失眠颂：难眠时分，何以慰藉？

我们翻译这篇文章的理由

各位失眠患者，你有一份失眠漫记等待查收。

——唐萧

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失眠颂：难眠时分，何以慰藉？

作者：JAMES PARKER  

译者：唐萧

校对：吴树炜

策划：宋一 & 刘蕊

YOU HAVE TO GET UP.

首先，你得起床。

That's the first thing. Don't just lie there and let it have its way with you. The sea of anxiety loves a horizontal human; it pours over your toes and surges up you like a tide. Is your partner lying next to you, dense with sleep, offensively unconscious? That's not helping either. So verticalize yourself. Leave the bed. Leave its maddening mammal warmth. Out you go, clammy-footed, into the midnight spaces. The couch. The kitchen.

这是第一件事。别躺在那儿任由自己失眠。焦虑的海洋钟爱平躺的人，它会像潮水般涌向你，从头到脚淹没你。你的伴侣是不是在你旁边睡得正香，完全没意识到你正失眠——怎么能这样？得了吧，就算意识到了，也没什么用。所以你要从床上坐起来，离开床，离开那恼人的属于哺乳动物的温热。来吧,迈动潮润的双脚滑进午夜空间。去沙发上，去厨房里。

So now you're up. You've reclaimed a little dignity, a little agency. You're shaken, though. You make yourself a piece of toast; it pops up like a gravestone. Insomnia is no joke. The thoughts it produces are entirely and droningly humorless. Failure, guilt, your money, your body. Someone else's body. On and on. And over there, look, the world: the whole flawed and shuddering and horribly lit life-and-death scape, with all of us shambling around the circuit like broken beetles. At 2:41 a.m., everyone who's awake turns into Hieronymus Bosch.

现在你起来了。你得到了一点尊严，一丝解救。不过,你吓坏了。你给自己烤了一片吐司，它像墓碑一样猛地跳出来。失眠可不是开玩笑。由它所引起的想法毫无幽默可言，还在你脑子里嗡嗡嗡地打转。你想到失败、内疚、你的钱、你的身体，还有别人的身体。等等这般。而这整个世界，看啊：这个充满缺陷、摇摇欲坠的惨亮空间里，我们所有人都像破碎的甲虫一样在电路周围摇摇晃晃，生死只在一瞬间。凌晨2点41分，每个在此刻醒着的人都会变成耶罗尼米斯·博斯（Hieronymus Bosch）。

注：耶罗尼米斯·博斯（Hieronymus Bosch）是一位十五至十六世纪的多产荷兰画家，其画作多在描绘罪恶与人类道德的沉沦。博斯以恶魔、半人半兽甚至是机械的形象来表现人的邪恶。

And therein, my sleepless friend, lies the key: You're not alone. Even as you twist in these private coils, these very particular difficulties, you are joining a mystical fellowship of insomniacs. We are all out there, keeping an eye on things: a sodality, a siblinghood, an immense and floating guild of piercingly conscious minds. What might happen, if not for our vigilance? Into what idiocies of optimism and vainglory might humanity collapse? We're like the Night's Watch in Game of Thrones, except there are millions of us. Above the city rooftops it shimmers and flexes; it tingles over the leafy suburbs: the neural lattice of our wakefulness.

我不能安睡的朋友, 在这件事上，你不是一个人。即使你是在这些私密的感受中纠结，在这些非常特殊的困难中自处,你也等同于加入了一个神秘的失眠症患者协会。我们都在旁观,密切注视着一切事物。那是一种同盟者和兄弟姐妹般的氛围，是一个巨大又流动的、由意识敏锐的人组成的协会。要是没有我们的警惕,会发生什么？如果人性陨落，乐观主义和虚荣心会使人们走入何种愚蠢的境地呢？我们就像《权力的游戏》中的守夜人，只不过我们的背后站着数百万人。在城市的屋顶之上，它闪闪发光，摩拳擦掌；在绿叶丛生的郊区旁，它发出声响，为我们的觉醒树起了可供其攀附的神经网格。

'God time'—that's what my late friend, the writer Gavin Hills, used to call insomnia. Meaning, I think, a release from the individual and partial, a release into the eternal. The clock goes weird in the small hours. It speeds up and it slows down. It has moods. You yourself have moods. Now the Gothic backchat of insomnia fills your mind with terrible news, terrible apprehensions; now you feel at peace. Now panic seizes you: How will you function in the morning, on so little sleep? You'll be grumpy, you'll feel ill, your brain won't work! All those things you have to do and say! And now you feel something else: a serene compassion for your social self, for the buttressed and bashed-together you, so brittle, trying so hard, that you present to the world. Maybe you think about the other bashed-together selves that you'll encounter, in the grayness of the day, and you experience compassion for them too. This is quite precious.

“上帝时刻”——我已故的朋友、作家加文·希尔(Gavin Hills)过去常常这样描述失眠。我觉得他的意思是，从个体和孤立中得到释放，获得永恒的感受。时钟在这短短的几小时里变得很奇怪。它一会儿加速，一会儿减速。它有情绪。你自己也有情绪。你的头脑因为这哥特式的失眠回声充满了可怕的想法、可怕的忧虑。你感到平静了。你又被恐慌淹没了:睡得这么少，起床后身体受得了吗？你会暴躁,你会感到不舒服,你的大脑不能工作！你还得做那么多事，说那么多话！现在你又有了别的感受：你对自己的社交人格和“一边丧、一边上”的状态产生了无比的同情。你是如此脆弱，又如此努力地向世界展现着自己。也许你还会想到那些将在灰暗的日常中遇到的人，那些也和你一样嫌弃着自己的人，你会对他们产生类似的同情。这很珍贵。

It's 4 a.m. You've experienced yourself, fully and purgatorially. You've preserved the balance of global sanity. You've had pity on your fellow man. You have sniffed timelessness. Your work is done, insomniac. Go back to bed.

凌晨四点了。你已经完整经历了一遍自我体验的痛苦旅程。你已经维护了世界的神志清朗。你已经展现了对失眠同胞的同情。你已经嗅过了时间胶冻的气息。你的任务完成了，失眠患者。去睡吧。

• 本文原载于 The Atlantic

• 原文链接：https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/07/an-ode-to-insomnia/612274/