"You know, the sky here is very strange. When I look up at the sky, I often feel that it is some kind of solid, blocking something behind us. ”
Kitt gave a cold cold war: "Something in the back? ”
"Yes."
"But what can be behind that?" Her voice was small.
"Nothing, I suppose. Only darkness. Absolutely dark night. ”
Shaded sky
Author: [Beauty] Paul Bowles
Translator: Yang Xi
Publisher: Jiangsu Phoenix Literature and Art Publishing House
Publication date: 2018.9
"The Covered Sky" was first published in the mainland in 2006 as "Falling into the Sahara". The two translations together are very interesting to see. The sky and the desert, day after day, are single-colored, vast and boundless existence. Just like the cover of the book, the blue sky and the orange desert, each half of the cover. There is no gap between heaven and earth, just like two closed mirrors reflect each other up and down, and I don't know whether the sky reflects the earth or the earth.
In the middle of the walk, the head is like the essence of nothingness, the feet are stepping on the essence of nothingness, one foot deep and one foot shallow, as if walking in the void. This void, just like the cage made of two pieces of gold of Maitreya Buddha in "Journey to the West", which even Sun Wukong can't jump out, has no gaps, and there are no holes and bulges, and the whole is bare and slippery, so that people can't find the point of focus. You struggle upwards again and again, but you are captured by gravity again and again, and you can't help but slide down. Only by allowing yourself to fall to the lowest point and abandoning resistance can you gain temporary comfort, but you can only hopelessly wait for death.
Stills from the movie "The Obscured Sky"
Kitt was one such person who eventually gave up resistance.
Kitt and Potter are a couple who have been married for more than a decade. Their lives seem to lack nothing.
In the novel, as soon as their suitcase is opened, it is a roll of money. The only thing they may lack is emotional trust in each other and differences in life pursuits. Take this trip to the Sahara, for example. For Potter, aimless travel is life itself; for Kit, the turbulent travel life is an unbearable nightmare. They are like two gears that turn in the opposite direction, trying to turn their backs on each other but having to glue each other. The result of entanglement is deeper boredom and further denial of each other.
Life is a sketch that can never be drawn, there is no past life to compare, and there is no afterlife to correct. No matter how you spend it, in the long river of time, only one life is as light as a feather. This unbearable lightness of life is the fulcrum that pries the earth in some people, and the last feather that crushes the will in others.
Stills from the movie "The Obscured Sky": Potter and Kit
Although Potter and Kitt share the same bed and dream, they are not a family that does not enter the door.
They invariably renounced the heavy and the light, and all chose self-exile.
Potter prostitutes, Kit cheats. Indulgence is tantamount to drinking to quench thirst, and short-lived pleasure comes at the cost of more profound suffering. They were each other's skies, obscuring each other from all darkness and nothingness. The guilt of a secret betrayal is indescribable and can only stab oneself. This dark wound accumulated day by day to erode the already confused life, and their sky finally began to collapse.
Fortunately, Potter suffered from typhoid fever and was dying. Such a heavy and tragic thing as death became Potter's little luck. He finally struggled out of the nothingness of life and confessed his feelings for Kit:
"I've been living for you all these years. I didn't realize it, but now I do! But now, you're leaving. ”
If the story ends here, it is just a slightly better-written marriage story, and there is nothing unique about it. The brilliance of the author Bowles is that he has completely revealed the face of nothingness through the fall of Kit.
While Potter awakens, Kitt is going farther and farther down the path of nothingness, and even Potter's dying confession can no longer awaken her. Potter died, and the sky that obscured Kitt collapsed completely. After the shattered sky, nothingness was like a monster with a huge mouth, devouring her. She's crazy!
She evaded her duties and responsibilities as a wife, abandoned her beloved husband, and left him alone and sick in a desert hut. She forgot how to live normally and was willing to become a sex slave for the Arab merchant Bel Qassim.
"How happy," she thought, "not responsible—no decisions about what's coming!" ”
She gave up her thoughts, she gave up resistance. Ren's "unthinking gratification" erodes her like a drug. In the life of going with the flow, if the past has any effect on her, only escape has become her only gesture. At the end of the story, when Kitt is found, he has become a walking dead hollow man.
The book's waist cover is printed with a large slogan, which calls "The Covered Sky" and "The Outsider" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Life" the three classics of existentialism.
Looking at it alone, this book is also very good, an allegorical story that includes marriage, love, dreams, travel, betrayal, choice, living, nothingness, and other major issues of life, which is thought-provoking. However, in terms of writing and story structure, it lacks both the simplicity and sharpness of "The Outsider", and the depth and beauty of "The Unbearable Lightness of Life".
However, compared to the other two, it also has its own advantages. In "The Outsider", Camus has a deliberate glorification of the protagonist Meursault, who is trapped in nothingness, out of the need for social criticism; in "The Unbearable Lightness of Life", Kundera makes Thomas, who faces the nihilistic life in a playful posture, choose to hold on to love again and again and finally have a relatively complete life. The real tragedy is to tear beautiful things apart for people to see. In "The Covered Sky", Kitt's tragic ending can be described as shocking, and it cannot but be read without alarm. "People who are aware of the nothingness of life are more eager than anyone to live authentically." After reading Kit's sad ending, we will know more clearly what "nothingness" really is, and how we should really live.
In the book, Bowers discusses death through potter and Kitt:
"Death is always on the way, but you won't really realize it until it creeps in and takes away the finiteness of life." It is that terrible precision that we hate. But it is precisely because we do not know that we think that life is a well that never dries up. Yet everything happens only one specific number of times, a very small number of times, really. How many times do you think of that particular afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that has become so deeply part of your life that you would not have been able to imagine your own life without it? Maybe four or five more times, maybe less. How many more times will you see the full moon rise? Maybe twenty times. However, we always feel that these are infinite. ”
If you want to read this book after reading this passage, then I suggest that you really go to see it, you will gain something. In addition, in 1990, italian director Bernardo Bertolucci used the original team of "The Last Emperor" to take root in North Africa and adapted the book into a film, but it is said that this ambiguous film full of uncertainty has been criticized badly in Western critics. Judging from the stills, the picture is still very beautiful. If you can find resources and are also interested, you may wish to take a look.
Wen | like water