I Miss Terry Pratchett

我怀念特里·普拉切特

There is a theory, not necessarily a really good theory, but a theory nevertheless, that all memories are a kind of furniture in the head. The good ones are armchairs. The painful ones are filing cabinets, usually full. And then there are the memories that are neither: the ones that arrive uninvited, settle in, and start terrorising the other occupants by kicking over the chairs. Sir Terry Pratchett, who knew more about furniture¹ than most, put it this way: Rincewind tried to force the memory out of his mind, but it was rather enjoying itself there, terrorizing the other occupants and kicking over the furniture.

有一个理论——未必是什么高明的理论，但终归是个理论——认为所有的记忆都是脑子里的家具。美好的记忆是扶手椅，痛苦的记忆是塞得满满当当的文件柜。还有一些记忆既不属于前者也不属于后者：它们不请自来，安顿下来，然后开始踢翻椅子，恐吓其他的“住户”。特里·普拉切特爵士对家具¹的了解比大多数人都多，他是这样描述的：林斯温德试图把这段记忆从脑海中赶走，但它在那儿待得挺自在，恐吓着其他住户，还踢翻了家具。

I was sixteen when I first read that sentence. I was sitting in the back row of a French classroom, next to my friend Mathieu, and the teacher was explaining something important about a comma. The pocket edition was cheap, the cover was a weird mix of grey and lurid colours, and Mathieu and I had read every Pratchett the school library would lend us, plus several it would not. The sentence has been in my head ever since. It refuses to leave. Occasionally it kicks over the furniture.

我第一次读到这句话时才十六岁。当时我坐在法语教室的后排，旁边是我的朋友马修，老师正在讲解关于逗号的重要知识点。那本袖珍版书很便宜，封面上灰暗与艳丽的色彩混杂在一起，显得有些怪异。我和马修读遍了学校图书馆能借到的每一本普拉切特，甚至还读了几本不该借出来的。从那时起，这句话就一直留在我的脑海里。它拒绝离开，偶尔还会踢翻我的“家具”。

The library at the back of the class

教室后排的图书馆

There is a kind of reading you only do at fifteen, and only really in places you are not supposed to be reading. The back of a classroom counts. So does the bottom of a sleeping bag, the wrong bus, and the ten minutes between someone announcing dinner and dinner actually arriving. The book has to be small enough to disappear when a teacher looks up. Pocket editions, as their name suggests, were engineered for this. Pratchett’s were small, thin, and printed on a kind of flimsy paper that made it easier to disrespect, and therefore ended up slightly battered. He wrote books that were the right size for hiding. A whole cosmology, a whole flat world balanced on a turtle, and you could slide it (poorly) inside a maths textbook with a centimetre to spare.

有一种阅读只属于十五岁，而且只发生在那些“不该阅读”的地方。教室后排算一个，睡袋里、坐错的公交车上，以及宣布开饭到饭菜真正端上桌的那十分钟空档也算。书必须足够小，以便在老师抬头时能迅速藏起来。袖珍版书如其名，正是为此而生。普拉切特的作品小巧、轻薄，印在一种容易磨损的薄纸上，因此书页总是显得有些破旧。他写的书大小正适合藏匿。整个宇宙观，整个平衡在巨龟背上的扁平世界，你都可以（笨拙地）把它塞进数学课本里，还能富余出一厘米的空间。

A brief theory of why he worked on teenagers

关于他为何能吸引青少年的简短理论

Most fantasy, at the time, took itself extremely seriously. It had maps. It had appendices. It had Heroes, capital H, walking grimly towards their Destiny across a landscape that smelled of dwarves. Pratchett had a wooden chest with legs. His thesis, more or less, was that the universe was very large and very ridiculous, and the two facts were related². He also treated his readers as if they were intelligent, which, to a teenager being treated as anything else by almost everybody else, is the closest thing to a love letter. And you could buy it in a train station bookstore.

在那个年代，大多数奇幻文学都极其严肃。它们有地图，有附录，有大写的“英雄”，在充满矮人气息的土地上沉重地走向他们的“命运”。而普拉切特有一个长着腿的木箱。他的核心论点大致是：宇宙非常宏大，也非常荒谬，而这两个事实是相互关联的²。他把读者当作聪明人来对待，对于一个在其他地方几乎被所有人忽视的青少年来说，这简直就是最动人的情书。而且，你可以在火车站的书店里买到他的书。

“The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.” I read that line at an age when adults were enthusiastically trying to put things in mine. It did not stop them. But it did mean that, from then on, I noticed them doing it.

“当然，思想开放的麻烦在于，人们总会坚持跑过来，试图往你的脑子里塞东西。”我读到这句话时，正值大人们热衷于往我脑子里塞东西的年纪。这并没有阻止他们，但它确实意味着，从那时起，我开始意识到他们在这么做。

Rincewind, and the City Watch, and the Witches

林斯温德、城市卫队与女巫们

I never quite got to I loved Rincewind. Mathieu loved Rincewind. Rincewind, I should clarify, did not love anyone, including himself, and would have run away from the feeling if it had ever cornered him. He was the perfect protagonist for a millenial teenage boy: a coward, an underachiever, technically a wizard but only on a technicality, and the most powerful spell in the universe was lodged in his head against his will.

我一直很爱林斯温德。马修也爱林斯温德。我得澄清一下，林斯温德谁也不爱，包括他自己；如果这种情感真的把他逼入绝境，他一定会逃之夭夭。对于千禧一代的青少年来说，他是完美的男主角：胆小、没出息，名义上是个巫师但纯属凑数，而且宇宙中最强大的咒语还是违背他意愿强行塞进他脑子里的。

The City Watch came later, the way reading the Watch books always comes a little later than reading the Rincewind ones, on the same shelf but a little further along. Vimes, who started as a drunk and became, slowly, painfully, and with a great deal of swearing, the moral spine of an entire city. Carrot, who was technically a king and decided, with some embarrassment, not to be one. Angua. Detritus. Reg Shoe, who had voted, and continued to vote, despite a number of inconvenient deaths.

城市卫队系列是后来才读到的，就像阅读卫队系列总是比阅读林斯温德系列晚一点一样，它们在同一个书架上，只是位置靠后一些。维姆斯，从一个酒鬼开始，缓慢而痛苦地、伴随着大量的咒骂，最终成为了整座城市的道德脊梁。卡洛特，名义上是国王，却尴尬地决定不做国王。安格亚。德特里图斯。雷格·舒，尽管经历了多次不合时宜的死亡，依然坚持投票，并继续投票。

I never quite found my way into the Witches. I think you need to have known a small village from the inside, and to have been afraid of an old woman who saw too much, and I had not yet been either. Granny Weatherwax is waiting for me. She is good at waiting. I will get there.

我一直没能读进去女巫系列。我想，你得从内部了解过一个小村庄，并且曾对一个洞察一切的老妇人感到恐惧，而我当时两者皆无。兰格薇瑟奶奶在等我。她很擅长等待。我会读到那里的。

The embuggerance

“那个该死的阻碍”

He called it that, because he called everything what it was. The Alzheimer’s, the long fade, the slow theft. He gave a lecture called Shaking Hands With Death, which remains the best thing anyone has written about dying since several Stoics gave up trying. He scripted his own ending, which is a Pratchettian act in itself. There was even a steamroller (six-and-a-half tonne “Lord Jericho”), and a hard drive, and instructions to be followed exactly.

他称之为“那个该死的阻碍”（embuggerance），因为他总是直呼其名。阿尔茨海默病，漫长的消逝，缓慢的掠夺。他曾发表过一场名为《与死神握手》的演讲，这是自几位斯多葛学派哲学家放弃尝试以来，关于死亡最精彩的论述。他为自己的结局写了剧本，这本身就是一种非常“普拉切特式”的行为。甚至还有一台压路机（六吨半重的“杰里科勋爵”）、一个硬盘，以及必须严格执行的遗嘱。

What we lost, and what teenagers lost

我们失去了什么，青少年失去了什么

Terry Pratchett died in 2015. I was no longer sixteen. Mathieu was no longer sitting next to me. The classroom was somebody else’s now, and the comma had long since been explained. What I miss, selfishly, is the next book. There were always going to be more. What I miss, less selfishly, is whatever Pratchett-shaped object is supposed to be reaching teenagers now, and isn’t. The on-ramp to reading, for a kid who finds school boring and homework worse, used to be a small, thin, slightly battered book with a lurid cover and footnotes that talked back.

特里·普拉切特于2015年去世。我不再是十六岁，马修也不再坐在我身边。教室现在属于别人了，那个逗号也早已讲解完毕。我自私地怀念的是下一本书——原本总会有下一本的。我不那么自私地怀念的是，那些本该触达当代青少年、却未能出现的“普拉切特式”作品。对于一个觉得学校无聊、作业更糟的孩子来说，通往阅读的入口曾经是一本小巧、轻薄、略显破旧、封面艳丽且带有“回嘴”脚注的书。

I don’t see them, lately, in the back of any classroom I walk past. It is possible I am not walking past the right ones. But somewhere, presumably, there is a sixteen-year-old who has just read a sentence that will not leave their head. It is kicking over the furniture even now. I hope they pass the book to the person sitting next to them.

最近，在我经过的任何教室后排，我都看不到这样的书了。也许是我走错教室了。但可以推测，在某个地方，一定有一个十六岁的孩子刚刚读到了一句挥之不去的话。它此刻正踢翻着脑子里的家具。我希望他们能把这本书传给坐在旁边的人。

“In the beginning there was nothing, which exploded.” “起初什么都没有，然后它爆炸了。”

A note from later: this post met the internet, which is to say it met several hundred people with strong opinions about commas, and AI. The version above removed or rephrased some sentences that people found to be nonsensical. The original is kept on the principle that crushing one’s own first drafts under a steamroller is a privilege reserved for Terry.

后记：这篇文章发布到网上后，遇到了几百位对逗号和人工智能有着强烈见解的读者。上述版本删除了或重写了一些被认为语意不通的句子。保留原文的原则是：把自己的初稿用压路机碾碎，那是特里独有的特权。

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¹ Especially one huge wood chest that would occasionally move on its own and start wreaking chaos. ¹ 特别是指那个巨大的木箱，它偶尔会自己移动并开始制造混乱。