少年派的奇幻漂流 Chapter 60

Chapter 60,I awoke once during the night. I pushed the canopy ¹ aside and looked out. The moon was a sharply defined crescent and the sky was perfectly ² clear. The stars shone with such fierce, contained brilliance ³ that it seemed absurd to call the night dark. The sea lay quietly, bathed in a shy, light-footed light, a dancing play of black and silver that extended without limits all about me. The volume of things was confounding - the volume of air above me, the volume of water around and beneath me. I was half-moved, half-terrified. I felt like the sage ⁴ Markandeya, who fell out of Vishnu's mouth while Vishnu was sleeping and so beheld ⁵ the entire universe, everything that there is. Before the sage could die of fright, Vishnu awoke and took him back into his mouth. For the first time I noticed - as I would notice repeatedly during my ordeal ⁶, between one throe of agony and the next - that my suffering was taking place in a grand setting. I saw my suffering for what it was, finite and insignificant ⁷, and I was still. My suffering did not fit anywhere, I realized. And I could accept this. It was all right. (It was daylight that brought my protest: "No! No! No! My suffering does matter. I want to live! I can't help but mix my life with that of the universe. Life is a peephole, a single tiny entry onto a vastness - how can I not dwell on this brief, cramped ⁸ view I have of things? This peephole is all I've got!") I mumbled ⁹ words of Muslim prayer and went back to sleep. 

,They lay down under a canopy of stars.他们躺在繁星点点的天幕下 。,The witnesses were each perfectly certain of what they said.证人们个个对自己所说的话十分肯定
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