生命的層級
作者： （英）朱利安·巴恩斯
出版社：譯林出版社
出版日期：2019/
內容簡介
「我們相遇時，我三十二歲；她去世時，我六十二歲。這三十年，她是我的生之所在，心之所向。」每一個愛的故事都是一曲潛在的悲歌。巴恩斯把所有作品都題獻給了愛侶，而這次卻再也無法得到她的回應。在這部極其私人的作品里，他以罕見的坦率講述了自己人生中唯一的故事，關於愛與失去的悲傷故事。作品字裡行間流淌著巴恩斯對愛侶的深情哀思，也承載著他對記憶和存在深刻的省視。
朱利安·巴恩斯(1946— )英國當代著名作家，畢業於牛津大學，曾參與《牛津英語辭典》的編纂工作，做過多年的文學編輯和評論家。「睿智」是巴恩斯作品的一貫標識。他以突破性之作《福樓拜的鸚鵡》入圍布克獎決選，並於2011年憑借《終結的感覺》贏得大獎，同年獲大衛·柯恩英國文學終身成就獎。2016年入選美國文學藝術學院，成為外國榮譽成員。2017年榮獲法國總統頒發的法國榮譽軍團勛章。
巴恩斯妻子帕特·凱伐納是著名的文學經紀人，2008年因病逝世。凱伐納是巴恩斯創作生涯的見證者，也是他此前所有作品的促成者，《生命的層級》是巴恩斯為愛妻寫下的紀念之作。
英國當代著名作家，畢業於牛津大學，曾參與《牛津英語辭典》的編纂工作，做過多年的文學編輯和評論家。
“睿智”是巴恩斯作品的一貫標識。他以突破性之作《福樓拜的鸚鵡》入圍布克獎決選，並於2011年憑藉《終結的感覺》贏得大獎，同年獲大衛•柯恩英國文學終身成就獎。2016年入選美國文學藝術學院，成為外國榮譽成員。2017年榮獲法國總統頒發的法國榮譽軍團勳章。
巴恩斯妻子帕特•凱伐納是著名的文學經紀人， 2008年因病逝世。凱伐納是巴恩斯創作生涯的見證者，也是他此前所有作品的促成者，《生命的層級》是巴恩斯為愛妻寫下的紀念之作。
目錄 · · · · · ·
高度之罪
水平面上
深度之失
水平面上
深度之失
p.21
Odilon RedonEye-Balloon (Œil-ballon)1878https://www.moma.org/collection/works/33013
p.105 奧蒂隆·雷東為--引言 1869年：1880年、カミーユ・ファルグ (Camille Fargue) と結婚。『森の精神』1880年；Self-Portrait, 1880, Musée d'Orsay
奧迪隆·雷東（原名伯特蘭-讓·雷東，法語：Odilon Redon，法語發音：[ʁədɔ̃]，1840年4月20日－1916年7月6日）是法國象徵主義畫家、版畫家、製圖員以及粉蠟筆畫家。a French symbolist painter, printmaker, draughtsman and pastellist.
Wikipedia 的 Odilon Redon，只有法文本有他妻子姓名
The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands, had an exhibition with an emphasis on the role that literature and music played in Redon's life and work, under the title La littérature et la musique. The exhibition ran from 2 June to 9 September 2018.[19]
"Odilon Redon: La littérature et la musique;". Retrieved 2018-08-10.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odilon_Redon
This thought of Rilke about visionary travel and country faces is also important because Rembrandt never left his native Holland. He also refused to travel to Rome, the "home of the arts," the center of European artistic life (in the 17th century, a visit to Italy was considered necessary for the completion of education). Here is what the French symbolist artist Odilon Redon wrote about this Rembrandt line:
"... I think that Rembrandt's great style, coming from his heart and his all-encompassing mind, is connected with the tranquility of his immobile life." He never left Amsterdam and advised his students not to go anywhere, even to Italy. to say that immobility creates genius, but it seems to me that his genius, his humane and human vision, would not have gained anything from a heap of impressions far from those models that he always had before his eyes.In diversity, the deep and single, which he He wounded in a secluded refuge of his dreams and thoughts ... ".
Levels of Life is a book about ballooning, photography, love and loss; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded Barnes the 2011 Booker Prize described him as “an unparalleled magus of the heart.” This book confirms that opinion.
Levels of Life: Barnes, Julian: 9780385350778: Amazon.com .
Julian Barnes 'Levels' With Us On Love, Loss And Ballooning
Levels of Life by Julian Barnes – review
Julian Barnes's searing essay on grief reveals the depth of his love for his late wife, writes Blake Morrison
Literary agent Pat Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’s wife, who died in 2008. Photograph: United Agents
Blake Morrison
Published on Wed 10 Apr 2013 13.08 BST
There's a great passage in Tobias Wolff's autobiographical novel Old School, in which a pompous young teacher called Ramsey asks Robert Frost whether form really matters any more: isn't writing that is spontaneous, even disorderly, a better way to reflect the traumas of modern-day experience? Frost's reply is devastating: "I lost my nearest friend in the one they called the Great War. So did Achilles lose his friend in war, and Homer did no injustice to his grief by writing about it in dactylic hexameters … Such grief can only be told in form … Without it you've got nothing but a stubbed-toe cry – sincere, maybe, for what that's worth, but with no depth or carry. No echo. You may have a grievance but you do not have grief."
Julian Barnes's new book is, in part, about the grief he suffered (and continues to suffer) after the death of his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh, in 2008. On the matter of form, he is with Frost, not Ramsey. If it has taken him several years to express his grief in writing, whereas Joan Didion, for example, completed a book about the death of her husband within 12 months, that's not because he was lost for words (he wrote hundreds of thousands of them in a diary) but because he needed to find the right form. His wife didn't enjoy public attention: a confessional memoir wouldn't have suited. The category-defying book he has written looks disjointed at first, until its different themes gradually converge.
"You put together two things that have not been put together before," it begins, "and the world is changed." That's true of love but also of art. Ezra Pound made the combination of disparate things a principle of imagism, as in his poem on a station of the Paris Métro: "The apparition of these faces in the crowd:/Petals on a wet, black bough." Faces and petals make an immediate visual match. The themes that preoccupy Barnes – love and ballooning (and grief and photography) – take a little longer to line up but discovering how they do is half the pleasure. We've work to do – not grief‑work such as the author's, but work all the same.
The book's first section offers a brief history of 19th-century Anglo-French ballooning, with the pioneer of aerial photography – Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, aka Nadar – in the starring role. Just as every love story is a potential grief story, so every exultant balloon ascent is a potential disaster; as well as freedom and adventure, there is hubris and farce. Nadar was doubly innovative: he didn't just get up in the clouds, colonising God's space, he took pictures, when all our previous imagery had been Earthbound. It is the capacity "to look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective" that Barnes admires in Nadar – that and the fact he was "uxorious"*, a word he returns to later and rescues from misuse in relation to himself. *我對人們濫用"溺愛妻子的"這一形容詞怒不可遏。p.104
husband, uxorious, per uxorem, band shell, “indul...
Two other pioneering balloonists were the English colonel Fred Burnaby and the French actor Sarah Bernhardt, both of them larger than life characters, despite Bernhardt being so slim. In the second section of the book, B & B are brought together. "We may establish that they met," Barnes writes – "establish" as in build a story round, rather than base on fact. Soon they are soaring towards marriage. Or Burnaby imagines they are. Not that Bernhardt is merely flirting. But she is too busy having fun to want commitment. Rejected, he wonders if it isn't better to live among clouds, deluded, than on the level. "The pain was to last several years."
Burnaby died in 1885, in a battle in Sudan, from a spear-thrust through the neck. Barnes felt he had suffered a similar spear-thrust, or balloon crash, when his wife of 30 years died just 37 days after being diagnosed with a brain tumour. Where the first two sections portray life in the air and on the ground, the searing 50-page essay that concludes the book describes descent – no upper air, no perspective, just darkness and despair. Nothing had prepared him: not his parents' deaths, nor all the thinking about death that went into his book Nothing to Be Frightened Of, published just a few months before. And very little helped him cope.
Certain things that were said, or not said, only made it worse: the friends who suggest he get away while they look after his house and their dog has the run of the garden (this while his wife is not yet dead); the ones who pretend not to hear when he mentions her name; the ones who ask – convinced he is looking better – "Have you found someone?" The griefstruck rarely know what they want, he says, so these offences are lightly noted, not raged over. What do they matter, after all – what does anything matter – when the worst has already happened?
One by one, the classic consolations offered to the bereaved are considered and repudiated: that suffering makes you stronger; that things get easier after the first year, through repetition ("why should repetition mean less pain?"); that the two of you will be reunited in the next life (which no atheist can believe). He owns up to thoughts of suicide and explains the reason for resisting: he is his wife's chief rememberer, and if he kills himself he will be killing her too.
One grief throws no light upon another, he says, quoting EM Forster. But some aspects of grief are universal, or can be made so through the honesty and precision with which they are articulated. Denying himself woolly comforts, Barnes scorns the euphemisms of "passed" or "lost to cancer" (the linguistic equivalent of averting one's eyes). Even actions that others might find strange – his habit of talking to his wife, though she is dead – have their own irresistible logic: "the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist."
Pat Kavanagh was my agent for 30 years; it is hard for me to be objective. But this is not a book written for people who knew her. Nor is it "Before She Left Me", a story of her life and last weeks. Candid about his own grief, Barnes remains protective of her privacy; though her photo is on the back cover, her name doesn't appear in the text. Distressed by how many memories of her have gone, as if she is slipping away a second time, he lists the things he does remember – the last book she read, the last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. But he doesn't disclose what they were.
"Let me tell you something about her," he wrote of his wife in the half-chapter of A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, while giving away very little. Levels of Life, similarly, is a book that levels with us only up to a point. Its resonance comes from all it doesn't say, as well as what it does; from the depth of love we infer from the desert of grief. Even this essay is only one panel of a triptych – a form arrived at to "give sorrow words" when it might have been a mere stubbed-toe cry.
Levels of Life
by Julian Barnes
Hardcover, 128 pagespurchase
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Julian Barnes is also the author of The Sense of an Ending, which won the Man Booker Prize in 2011.Alan Edwards/Knopf
"Every love story is a potential grief story," Julian Barnes writes in Levels of Life, a quirky but ultimately powerful meditation on things that uplift us — literally, as in hot air balloons, and emotionally, as in love — and things that bring us crashing to earth: to wit, that great leveler, the death of a loved one.
In this slim, tripartite book, Barnes tenuously attempts to juxtapose several disparate subjects: 19th century French portrait photographer Nadar, who first succeeded in photographing the earth from above, allowing us "to look at ourselves from afar, to make the subjective suddenly objective"; Fred Burnaby, a "balloonatic" officer in the British Royal Horse Guards willing to risk soaring across the English Channel without a cork vest, but nearly sunk when spurned in his ardent attempt to marry Sarah Bernhardt; and Barnes' own flattening grief after the sudden death of his wife, literary agent Pat Kavanagh, from a brain tumor in 2008.
The tricky synthesis Barnes is after doesn't quite come off. We read the opening nonfiction section, "The Sin of Height," and the quasi-fictional "On the Level," intrigued but somewhat baffled by his fascination with 19th century aeronautics and weighted down by his belabored extended metaphors of soaring and crashing. "You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed," he begins, later adding what could serve as commentary on this book: "Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
Yet Levels of Life takes flight with its third, autobiographical section, "The Loss of Depth." After a vigil that lasted just "thirty-seven days from diagnosis to death," Barnes crash-landed into widowerhood. Normally so crisp and circumspect, Barnes writes movingly, "We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart." What was taken away, he insists, was "greater than the sum of what was there. This may not be mathematically possible; but it is emotionally possible."
He scrutinizes the down-to-earth landscape of grief, from "the Desert of Loss" to the "Bog of Self-Pity," and rails at the thoughtless things people say, such as advice to get a dog. But although probing deeply personal emotions, this is no confessional. Barnes avoids particulars, neither mentioning his wife's name nor sharing all the "last things" he tells us he remembers so clearly: "the last book she read," "her last spoken word." In doing so, his book's focus becomes his grief rather than his wife, "her-lessness" rather than her.
Barnes' preoccupation with mortality predates this loss. In his 2008 memoir, Nothing to Be Frightened Of, written before her diagnosis, he discussed his fear of end-of-life oblivion — the nothingness after death — and commented that death is "the one appalling fact which defines life; unless you are constantly aware of it, you cannot begin to understand what life is about." He also broached the subject of grief in his short story "Marriage Lines," from his 2011 collection, Pulse, about a widower returning alone to a formerly happy vacation spot.
Among the many trenchant questions Barnes poses in Levels of Life is what constitutes success in mourning: "Does it lie in remembering or in forgetting?" He contemplates suicide, but is stayed by the realization that his wife lives through his memories. Yet, "You ask yourself: what happiness is there in just the memory of happiness?"
Most of all, he misses the sharing and tries to keep up his end of their running conversation. "This is what those who haven't crossed the tropic of grief often fail to understand: the fact that someone is dead may mean that they are not alive, but doesn't mean that they do not exist," he writes. But with "no echo coming back," "everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less" — including, presumably, his 2011 Booker Prize for his elegant most recent novel, The Sense of an Ending.
Although Barnes contends, after E.M. Forster, that one grief "throws no light upon another," there is solace aplenty in reading of others' emotional struggles and resilience. For its unsparing contemplation of grief, Levels of Life merits a place beside C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, Calvin Trillin's About Alice, John Bayley's Elegy for Iris, Joyce Carol Oates' A Widow's Story and Donald Hall's Without on the growing shelf of literature about spousal bereavement.
"Sorrow is a kind of rust of the soul," Barnes quotes Samuel Johnson. Levels of Life boldly and beautifully buffs the corrosion.
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