| 怀旧与乡愁：When Everyone Was Pregnant/John Updike |
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虽然有人说John Updike文笔造作，但我喜欢他文字的轻巧。偶然读到When Everyone Was Pregnant——Updike写于1971年的小说——这种感觉更加强烈。
小说是对五十年代的纪念。那时候，万事都勃勃有生机（everyone was pregnant, 好题目），但生机里也有不少naivety，不少rashness。
我一直没有当它是小说读。才短短四五页，也没有什么连贯的情节，看二十年前的事情，就觉得是繁星满天。
Katharine's husband Jerry had only one eye, ..., saying across to Sarah Harris, her pregant in a big flowered dress, sitting dreaming in a plush wing chair, "Sarah, sitting there you look just like a voluptuous big piece of wallpaper!" I thought, has only one eye, everything looks flat to him. Sickening sensation of love.
Years later I said to Sarah "You voluptuous piece of wallpaper you" but she had forgotten and I had to explain.
很美好。但也有另一个层次的：
The brown line on her belly a woman brings back from the hospital, after being pregnant. Nobody had ever told me that line existed. Why handn't they?
孕育生机的五十年代也带来不少未曾预料到的事情：就好象生育后留在妻子肚子上的那条黄线。那个时代，就像那个时代怀孕的女人，美好而且充满了期盼，而日后的衰败还没有来临。
Updike的When Everyone Was Pregnant使人不由地怀旧，乡愁从读者的心里浮起来，仿佛我现在看到《friends》里的几个演员，想起七、八年前我刚到美国时看到的他们，惊觉人衰老地那么快！
但Updike的nostalgia并不是容颜易老的简单nostalgia，它包含了对那个时代的反思：
Guiltlessness. Our fat Fifties cars, how we loved them, revved them: no thought of pollution. Exhaust smoke, cigarette smoke, factory smoke, all romantic. Romance of consumption at its height. Shopping for baby food in the gaudy trash of the supermarkets. Purchasing power: young, newly powerful, born to consume. To precreate greedily. A smug conviction that the world was doomed.
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