少年派的奇幻漂流 Chapter 1

Chapter 1,My suffering left me sad and gloomy.,Academic study and the steady, mindful practice of religion slowly wrought ¹ me back to life. I have kept up with what some people would consider my strange religious practices. After one year of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and took a double-major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious studies and zoology ². My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional ³ analysis of the thyroid glandof the three-toed sloth ⁴. I chose the sloth because its demeanour—calm, quiet and introspective—did something to soothe ⁵ my shattered self.,There are two-toed sloths ⁶ and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined ⁷ by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind ⁸ paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ (in its natural place or position) in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing ⁹ creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes filled with water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the water of the dishes swarming ¹⁰ with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in the most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough ¹² of a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 metres an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 metres an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah ¹³. Unmotivated, it covers four to five metres in an hour.,The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity ¹⁴, Beebe (1926) gave the sloths senses of taste, touch, sight and hearing a rating of 2, and its sense of smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken ¹⁵ it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur ¹⁶. As for hearing, the sloth is not so much deaf as uninterested in sound. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping or feeding sloths elicited ¹⁷ little reaction. And the sloth's slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated ¹⁸. They are said to be able to sniff ¹⁹ and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to decayed branches "often".,How does it survive, you might ask.,The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian ²⁵ life in perfect harmony with its environment. "A good-natured smile is forever on its lips," reported Tirler (1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, looking up at sloths in repose ²⁶, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation ²⁷ or hermits ²⁸ deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing.,Sometimes I got my majors mixed up. A number of my fellow religious-studies students—muddled agnostics who didn't know which way was up, who were in the thrall ²⁹ of reason, that fool's gold for the bright—reminded me of the three-toed sloth; and the three-toed sloth, such a beautiful example of the miracle of life, reminded me of God.,I never had problems with my fellow scientists. Scientists are a friendly, atheistic ³⁰, hard-working, beer-drinking lot whose minds are preoccupied ³¹ with sex, chess and baseball when they are not preoccupied with science.,I was a very good student, if I may say so myself. I was tops at St. Michael's College four years in a row. I got every possible student award from the Department of Zoology. If I got none from the Department of Religious Studies, it is simply because there are no student awards in this department (the rewards of religious study are not in mortal hands, we all know that). I would have received the Governor General's Academic Medal, the University of Toronto's highest undergraduate award, of which no small number of illustrious Canadians have been recipients ³², were it not for a beef-eating pink boy with a neck like a tree trunk and a temperament ³³ of unbearable ³⁴ good cheer.,I still smart a little at the slight. When you've suffered a great deal in life, each additional pain is both unbearable and trifling ³⁵. My life is like a memento ³⁶ mori painting from European art: there is always a grinning skull ³⁷ at my side to remind me of the folly ³⁸ of human ambition. I mock this skull. I look at it and I say, "You've got the wrong fellow. You may not believe in life, but I don't believe in death. Move on!" The skull snickers and moves ever closer, but that doesn't surprise me. The reason death sticks so closely to life isn't biological necessity—it's envy. Life is so beautiful that death has fallen in love with it, a jealous, possessive love that grabs at what it can. But life leaps over oblivion lightly, losing only a thing or two of no importance, and gloom is but the passing shadow of a cloud. The pink boy also got the nod from the Rhodes Scholarship committee. I love him and I hope his time at Oxford ³⁹ was a rich experience. If Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, one day favours me bountifully, Oxford is fifth on the list of cities I would like to visit before I pass on, after Mecca, Varanasi, Jerusalem and Paris.,It's a walking stick with a gold head wrought in the form of a flower.那是一个金质花形包头的拐杖。,I would like to brush up my zoology.我想重新温习一下动物学 。