蜕变

∷蒋素华 选注

I wanted the mind of a scholar, but it seemed that Dr.Kerry saw in me the mind of a roofer（盖屋顶者）.The other students belonged in a library; I belong in a crane（起重机，吊车）1. 塔拉小时候跟随父亲分拣废品时曾坐过起重机。.

The fi rst week passed in a blur of lectures. In the second week, every student was assigned a supervisor to guide their research. My supervisor, I learned, was the eminent（杰出的，有名望的）Professor Jonathan Steinberg, a former vicemaster of a Cambridge college, who was much celebrated for his writings on the Holocaust（二战期间纳粹对犹太人的大屠杀）.

My fi rst meeting with Professor Steinberg took place a few days later. I waited at the porter's lodge（旅馆或宿舍楼的门房，传达室）until a thin man appeared and, producing a set of heavy keys, unlocked a wooden door set into the stone. I followed him up a spiral staircase and into the clock tower itself, where there was a well-lit room with simple furnishings: two chairs and a wooden table.

I could hear the blood pounding behind my ears as I sat down. Professor Steinberg was in his seventies but I would not have described him as an old man. He was lithe（行动灵巧的）, and his eyes moved about the room with probing energy. His speech was measured（慎重的，经仔细斟酌的）and fl uid.

“I am Professor Steinberg,” he said. “What would you like to read?”

I mumbled something about historiography（撰史，修史）. I had decided to study not history, but historians. I suppose my interest came from the sense of groundlessness I'd felt since learning about the Holocaust and the civil rights movements—since realizing that what a person knows about the past is limited, and will always be limited, to what they are told by others. I knew what it was to have a misconception corrected—a misconception of such magnitude that shifting it shifted the world. Now I needed to understand how the great gatekeepers of history had come to terms with（与……妥协）their own ignorance and partiality（偏袒，偏好）. I thought ificould accept that what they had written was not absolute but was the result of a biased process of conversation and revision, maybe I could reconcile（使和解）myself with the fact that the history most people agreed upon was not the history I had been taught. Dad could be wrong, and the great historians Carlyle and Macaulay and Trevelyan could be wrong,2. Carlyle: 托马斯·卡莱尔（Thomas Carlyle,1795—1881)，苏格兰哲学家、散文作家、历史学家及当时著名的社会评论家，著有《论英雄、英雄崇拜和历史上的英雄事迹》和《法国革命》等；Macaulay: 托马斯·巴宾顿·麦考利（Thomas Babington Macaulay, 1800—1859），英国政治家、历史学家、辉格党议员，著有大量随笔及讨论历史、政治、社会的文章，他的《英国史》成为辉格党编史的范例，其写作风格受到广泛称颂，内容却颇受争论；Trevelyan: 乔治·麦考利·特里维廉（George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1876—1962），英国历史学家，著有《威克利夫时代的英格兰》《改革法案的格雷爵士》《19世纪英国史》《英格兰史》等。but from the ashes of their dispute I could construct a world to live in. In knowing the ground was not ground at all, I hoped I could stand on it.

塔拉·韦斯托弗（Tara Westover）1986年9月出生于爱达荷州的摩门教家庭，17岁前从未进过正规学校，然而她通过惊人的刻苦和努力，不但以优异的成绩完成了杨百翰大学历史专业的课程，还获得了剑桥大学的博士学位，并成为哈佛大学访问学者。她把自己的成长经历撰写成书，自2018年2月出版以来，她的回忆录《受教者》（Educated）连续几周登上《纽约时报》最佳图书榜单第一名。

作者的父亲脾气暴躁，对家庭拥有绝对的控制权，他以回收破铜烂铁为生，不信任政府和学校教育，不让家里的七个孩子上学；他抗拒现代医疗，家人生病受伤都是靠母亲自制的草药医治。塔拉在三哥的支持和帮助下靠自学通过ACT考试，进入了杨百翰大学。大学教育彻底改变了塔拉，她开始自我反思，自我发现，她对家庭的揭露也导致她与家人渐行渐远，并最终决裂。尽管最要好、最支持她的三哥泰勒不完全同意书中的某些细节和塔拉的记忆，觉得有夸张的成分，但他不否认塔拉所叙述的是她所认为的真实情况。塔拉的父母也否认他们在她二哥虐待她时袖手旁观。草本疗法使塔拉的母亲名声远扬，她的父母都成为了当地非常成功的商人，而且共有三个子女获得了博士学位。

这一期选登的是塔拉在剑桥大学作研究时的经历。尽管可以用“一张白纸”来形容塔拉先前的教育背景，因为她连“犹太人大屠杀”（Holocaust）都没有听说过，但是她的导师乔纳森·斯坦伯格非常欣赏她的论文，认为她极具学术潜力，并极力推荐她到剑桥攻读博士学位，而塔拉却觉得自己不属于剑桥这样的学术象牙塔。克里博士试图说服她，他提起萧伯纳的《皮格马利翁》（Pygmalion，或译《卖花女》），剧中的卖花女伊丽莎虽然在教授的专业指教下改掉了自己的伦敦土腔，但真正使她蜕变的是她自己内心的信念。

I doubt I managed to communicate any of this. When I fi nished talking, Professor Steinberg eyed me for a moment, then said, “Tell me about your education. Where did you attend school?”

The air was immediately sucked from the room.

“I grew up in Idaho,” I said.

“And you attend school there?”

It occurs to me in retrospect that someone might have told Professor Steinberg about me, perhaps Dr.Kerry. Or perhaps he perceived that I was avoiding his question, and that made him curious. Whatever the reason,he wasn't satisfied until I had admitted that I'd never been to school.

“How marvelous,” he said, smiling. “It's as if I've stepped into Shaw'sPygmalion3. 希腊神话中的塞浦路斯国王皮格马利翁用神奇的技艺雕刻了一座美丽的象牙少女像，并赋予这座雕像全部的爱恋，爱神阿佛洛狄特被他打动，赐予雕像生命，并让他们结为夫妻。英国大文豪萧伯纳以上面这段传说为原型，创作了同名社会讽刺剧Pygmalion（《皮格马利翁》，又译《卖花女》，电影《窈窕淑女》正是改编自该作品），描写了语音学教授训练一名贫苦的卖花女并使其成功被上流社会所认可的故事。.”

None of my professors at BYU（Brigham Young University，杨百翰大学）had examined my writing the way Professor Steinberg did. No comma, no period, no adjective or adverb was beneath his interest. He made no distinction between grammar and content, between form and substance. A poorly written sentence was a poorly conceived idea, and in his view the grammatical logic was as much in need of correction. “Tell me,” he would say,“why have you placed this comma here? What relationship between these phrases are you hoping to establish?” When I gave my explanation sometimes he would say, “Quite right,” and other times he would correct me with lengthy explanations of syntax（句法）.

After I'd been meeting with Professor Steinberg for a month, I wrote an essay comparing Edmund Burke with Publius, the persona（人物角色）under which James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and John Jay had writtenThe Federalist Papers.4. Edmund Burke: 埃德蒙·伯克（1727—1797），18世纪英国著名的政治家和保守主义政治理论家，著有《法国大革命沉思录》。他是法国大革命的批判者，认为大革命已经演变为一场颠覆传统和正当权威的暴力叛乱，而非追求代议、宪法民主的改革运动，最终沦为一场大灾难。伯克所倡导的保守主义思想对英国的政治传统和各种思潮，美国的政治传统、政治制度以及主流的意识形态一直有着潜移默化的重大影响；The Federalist Papers:《联邦党人文集》，是詹姆斯·麦迪逊、亚历山大·汉密尔顿和约翰·杰伊三人为争取批准新宪法在纽约报刊上以“普布利乌斯”（Publius）为笔名而发表的一系列宪法论文，首次整理结集出版于1788年。《联邦党人文集》主张三权分立，相互制衡，成为美国政体和治国的核心理念。I barely slept for two weeks:every moment my eyes were open, I was either reading or thinking about those texts.

From my father I had learned that books were to be either adored or exiled. Books that were of God—books written by the Mormon prophets（摩门教先知）or the Founding Fathers—were not to be studied so much as cherished, like a thing perfect in itself. I had been taught to read the words of men like Madison as a cast into which I ought to pour the plaster of my own mind, to be reshaped according to contours（轮廓）of their faultless model. I read them to learn what to think,not how to think for myself. Books that were not of God were banished; they were a danger, powerful and irresistible in their cunning.

To write my essay I had to read books differently,without giving myself over to either fear or adoration.Because Burke had defended the British monarchy（君主制）, Dad would have said he was an agent of tyranny.He wouldn't have wanted the book in the house. There was a thrill in trusting myself to read the words. I felt a similar thrill in reading Maidson, Hamilton and Jay,especially on those occasions when I discarded their conclusions in favor of Burke's, or when it seemed to me that their ideas were not really different in substance,only in form. There were wonderful suppositions（假定，推测）embedded in this method of reading: that books are not tricks, and that I was not feeble（软弱的，无能的）.

I fi nished the essay and sent it to Professor Steinberg. Two days later,when I arrived for our next meeting,he was subdued（沉默寡言的）. He peered at me from across the table. I waited for him to say the essay was a disaster, the product of an ignorant mind, that it had overreached（做得过头）, drawn too many conclusions from too little material.

“I have been teaching in Cambridge for thirty years,” he said.“And this is one of the best essays I've read.”

I was prepared for insults but not for this.

Professor Steinberg must have said more about the essay but I heard nothing. My mind was consumed with a wrenching（令人痛苦的）need to get out of that room. In that moment I was no longer in a clock tower in Cambridge. I was seventeen,in a red jeep, and a boy I loved had just touched my hand. I bolted（逃跑）.

I could tolerate any form of cruelty better than kindness. Praise was a poison to me; I choked on it. I wanted the professor to shout at me, wanted it so deeply I felt dizzy from the deprivation（剥夺）. The ugliness of me had to be given expression. If it was not expressed in his voice, I would need to express it in mine.

I don't remember leaving the clock tower, or how I passed the afternoon. That evening there was a black-tie dinner（要求宾客穿礼服的正式晚宴）. The hall was lit by candlelight, which was beautiful, but it cheered me for another reason: I wasn't wearing formal clothing, just a black shirt and black pants, and I thought people might not notice in the dim lighting.

At my next supervision,Professor Steinberg said that when I applied for graduate school, he would make sure I was accepted to whatever institution I chose. “Have you visited Harvard?” he said. “Or perhaps you prefer Cambridge?”

I imagined myself in Cambridge, a graduate student wearing a long black robe that swished as I strode through ancient corridors.Then I was hunching（弯腰弓背身体向前）in a bathroom,my arm behind my back,my head in the toilet. I tried to focus on the student but I couldn't. I couldn't picture the girl in the whirling black gown without seeing that other girl. Scholar or whore,both couldn't be true. One was a lie.

“I can't go,” I said. “I can't pay the fees.”

“Let me worry about the fees,” Professor Steinberg said.

In late August, on our last night in Cambridge, there was a fi nal dinner in the great hall. The tables were set with more knives, forks and goblets（高脚杯）than I'd ever seen; the paintings on the wall seemed ghostly in the candlelight. I felt exposed by the elegance and yet somehow made invisible by it. I stared at the other students as they passed, taking in every silk dress, every heavily lined eye. I obsessed（对……着迷）over the beauty of them.

At dinner I listened to the cheerful chatter of my friends while longing for the isolation of my room.Professor Steinberg was seated at the high table. Each time I glanced at him, I felt that old instinct at work in me, tensing my muscles, preparing me to take fl ight（逃之夭夭）.

I left the hall the moment dessert was served. It was a relief to escape all that refinement and beauty—to be allowed to be unlovely and not a point of contrast. Dr. Kerry saw me leave and followed.

“You've made an impression on Professor Steinberg,”Dr. Kerry said, falling into step beside me. “I only hope he has made some impression on you.”

I didn't understand.

“Come this way,” he said, turning toward the chapel. “I have something to say to you.”

Dr. Kerry said he'd been watching me. “You act like someone who is impersonating（扮演，模仿）someone else.And it's as if you think your life depends on it.”

I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing.

“It has never occurred to you,” he said, “that you might have as much right to be here as anyone.” He waited for an explanation.

“I would enjoy serving the dinner,” I said, “more than eating it.”

Dr. Kerry smiled. “You should trust Professor Steinberg.If he says you're a scholar— ‘pure gold,' I heard him say—then you are.”

“This is a magical place,” I said. “Everything shines here.”

“You must stop yourself from thinking like that,” Dr.Kerry said, his voice raised. “You are not fool's gold,shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are.It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.”

I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I'd never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred（埋葬）the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot.

To myselfipretended there were other reasons I couldn't belong at Cambridge, reasons having to do with class and status: that it was because I was poor,had grown up poor. Because I could stand in the wind on the chapel roof and not tilt. That was the person who didn't belong in Cambridge: the roofer, not the whore. I can go to school, I had written in my journal that very afternoon. And I can buy new clothes. But I am still Tara Westover. I have done jobs no Cambridge student would do. Dress us any way you like, we are not the same. Clothes could not fi x what was wrong with me. Something had rotted on the inside, and the stench was too powerful, the core too rancid（腐臭的）, to be covered up by mere dressings.

Whether Dr. Kerry suspected any part of this, I'm not sure. But he understood that I had fi xated on clothes as the symbol of why I didn't, and couldn't, belong. It was the last thing he said to me before he walked away,leaving me rooted, astonished, beside that grand chapel.

“The most powerful determinant（决定因素）of who you are is inside you,” he said. “Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara.” He paused, his eyes fi erce, his voice piercing. “She was just a cockney（伦敦人）in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn't matter what dress she wore.”