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【群山回唱】

刚收到的时候放在掌心像一本厚厚的字典，以为要很久才能读完。没想到一周就结束了。

大部分阅读时间在地铁上。最后一章是星期六早晨在被窝里读的。
英文title非常美，中译名有过之无不及。是被名字吸引的，尤其是这个and，如果这本书就叫the mountains echoed，我也许就不会买。
文字有很熟悉的胡塞尼的味道。
还记得高中时代在电脑屏幕上看《追风筝的人》中译本，频频戳中泪点。胡塞尼的文字简单质朴，却温暖人心。《群山回唱》没有《追》那么催泪。长篇巨制，颇有草蛇灰线之感。读到中间才突然明白群山回唱，这个echo的用意。那么多人物，那么多故事，串联在一起，总是突然之间又来到十万八千里外的另一个地方，遇到另一个人，讲述另一个故事；又总是在电光火石之间，发现熟悉的联系。

【扉页】

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When you have lived as long as I have, the div replied, you find that cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same color.
善与恶。

Abdullah grinned to himself. “All right, fine.”
“You’ll be close by.”
“Yes.”
“Until we’re old.”
“Very old.”
“For always.”
“Yes, for always.”
From the front of the wagon, she turned to look at him. “Do you promise, Abollah?”
“Fro always and always.”
永远陪在我身边的承诺。

Abdullah could not picture that Father had once swung on a swing. He could not imagine that Father had once swung on a swing. He could not imagine that Father had once been a boy, like him. A boy. Carefree, light on his feet. Running headlong into the open fields with his playmates. Father, whose hands were scarred, whose face was crosshatched with lines of weariness. Father, who might as well have been born with shovel in hand and mud under his nails.
哈，我们总是以为父亲，母亲，爷爷，奶奶，生来如此。

Every night sleep stole him away no sooner than his cheek met the pillow.

怎么说“脑袋一沾枕头就睡着”~

Still, Ayub counted himself among the fortunate because he had a family that he cherished above all things. He loved his wife and never raised voice to her, much less his hand. He valued her counsel and found genuine pleasure in her companionship. As for children, he was blessed with as many as a hand has fingers, three sons and two daughters, each of whom he loved dearly. His daughters were dutiful and kind and of good character and repute. To his sons he had taught already the value of honesty, courage, friendship, and hard work without complaint. They obeyed him, as good sons must, and helped their father with his crops.
故事总是这样开始，然后一个转折——

The finger cut, to save the hand.

For a time, I was quite literally at a loss as to what to do with myself. For more than half a century I had looked after Suleiman. My daily existence had been shaped by his needs, his companionship. Now I was free to do as I wished, but I found the freedom illusory, for what I wished for the most had been taken from me. they say, Find a purpose in your life and live it. but, sometimes, it is only after you have lived that you recognize your life had a purpose, and likely one you never had in mind. And now that I had fulfilled mine, I felt aimless and adrift.
人生的目的为何？活过才知道。

You’re missing the point, Nahil. All I’m saying is that it’s crass to plaster your good deeds up on a billboard. Something to be said for doing it quietly, with dignity, there’s more to kindness than signing checks in public.
什么是真正的行善。

Timur is in his element at gatherings like this, and Idris cannot help but admire him for the ease of his manners, the effortless wisecracking, the self-possessed charm.
常常羡慕他们这样的能力：the ease of manners, the effortless wisecracking, the self-possessed charm.因为我做不到。生人面前，或者许多人面前，总是拘束不知道手该放在哪里，该说什么样的话，该用什么样的表情。姿势完全僵硬。所以我阅读卡耐基how to win friends，希望有一点点进步。确实好多了。但如果不是有意识地去努力，依然还是那副样子╮(╯_╰)╭

He is annoyed with their lack of interest, their blithe ignorance of the arbitrary genetic lottery that has granted them their privileged livee. He feels a sudden rift between himself and his family, even Nahil, most of whose questions about his trip revolve around restaurants and the lack of indoor plumbing. He looks at them accusingly now as the locals must have looked at him when he’d first arrived in Kabul.


What began with exuberance and passion always ended with terse accusations and hateful words, with rage and weeping fits and the flinging of cooking utensils and collapse. High drama.
爱情，总是这样开始，又那样结束。

爱。终于读完手机里的《温莎墓园日记》和《素履之往》，两本书混在一起看的，忘了是在哪本书里，木心先生讲到他的爱情观。原句忘了，我的理解是：偶然之中之偶然，爱情并非是必须品。换句话说，可遇不可求。

She said there was comfort to be found in the permanence of mathematical truths, in the lack of arbitrariness and the absence of ambiguity. In knowing that the answers may be elusive, but they could be found. They were there, waiting, chalk scribbles away.
“Nothing like life, in other words,” he said. “There, it’s questions with either no answers or messy ones.”
我也曾经因为相同的原因热爱数学和物理。

As they walk into the shop, Pari catches a glimpse of her reflection in the plate glass. Normally, especially of late, when she steps in front of a mirror an automatic mental process kicks into gear that prepares her to greet her older self. It buffers her, dulls the shock. But in the shopwindow, she has caught herself off guard, vulnerable to reality undistorted by self-delusion. She sees a middle-aged woman in a drab floppy blouse and a beach skirt that doesn’t conceal quite enough of the saggy folds of skin over her kneecaps. The sun picks out the gray in her hair. And despite the eyeliner, and the lipstick that defines her lips, she has a face now that a passerby’s gaze will engage and then bounce from, as it would a street sign or a mail-box number. The moment is brief, barely enough for a flutter of the pulse but long enough for her illusory self to catch up with the reality of the woman gazing back from the shopwindows. It is a little devastating. This is what aging is, she thinks as she follows Isabelle into the store, these random unking moments that catch you when you least expect them.
什么是aging。突然在某个时刻，在镜子里遇见苍老的自己。不知明镜里，何处染秋霜。

Adel was not too naïve to know that the world was a fundamentally unfair place; he only had to gaze out the window of his bedroom. But he imagined that for people like Gholam, the acknowledgment of this truth brought no satisfaction. Maybe people like Gholam needed someone to stand culpable, a flesh-and-bones target, someone they could convincingly point to as the agent of their hardship, someone to condemn, blame, be angry with. And perhaps Baba jan was right when he said the proper response was to understand, to withhold judgment. To answer with kindness, even.
世界原本不公平。但不能认输，不能认输。never, ever, ever.

Adel suspected, she had accepted for the same reason he would: because she had to. What choice was there? Adel could not run from his life any more than Gholam could from his. People learned to live with the most unimaginable things. As would he. This was his life. This was his mother. This was his father. And this was him, even if he hadn’t always known it.

认命？！有时候，你会对着镜子里的自己说：This is you. And this is your life. This is your fate, this is your desitiny.

Then you blink a little and look farther into your own iris: But I wanna change it.

Mama can’t stand it when people cry in her preence. She can barely look at their puffy eyes, their open, pleading faces. She sees crying as a sign of weakness, a garish appeal for attention, and she won’t indulge it. she can’t bring herself to console. Growing up, I learned that it was not one of her strong suits. Sorrow ought to be private, she thinks, not flaunted. Once, when I was little, I asked her if she’d cried when my father had fallen to his death.
At the funeral? I mean, the burial?
No, I did not.
Because you weren’t sad?
Because it was nobody’s business if I was.
Would you cry if I died, Mama?
Let’s hope we never have to find out, she said.
真正的悲伤总是外表不露痕迹。不是不会哭泣，是因为哭泣已经不足以作为表达悲伤的方式。

But in my quiet moments, in those long rides in the back of a bus or the bed of a truck, my mind always circles back to Mannaar. Thinking of him, of the anguish of his final days, and my own helplessness in the face of it, makes everything I have done, everything I want to do, seem as unsubstantial as the little vows you make yourself as you’re going to sleep, the ones you’ve already forgotten by the time you wake up.
永远不要相信自己睡前做出的承诺。vanity.

Many years later, when I began training as a plastic surgeon, I understood something that I had not that day in the kitchen arguing for Thalia to leave Tinos for the boarding school. I learned that the world didn’t see the inside of you, that it didn’t care a whit about the hopes and dreams, and sorrows, that lay masked by skin and bone. It was as simple, as absurd, and as cruel as that. My patients knew this. They saw that much of what they were, would be, or could be hinged on the symmetry of their bone structure, the space between their eyes, their chin length, the tip projection of their nose, whether they had an ideal nasofrontal angle or not.
Beauty is an enormous, unmerited gift given randomly, stupidly.
And so I chose m specialty to even out the odds for people like Thalia, to rectify, with each slice of my scalpel, an arbitrary injustice, to make a small stand against a world order I found disgraceful, one in which a dog bite could rob a little girl of her future, make her an outcast, an object of scorn.
美。长得丑的人看到上面那句话会非常爽快。我就很爽快。yes it is. beauty IS given stupidly.

But, all those years, I’d been blind to a greater truth, which lay unacknowledged and unappreciated, buried deep beneath my grievances. It was this: that my mother would never leave me. this was her gift to me, the ironclad knowledge that she would never do to me what Madaline had done to Thalia. She was my mother and she would not leave me. this I had simply accepted and expected. I had no more thanked her for it than I did the dun for shining on me.
谁言寸草心，报得三春晖。

He said that if culture was a house, then language was the key to the front door, to all the rooms inside. Without it, he said, you ended up wayward, without a proper home or a legitimate identity.
文化和语言。

All my life, I have lived like an aquarium fish in the safety of a glass tank, behind a barrier as impenetrable as it has been transparent. I have been free to observe the glimmering world on the other side, to picture myself in it, if I like. But I have always been contained, hemmed in, by the hard, unyielding confines of the existence that Baba has constructed for me, at first knowingly, when I was young, and now guilelessly, now that he is fading day by day. I think I have grown accustomed to the glass and am terrified that when it breaks, when I am alone, I will spill out into the wide unknown and flop around, helpless, lost, gasping for breath.
叛逆，成长。

I used to picture us as two leaves, blowing miles apart in the wind yet bound by the deep tangled roots of the tree from which we had both fallen.
“For me, it was the contrary,” Pari says. “You say you felt a presence, but I sensed only an absence. A vague pain without a source. I was like the patient who cannot explain to the doctor where it hurts, only that it does.”
presence&absence。两个Pari最终的相遇。