醉吾疾》(Intoxicated by My Illness[1992])中冥思死亡；保罗·茨威格(Paul Zweig)著回忆录《启程》(Departures [1986])；詹姆斯·梅利尔(James Merrill)有绝笔诗集《四散人间的趣语良盐》(A Scattering of Salts[1995])。如今，构成死亡文学的一个主要分类，是“弥留文学”。
Why are these works being written now? For one thing, there’s the usual business about our “reality-based” age, our era of endless self-documentation. But they’re also a natural outgrowth of significant social changes in how we experience disease and death. Last summer, in a review of its 200 years, The New England Journal of Medicine noted that “disease has changed since 1812,” when the magazine’s first issue went to press. Pneumonia and gastrointestinal infections — ­relatively speedy killers — were among the leading causes of death. Today, it’s cancer and heart disease (both of which, thanks to advances in medical technology, have come to be slower ways to die). Of course, the Romantic era had one famous kind of slow death: namely, tuberculosis. In fact, our fascination with the glorious young Keats and his poems about facing death tells us a great deal about our own style of dying.
为什么如今有人书写这些作品？首先，我们生活在这个“基于现实”的年代，我们这个时代无非就是无止境的自我记录。但是，我们对疾病和死亡的体验发生了重大的社会性转变，这些作品同时也是在转变下滋生的一种自然产物。去年夏天，《新英格兰医学杂志》(NEJM)回顾创刊以来的200年历史，指出“疾病自1812年以来已发生了改变”。肺炎和胃肠道感染，致命速度曾相对更快，曾是致死的主要原因。今天，则是癌症和心脏病（此二者得益于医疗技术进步，致死速度均已逐渐慢下来）。当然，浪漫主义时期曾有一种著名的缓慢死亡法：肺结核。事实上，我们迷恋英年济慈，以及他那些直面死亡的诗歌，充分说明了我们对自身“将死”风格的看法。
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Kristian Hammerstad

Death may be unchanging, but the human experience of it isn’t. If every age has its style of dying, its moral-ethical and literary view of it, from the “tame death” to the “beautiful death,” ours is surely the age of the “protracted death” — a slow, medicalized end, portrayed in documentary detail. The author finds himself in the predicament of feeling vividly alive — perhaps more alive than ever — while facing imminent demise. It is a classically ironic state. Because today’s sophisticated medical diagnoses and treatments have led to slower deaths, writers have, as never before, the opportunity to leave behind a considered record of their final détente.
死亡本身可能不变，但人类对死亡的体验则不然。如果每个时代都自有其弥留的——或曰将死的——风格，以及相应的道德伦理与文学观，那么从“驯服的死亡”到“美丽的死亡”，我们这个时代肯定属于“拖延的死亡”——走向一个缓慢的、医药治疗化的终点，钜细靡遗地描绘着过程。作者发现自己身陷窘境，一方面感到活力充沛，生机可能前所未有如此勃勃，另一方面则面临着将至的大限。这是一种颇具古典主义讽刺意味的状态。因为今日复杂的医疗诊断与治疗手段，致使死亡过程变得更缓慢，所以作家具有了前所未有的机会，得以深思熟虑地记录自己逝去之事，最终释怀且留以身后。
The defining characteristic of the literature of protracted death is its fascination with the deterioration of the body, especially in the alien context of the hospital. No doubt, in part, because most of our writers are agnostic, if not atheist, the focus is on the difficult, lab-filled, needle-infused process of dying. As Hitchens puts it, ours is a time in which a person can “avail himself of a historically unprecedented level of care, while at the same time being exposed to a level of suffering that previous generations might not have been able to afford.” Our deathbeds aren’t spiritual; they’re chart-full.
给“拖延的死亡”这种文学下定义，其明确特征就是其沉迷于身体的恶化过程——尤其是在医院这种陌生背景下。无疑，一部分是因为，我们讲的这些作家，即使不是无神论者，也大多都是不可知论者，所以他们关注的焦点是死亡的过程——这个过程艰难恼人、充满了实验室的味道、扎满了注射器针管。如希钦斯所述，在我们这个时代，一个人能够“通过史无前例的高级护理挽救自己生命，但同时受到的折磨，其程度之深也是前人所无法负担或承受的。”我们的临终卧榻，不与心灵相关，倒满满萦绕着心电图。
Hitchens’s “Mortality” — an extraordinary book — offers an exquisitely detailed portrait of dying underscored by the author’s reluctance to be sentimental and his hatred of self-pity. (Losing one’s writerly control is one of the obvious pitfalls here.) One day, Hitchens finds himself covered with a red radiation rash — “To say that the rash hurt would be pointless. The struggle is to convey the way it hurt on the inside.” He describes being “recently scheduled for the insertion of a ‘PIC’ line” — a procedure meant to take 10 minutes. Two hours later, he lies “between two bed-pads that were liberally laced with dried or clotting blood.” He quips about the medical paperwork (“curse of Tumortown”) and the “boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite,” offering all the details that Nora Ephron wrote about not wanting to burden friends and family with. This is the special humiliation of the slow death — the days spent on what Sidney Hook (as Hitchens reminds us) called a “mattress grave.” Hitchens makes us contemplate the central question of the modern death: Are these slow, medicated processes worth the pain? No, you think, fiercely — but, he acknowledges, he’s glad he bought himself more time.
希钦斯的《人之将死》是一本非凡的书，书中生动、精巧刻画了死亡过程的场面，而作者对感伤的不情愿，以及对自怜的仇恨，更像是给“将死”二字标记了着重号，强调了进行时（作者丢失了对写作的控制，是此处明显隐患之一）。一天，希钦斯发现自己因放疗而浑身起红疹——“说这皮疹疼，那毫无意义。我努力要传达的，是这种疼的方式：‘钻心’。”他描述自己“最近被安排做一个外周导入中心静脉置管的手术”——这个过程本应只要10分钟。而两小时后，他躺在“两张床垫中间，床垫上大量缀饰着干涸或凝块的血迹”。他嘲讽那些医疗文件（“肿瘤镇的诅咒”），调侃“从慢性便秘到突然间戏剧性急转直‘下’的无聊切换”，所提供细节之完备，是诺拉·艾芙伦(Nora Ephron)笔所未及的——后者生前曾写道：不愿亲友因这些细节而承受负担。这就是慢性死亡独具的一种屈辱——（希钦斯提醒我们）西德尼·胡克(Sidney Hook)将最后这段日子所发生的地点称为“床垫坟墓”。希钦斯令我们就此种现代化死亡的中心问题沉思默想：这些缓慢的、药物治疗的过程，与其带来的痛苦相比，是否值得？——不值得，你残忍地思忖——但是他却承认他很庆幸为自己争取到了更多时间。
A recurrent theme in all the work is a fundamental repression of the fact that time is limited. As John Updike asks in earnest, heartbreaking surprise, having glimpsed himself looking remarkably old in a bathroom mirror, “Where was the freckled boy who used to peek / into the front-hall mirror, off to school?” Likewise, Hitchens writes:
所有这些作品中，反复出现的一个主题，是一种重为基本的压抑事实：时间有限。正如约翰·厄普代克在浴室镜子里瞥见自己，惊讶地发现自己看起来明显特别老，他扪着最诚挚的碎心自问：“那雀斑男孩去了哪里？他曾窥看／前厅镜中的自己；去上学了么？”同样，希钦斯也写到：
“I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for my next decade and felt I’d worked hard enough to earn it. Will I really not live to see my children married? To watch the World Trade Center rise again? . . . But I understand this sort of nonthinking for what it is: sentimentality and self-pity.”
“我被一种折磨人的‘废’感严重压抑。我曾为下一个十年订立确实的计划，曾感觉我是通过辛苦工作，才获得这来之不易的机会。我是否真的无法活着亲眼看见孩子们结婚？看见世贸中心再度崛起？……但我明白，这种“无思”的本质其实就是：感伤和自怜。”
Hitchens is correct, of course, to diagnose such plans as a form of nonthinking — we are not Fates holding our own life-strings, much as we may wish to be. And yet such nonthinking is the way we think about death today. We’re taken aback that life has passed so fast, that the end is so out of sync with our plans. Deviations from the ideal life story (“She died in her sleep at 95”) seem to puzzle us. Are contemporary secular Westerners, perhaps, the most deluded mortals on the planet? Certainly we are misguided about death, Hitchens finds, on the most basic levels, recalling that before his cancer was diagnosed, “I rather jauntily told the readers of my memoirs that when faced with extinction I wanted to be fully conscious and awake, in order to ‘do’ death in the active and not the passive sense.” Dying, Hitchens reminds us, is not something most of us get to choose, like our individualized salads, our jobs.
当然，希钦斯是正确的，他将这样的计划诊断为一种“无思”——我们不是命运女神，无法掌控自己生命之线，虽然我们可能都希望自己可以。然而，如此“无思”正是我们今天对于死亡的思考。我们惊愕发现，人生逝去得那么快，以至于其终点与我们的计划简直太不同步。理想的人生故事（“她在睡梦中去世，享年95岁”）背离了航线，这似乎令我们困扰。当代世俗西方人，是否也许就是这个星球上最遭迷惑的、不免一死的凡人？希钦斯发现，就死亡而言，我们当然是被误导了，而且是在一些最基本的层面被误导。他回忆起自己确诊癌症前：“我曾相当沾沾自喜地告诉我回忆录的读者，面临‘灭绝’，我想要完全自觉和清醒，因为我要主动地‘去’死，而不是被动的死去。”希钦斯提醒我们：死去，或去死——这可不是大多数人能够自己选择的，不比你选个菜、或是选个工作。
Unlike Keats, writers today are skeptical about romanticizing illness, in no small part thanks to Susan Sontag’s paradigm-changing “Illness as Metaphor” (1978). And so in place of Keats’s exclamatory “Now more than ever seems it rich to die, / To cease upon the midnight with no pain,” we have John Updike’s cri de coeur of protracted diminishment. In “A Lightened Life,” Updike writes, “Checks mailed, I stopped for gas, and plumb forgot / how to release the gas-cap door” and asks: “What’s up? What’s left of me?” This isn’t the finest poetry, but it is powerful as documentation. Updike writes poems, one senses, because the control of rhyme and line is somehow soothing; the poems avoid self-pity and mawkishness because rhyme and poetic form restrict them. It’s moving to witness his need to keep *** art in the shadow of death. Getting a CAT scan, he writes, “I heard machines and experts murmuring about me” and finds himself thinking “creative thoughts . . . Plans flowered, dreams. / All would be well, I felt, all manner of thing.”
与济慈不同的是，今天的作家对于浪漫化的疾病，抱持怀疑态度，不小的一部分要归功于苏珊·桑塔格(Susan Sontag)——她的《疾病的隐喻》(Illness as Metaphor [1978])改变了疾病观的范式。因此，虽然济慈感叹“而现在，哦，死更是多么富丽：在午夜里溘然魂离人间”（此句查良铮译文——译者注），取而代之的，我们则有约翰·厄普代克对旷日弥留的振臂疾呼。在《轻淡了的生活》(A Lightened Life)中，厄普代克写道“寄出了支票，我停车加油，然后彻底忘了／如何拧开油箱盖”，又问道“怎么了？我还剩下些什么？”这不是最精美的诗歌，但作为文献记录则相当有力。厄普代克写诗，读者能有所感觉，因为韵律和诗行控制了文字，令人宽慰；这些诗，因为韵律和诗歌形式限制，避免了自怜和无病呻吟。作者在死亡阴影之下也必需坚持打造艺术，这一点令见证者感动。要做一个电脑断层扫描，他写道“我听见机器和专家们喃喃议论着我”，继而发现自己在思考着“有创意的想法……计划纷纷开花、梦想。／一切都会好的，我觉得，所有的一切”。
If we don’t romanticize illness, that’s not to say that our “realism” isn’t full of denial. Over and over writers express surprise that their minds really are housed in bodies. After his own cancer diagnosis, Anatole Broyard wrote, in a piece that initially appeared in The New York Times Magazine in 1989, that while the diagnosis didn’t make him believe that cancer “was going to kill me” (although of course it did), “what struck me was the startled awareness that one day something, whatever it might be, was going to interrupt my leisurely progress. It sounds trite, yet I can only say that I realized for the first time that I don’t have forever.” In notes appended to “Mortality,” Hitchens observes: “Always prided myself on my reasoning faculty and my stoic materialism. I don’t have a body, I am a body. Yet consciously and regularly acted as if this was not true, or as if an exception would be made in my case.”
如果我们不将疾病浪漫化，那么这并不是说，我们的“现实主义”就一定没有充满否认。一而再、再而三地有作家表达，他们惊讶于发现自己的思想其实并不安置于身体内。确诊癌症后，阿纳托尔·布鲁瓦亚尔在一篇1989年首刊于《纽约时报杂志》的文章中写到，虽然这个诊断没能令他相信癌症“最终会杀死我”（尽管这最终当然还是发生了），但“我遭到的打击是，我震惊地意识到，某一天，某个什么东西，无论它是什么，终究要终止我悠闲前进的人生脚步。这话听起来老掉牙，但我唯一能说的就是，我第一次意识到：我并没有永远”。在《人之将死》附注里，希钦斯则指出：“一向引以为自豪的是我的推理能力和斯多葛学派唯物主义。我并非拥有一个身体；我就是一个身体。但还是经常有意识地假装这并非事实真相，或者认为好像我将成为一个例外。”
The process of diminishment is at once a galvanizing subject for the writer and a terrifying one: Will it silence me before I get to describe it? You cannot describe what can’t ultimately be endured. And as fascinating as these documentary works are, they are necessarily limited. The writers can’t write the final chapter of the work they’re ***, because the final chapter is death; in this sense, they remain strangely fictive. The reader fills in the blanks. In fact, the eighth chapter of “Mortality” consists of Hitchens’s jotted notes — the most affecting possible conclusion, more emphatically conveying the reality of wasting away than any elegantly wrought essay might. This failure is necessary to their power, even if the reader craves, sometimes, the shaped piece, the finished object. As Anatole Broyard wrote, “Stories are antibodies against illness and pain.”
寿终正寝的过程对作家而言，立刻成为一个刺激且吓人的主题：在我得以描述它之前，它是否会先夺走我描述它的能力呢？你无法描述那些你最终无法经受的体验。因此，虽然这些纪实作品迷人，但它们不可避免的有所局限。作家无法写完他们笔下这些作品的最后一章，因为最后一章就是死亡；从这层意义上讲，对死亡的描写仍是奇怪的虚构。读者自己填补空白。事实上，《人之将死》第八章就由希钦斯一些草略的笔记组成——最感人的、可能的结论，比任何文笔优美的散文更着重传达了日渐消亡的真实。这一不足，于这些作品的力量而言，却很有必要，即使读者有时渴求的是成型的篇章，或精美收笔的对象。正如阿纳托尔·布鲁瓦亚尔写道：“故事是对抗疾病与痛苦的抗体。”
THE literature of AIDS clearly helped pave the way for the new openness about what it’s like to die. The disease’s most deadly era saw a proliferation of illness memoirs written by caretakers (some of whom themselves fell ill while writing), including Paul Monette’s “Borrowed Time” (1988) and Mark Doty’s “Heaven’s Coast” (1996). Because these memoirs were not only literary accounts but profound acts of social witness — humanizing the tragedy and helping wash away its stigma — they opened a space for a kind of writing about death that Americans might previously have considered morbid. (Recall that it wasn’t until the 1970s that doctors regularly began to tell patients with fatal diseases that they were dying; previously, it was considered better to keep the bad news from the terminally ill.)
“艾滋病文学”显然也帮助文学铺平了一条道路：对于“死到底是什么样”这个问题，开放程度达到了新的高度。在艾滋病最致命的年代，我们看到，由陪护者撰写的疾病回忆录激增（其中有些作者在创作过程中自己也患了病），包括保罗·莫奈(Paul Monette)的《借来的时间》(Borrowed Time [1988])和马克·多蒂(Mark Doty)的《天堂的海岸》(Heaven's Coast [1996])。因为这些回忆录并不仅仅是文学记述，而更是社会见证者的深刻举措——将这一悲剧赋予人性化并帮助洗清其污名——所以，这些作品为某种有关死亡的写作开辟了空间，而这种写作可能之前一直被美国人认为病态（回想一下，对于致命疾病的患者来说，直到20世纪70年代，医生才开始习惯性地告诉他们命不久矣的实情；而更早之前，通常认为最好不要告诉绝症患者坏消息）。
Among my favorite works of that era are Tim Dlugos’s late poems. They have the jaunty “I did this, I did that” style of Frank O’Hara, inflected with the gravitas of death. Dlugos takes stock, like others, of the physical degradation of the body, “the shiny / hamburger-in-lucite look / of the big lesion on my face; / the smaller ones I daub / with makeup; the loss / of forty pounds in a year.” But he also searched for meaning in his suffering, concluding: “The symptoms float like algae / on the su***ce of the grace / that buoys me up today.” His work is remarkable, pivoting from bald reportage on a friend’s outcry — “ ‘I hate this, I hate your / being sick and having AIDS / and lying in a hospital / where I can only see you / with a visitor’s pass’ ” — to transcendent hope:
那一时期我最喜欢的作品，包括提姆·德鲁格斯(Tim Dlugos)后期的诗歌。它们具有弗兰克·奥哈拉(Frank O'Hara)那种“我做了这个，我做了那个”的轻快风格，语调则因死亡的沉重和庄严而产生一些变化。德鲁格斯，与其他作者类似，盘点了身体的物理退化过程：“闪亮亮的／像树脂封着个汉堡包的／是我脸上一大块病创；／小点的伤我胡乱涂抹／一些妆粉；丢失了／四十磅体重，仅此一年。”但他也从受苦经历中寻找了意义，总结道：“病症像水藻一样漂浮／在恩典的表面，是这恩典／今天令我振作、高涨。”他的作品卓尔不凡，回旋与对一个朋友哗然喧嚷的大胆采写——“‘我恨这一切，我恨你／得了病、得了艾滋／而且躺在医院里／以致我见你还必须／办访客通行证’”——与超然的希望之间：
When
Joe O’Hare flew in last week,
he asked what were the best
times of my New York years;
I said “Today,” and meant it.
I hope that death will lift me
by the hair like an angel
in a Hebrew myth, snatch me with
the strength of sleep’s embrace,
and gently set me down
where I’m supposed to be,
in just the right place.
当
奥黑尔上周飞来小聚，*
他问我觉得在纽约
这些年里哪时最好；
我说“今天”，我很认真。
希望死亡把我拎起来
抓着我的头发，就像
希伯来神话里的天使，
力道恰似睡眠的拥抱，
然后温柔地将我放下，
恰好放在我本必须
置身的那个地方。
（*奥黑尔指乔·奥黑尔[Joe O'Hare]——译者注）
But for me the great poem of protracted death is James Merrill’s “Christmas Tree,” which was written in the final weeks of his life. Merrill was dying of AIDS, although this information wasn’t made public until years after his death. The book includes many extraordinary poems about mortality, many of them self-portraits. Particularly moving is the final poem, “An Upward Look,” which describes the world as “this vast facility the living come / dearest to die in” — medicalizing, as it were, all of existence. But, in a sense, the book’s capstone is the poem that didn’t make it in. “Christmas Tree” is a “shape poem,” taking the form of the right half of a Christmas tree, narrowing at the end to a trunk. A dramatic monologue, it’s spoken by the tree a family has brought down “from the cold sighing mountain” to decorate the family home. The tree knows it must soon die. But nonetheless it speaks of being feted, finding that, “honestly, / It did help to be wound in jewels, to send / Their colors flashing forth from vents in the deep / Fragrant sable that cloaked me head to foot.”
不过，有关拖延的死亡，对我而言最伟大的一首诗是詹姆斯·梅利尔的《圣诞树》(Christmas Tree)。这首诗写成于他生命的最后几周内。弥留之际的梅利尔当时身患艾滋病，虽然直到他死后多年，这一信息才公之于众。梅利尔那本诗集里还有很多关于人之将死的非凡诗篇，其中许多都是文字的自画像。书中最动人的是最后一首诗：《向上的一望》(An Upward Look)。诗中将世界描述为“这个广阔的设施，生者／以至亲而来，只为一死”——宛如将所有的存在都医疗化了。但是，在某种意义上，这本书的墓顶石，是书中没有收录的那一首：《圣诞树》。这是一首具象诗，采用一棵圣诞树右半边形状为格式，诗文缩拢于树干根部。内容是一段戏剧性的独白，出自一棵树之口，它被某家人“从叹息的冷山上”买走，下山妆点这个家。这棵树知道自己肯定马上就要死了。虽则如此，它仍然说自己承蒙盛情款待，发现：“老实说，／这确实挺有帮助：珠宝缠身，将它们／闪烁的色彩从貂皮孔隙中呈射而出，／那是我从头到脚裹着的，芬芳的黝黑丧衣。”
The poem is remarkable, I think, for its combination of rich descriptive language and stark reflection on the slow fade of the body; for its ability to convey both the painful vividness of life and the sorrowful muting of physical diminishment. Unlike Keats’s speaker in “Ode to a Nightingale,” musing on the immortal sublimity of the nightingale and the painless release of death, Merrill’s Christmas tree must reflect on its disembodiment:
这首诗之所以引人注目，我认为，是因为它结合了丰富的描述性语言，以及对身体缓慢凋零的不加掩饰的强烈反映；因为它既能够传递生命那种痛苦的鲜活，又能够表达肉体在物质层面上渐弱的悲伤缄默。济慈《夜莺颂》(Ode to a Nightingale)中的讲话者，冥思着夜莺那升华的不朽崇高，以及轻轻松松无痛而释的死亡；与此不同的是，梅利尔的《圣诞树》必须反映自身与躯壳的脱离，及其肉体的解散：
Yes, yes, what lay ahead
Was clear: the stripping, the cold street, my
chemicals
Plowed back into Earth for lives to come —
No doubt a blessing, a harvest, but one that doesn’t
bear,
Now or ever, dwelling upon. To have grown so thin.
Needles and bone. The little boy’s hands meeting
About my spine.
是的，是的，前面等着什么
非常清楚：剥光，冰冷的街，我的化学物质各种药
奋力耕犁，重回大地，为了新生的来到——
这无疑是一份福恩，一份收获，但同时令任何人都无法
无论此刻或永远，详述或思量。生长至如此单薄。
尖针与嶙峋瘦骨。小男孩的双手碰触着
我的“棘”椎。
The shape of the poem powerfully intensifies the realization of death, and enacts it (much as Hitchens’s scattered notes enact his death). At the end, the poem shifts to short lines and sentence fragments:
这首诗的形状有力加剧了对死亡的现实化，并且形象地展现了死亡（正如同希钦斯零落溃散的笔记展现了他的死亡）。最末，诗文转化为短短数行句子的碎片：
No dread. No bitterness. The end beginning. Today’s
Dusk room aglow
For the last time
With candlelight.
Faces love lit,
Gifts underfoot.
Still to be so poised, so
Receptive. Still to recall, to praise.
没有恐惧。没有辛酸。终结的开始。今天的
黄昏的房间
最后的一次
在烛光中映红。
容光因爱焕发，
脚下堆着礼物。
仍要如此泰然，如此
善感。仍要回忆、仍要称颂。
All of this raises the question: Why do we read memoirs of death? It is fairly clear why writers might write them. As Updike notes, in the CAT scan he fantasizes about future projects, which makes him feel that “all would be well.” The writer writes, clearly, in order to gain some semblance of control; to understand what is taking place; to leave some immortal part of herself behind in art; and to memorialize herself in a final self-portrait. Sontag said that writing “Illness as Metaphor” was “very cathartic. . . . It turned cancer into an intellectual adventure and made a disaster into something positive.” Hitchens, like Sontag, also wrote to correct false impressions, cultural delusions, false metaphors and truisms about “battling cancer” and “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
所有这一切都提出了一个问题：我们为什么要读死亡的回忆录？至于作家为什么要写，相当清楚。正如厄普代克所指出的，在做电脑断层扫描时，他幻想着未来的计划，这让他感到“一切都会好的”。作家写作，很显然，是为了获得一些貌似控制的感觉；为了理解正在发生的是什么；为了将一部分不朽的自己以艺术方式留以身后；为了以最终自画像的形式纪念自身。桑塔格曾说，写《疾病的隐喻》是“非常具有宣泄作用的……它将癌症转化成一种知性的冒险，将灾难变成某种积极的东西”。与桑塔格类似，希钦斯写作也是为了纠正错误印象、文化错觉、虚假隐喻，以及那些老生常谈的“抗击癌症”和所谓“杀不死你的总会令你变得更强大”。
But the reason we read, I think, is connected to what Helen Vendler calls “the strange binocular style” of late works. The writer is “still alive but aware of the imminence of death” and “wishes to enact that deeply shadowed but still vividly alert moment.” That alertness, that double reality, calls us to our senses, reminds us that even if we are not believers we may wish to approach the apportioning of our days with more profound awareness. Merrill’s poem finds a way to weave the intensity of life and its imminent end into one moving, salvific — if unsentimental — thread. It’s a reminder that one reason we turn to art is not for the illusion of false finish but for contact with our deepest evaded realities. For some of us, fear of death is ameliorated by faith in a world beyond ours; for others, the only compensatory religion is art.
不过我认为，我们之所以读这些作品，与海伦·文德勒(Helen Vendler)所谓作家后期作品的“奇怪双视风格”有关。写作的人“还活着，但意识到死亡的紧迫”而且“希望触发那个在深深的暗影之下，却又如此生动警觉的时刻”。这种警觉，这种双重现实，令我们获得全方位的感官认识，提醒我们：即使我们不是宗教信徒，也可能会希望以更深刻的觉悟，认真考虑我们行将就木的日子如何分配。梅利尔的诗就找到一种方法，得以将生命的强烈，及其终点逼近时的急迫，编织为一线动人的语丝——如果不多愁善感的话，那就具有救赎的能量。这也提醒了我们，我们求助于艺术的一个原因，不是为了幻觉中的虚假完结，而是为了接触我们最远远回避的现实。对于某些人而言，对死亡的恐惧，因为对来生的信念而有所改善；对其他人而言，唯一可为代偿的宗教则是艺术。
The fact is we experience a cognitive dissonance reading these books, accurate though their characterizations of dying may be. In many places, what death might mean is obscured by all the procedural attentions, the focus on the “benign big blond machine” and “CAT-scan needle biopsy” (Updike). But that cognitive dissonance is, for readers, useful, as it forces us to recognize our own strategies of denial and repression, whether we are agnostics or believers. In his last poems, Updike himself turns, conventionally, to nature and to religion for comfort, finding in the Virginia creeper outside his window the lesson he hasn’t internalized yet, noting that the “feeblest tug” brings it down, “as if to say, To live is good / but not to live . . . still stretching toward the sun — is good also, all photosynthesis abandoned.”
事实上，我们读这些书就是经历某种认知失调，虽然其对于死亡可能的过程刻画精准。死亡有可能意味着什么？答案在许多地方都被模糊了，被各种程序意义上的注意点，被（厄普代克笔下的）“仁慈的淡金色大机器”以及“电脑断层扫描穿刺活检”遮掩了。但这种认知失调，对读者而言，非常有用，因为它迫使我们去辨识我们自身面对否认与内心压抑的策略，无论我们是不可知论者还是宗教信徒。在厄普代克最后几首诗中，他自己也不免俗地转向大自然与宗教，寻求慰藉。他从窗外的五叶爬山虎中学到了一课，虽然当时还未能使其化于内在；他指出：“最微弱的一拽”将爬山虎扯下墙，“就好像是说：活着挺好／但不活的话……仍然面朝太阳舒展身体——／也挺好，所有的光合作用／都弃之不要。”
Reading today’s secular literature of death one ultimately realizes that the medical language is a scrim: on the one hand, it’s purely descriptive, a way of “recording” the strange time of the hospital. But on the other hand, its foreignness is connotative. It subconsciously serves to express the author’s fundamental alienation from the fact that this is happening to his body, his wishful hope that this remain unreal even as he experiences it as total, an immersion in what Hitchens describes as living in “another country.” The dissonance here is that dying is not really like entering “another country.” As Sontag observed accurately, it is our country from birth: “Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick.” But in a world that lacks an ethics of death, as ours does, we live estranged from this deeper knowledge. Perhaps because we must.
阅读今日世俗非宗教的死亡文学，读者最终意识到，医学语言是一层纱幕：一方面，它以一种纯粹描述性的方式，“记录”着医院里奇怪的时间；但另一方面，其异质性颇具内涵。这种语言，下意识地服务于作者；作者面对自己身体发生的一切时，以其表达自身疏离这些事实的根本性异化过程。这是作者一厢情愿的希望——希望这一切都维持非现实态——即使他自己全面经历这一切，完全浸润在希钦斯描述的所谓生活在“另一个国家”的状态中。这里的这种失调，是指死去的过程并不真就像是进入了“另一个国家”。正如桑塔格精准观察到的那样，这另一个国家，本就是我们自出生起所生活的故土：“每个人，只要出生，必都持有双重公民身份，一则属于健康王国，一则衰病王国。”但是，在一个缺乏死亡伦理规范的世界，比如我们这个世界，我们活着，却疏远着这层更深的知识。或许因为我们必须如此吧。