當 Vivien Leigh 憑《亂世佳人》贏得奧斯卡最佳女主角，而她的演員丈夫 Laurence Olivier 雖然也通過另一部片子獲提名但沒贏，他們倆在頒獎典禮結束後回家途中，在車裏經歷了小插曲。被嫉妒沖昏了頭腦的 Olivier ，伸手去搶奪 Leigh 的奧斯卡雕像，多年後他跟兒子這樣解釋他當時的行為：“It was all I could do to restrain myself from hitting her with it. I was insane with jealousy.”
我很理解 Olivier 的心情，因我每次讀到好的作品，我的嫉妒心就會燃起來， 然後我會問自己， why haven’t you thought of writing this way?
如果我明天中了六合彩，我的生活方式不會有很大的變化，我不會到世界各地旅遊吃好吃的等。我還是會指導學生寫作，因這是我愛做的事，但我肯定會減輕我的教學量，因我希望有多點時間看書，發現別人文章的奧妙之處，然後嘗試偷師，是我的最愛。
這次分享的兩段文字，來自一篇讓我 insane with jealousy 的 The New Yorker 長篇報導，它關於將臨北美西岸的九級地震（西雅圖溫哥華本地人給了這場未來災難 “The Big One” 的稱號)。該報導後來贏得普立茲獎。
In the following extract, Kathryn Schulz describes what will likely immediately happen after The Big One hits:
Soon after the shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades (a mountain range west of North America) and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over.
My takeaway
The part that stood out to me in this paragraph is this: “That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass.”
The writer takes advantage of the fact that the word “shatter” can harbour more than one meaning. Her first use of “shatter” – “That nonchalance will shatter instantly” – conveys her criticism of those who have long been living in denial about the earthquake. Her second use of “shatter” – “So will everything made of glass” – paints in the reader’s mind the horrifying picture of a mass of tall glass buildings collapsing all at once. This trick of using the same word metaphorically and then literally sums up in one stroke both the severity of the earthquake, and the idiocy of building so many fragile skyscrapers in a region that is overdue for a 9.0 quake.
I also admire the writer’s use of personification when describing what will happen to fridges while the ground shakes. We usually perceive this household item as so heavy that it’s practically immovable. If even a fridge can “walk out of kitchens,” then the earth’s vibrations must be very extreme indeed.
Schulz now turns to the tsunami that will flood the Pacific Northwest shortly after the earthquake:
Among natural disasters, tsunamis may be the closest to being completely unsurvivable. The only likely way to outlive one is not to be there when it happens: to steer clear of the vulnerable area in the first place, or get yourself to high ground as fast as possible. For the seventy-one thousand people who live in Cascadia’s inundation zone, that will mean evacuating in the narrow window after one disaster ends and before another begins. Depending on location, they will have between ten and thirty minutes to get out. That time line does not allow for finding a flashlight, tending to an earthquake injury, hesitating amid the ruins of a home, searching for loved ones, or being a Good Samaritan. “When that tsunami is coming, you run,” Jay Wilson, the chair of the Oregon Seismic Safety Policy Advisory Commission (OSSPAC), says. “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life.”
My takeaway
I’m blown away by the manner in which the writer has chosen to relay the earthquake expert’s words. If she had stuck strictly to the rules of grammar, instead of “You protect yourself, you don’t turn around, you don’t go back to save anybody. You run for your life,” she would have replaced each comma with a full stop. But because the quote is about the urgency of escaping from a tsunami, she decided to present it as a series of run-on sentences, so that the form of the quote mirrors the frantic running of people who are trying to flee from a tsunami.
Michelle Ng
英國牛津大學畢業，前《蘋果日報》和《眾新聞》專欄作家，現在身在楓葉國，心繫中國大陸和香港。
聯絡方式： michelleng.coach@proton.me
個人網站： https://michellengwritings.com
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