A Year in Reading: Inward Journeys
This month marks exactly 35 years since the birth of the first web browser, and our world today is nearly unrecognizable from what it was in 1990.
这个月恰逢第一个网络浏览器诞生 35 周年，今天的世界与 1990 年相比几乎面目全非。
That’s not yelling at clouds, it’s simply a fact.
这不是对云大喊大叫，这只是事实。
We can do more, do it faster, are expected to do more faster.
我们可以做得更多、做得更快，也有望做得更多更快。
We’ve ceded our attention and emotional valence to parties who have demonstrated in every conceivable way that they’re not the good actors they claim to be.
我们已经把我们的注意力和情感效价让给了那些以各种可以想象的方式证明自己并不是他们所声称的好演员的政党。
We’ve developed and discarded more in the past three decades than in the three millennia prior.
过去三十年我们开发和丢弃的东西比之前三千年还要多。
We’ve managed to re-enact a discouraging number of sci-fi movies and social satires.
我们成功地重现了数量令人沮丧的科幻电影和社会讽刺作品。
Even if the velocity of our change is constant, try telling that to anyone seated at the end of a centrifuge arm, lips peeled back, cheeks fluttering.
即使我们变化的速度是恒定的，也可以尝试告诉坐在离心机臂末端、嘴唇向后张开、脸颊颤动的任何人。
Whatever we’re rushing toward, the experience is anything but smooth.
无论我们追求什么，体验都绝非一帆风顺。
It’s little wonder, then, amid so much bumping and buffeting, that people are turning inward.
因此，在如此多的碰撞和冲击中，人们开始向内看也就不足为奇了。
To be clear, this is a very good thing.
需要明确的是，这是一件非常好的事情。
Turning in isn’t turning away.
转入并不是转身离开。
It’s something more like attunement.
这更像是一种协调。
Just as you need a strong core to overcome the ergonomic siege of sitting at a desk for eight hours a day, navigating upheaval Out There demands at least a passing understanding of who you are, what you think, how you feel.
正如你需要强大的核心来克服每天坐在办公桌前八小时的人体工程学围困一样，应对外面的剧变也需要至少暂时了解你是谁、你的想法和你的感受。
Some of my favorite pieces from this year speak to that.
今年我最喜欢的一些作品就说明了这一点。
Of course, there are many ways to go inside yourself.
当然，有很多方法可以进入你的内心。
The easiest, and possibly the oldest, is an intense hallucinogen.
最简单的，也可能是最古老的，是一种强烈的致幻剂。
Enter Sarah Miller, who headed to Peru for a week of ayahuasca therapy and in the process delivered one of the funniest, most acerbic stories of 2025.
莎拉·米勒 (Sarah Miller) 前往秘鲁进行了一周的死藤水疗法，并在此过程中讲述了 2025 年最有趣、最尖刻的故事之一。
From travel to preparation to her septet (!) of supervised voyages, Miller spares no detail, and seems to revel in being as hard on herself as she is on the cast of characters around her, from the ethereal facility administrator to her fellow pasajeros.
从旅行到准备，再到她七次（！）有人监督的航行，米勒不遗余力地对待细节，并且似乎陶醉于对自己和周围的角色一样严格，从空灵的设施管理员到她的同事们。
Her piece would have been a natural fit for a dozen magazines or more, but n+1 feels like a perfect match, especially given that the Spring 2025 issue bore the theme Harsh Realm.
她的作品本来适合十几本甚至更多杂志，但《n+1》感觉像是完美的搭配，特别是考虑到 2025 年春季刊的主题是“严酷领域”。
After all, what realm is harsher than the one we shape ourselves?
毕竟，还有什么境界比我们自己塑造的境界更严酷呢？
Not all hallucinations are induced.
并非所有的幻觉都是诱发的。
You can also tour your interior via deprivation, as Chris Colin did during a three-day darkness retreat for The New York Times Magazine.
你也可以通过剥夺来探索你的内心，就像克里斯·科林在《纽约时报杂志》为期三天的黑暗静修中所做的那样。
“On Day 3, I started seeing Rothkos,” begins his story.
“第三天，我开始见到罗斯科斯，”他的故事开始了。
(Better Rothko than Bosch, especially when you’re in a setting out of Horror Movies 101: a blacked-out basement in the woods in the middle of nowhere.) One doesn’t get to the third day without a first and second, which for Colin means a psychic purgation not unlike the corporeal one Sarah Miller endured.
（罗斯科比博斯更好，尤其是当你身处恐怖电影 101 中的场景时：在荒无人烟的树林里一个漆黑的地下室。）没有第一天和第二天，一个人就无法到达第三天，这对科林来说意味着一种精神净化，与莎拉·米勒所经历的肉体净化没有什么不同。
“It’s not that I don’t ponder these horrors in daily life,” he writes of the real-world atrocities his mind conjures up in vivid detail, “it’s that I contain them.
“这并不是说我在日常生活中没有思考这些恐怖，”他在描述他脑海中生动细节的现实世界暴行时写道，“而是我遏制了它们。
I’ll read the latest awfulness and then veer into outrage, or political strategy, or more reading, and then leave for car-pool duty.
我会阅读最新的可怕文章，然后转向愤怒、政治策略或更多阅读，然后去拼车。
Now all I could do was sit with that awfulness.” The first deluge gives way to more fantastical visions: snow caves, outer space, a Hapsburgian fortress.
现在我能做的就是忍受这种可怕的事情。”第一次洪水让位于更奇幻的景象：雪洞、外太空、哈布斯堡王朝的堡垒。
Seth Meyers slicing cheese makes a cameo, as does Colin’s own gravestone.
塞思·迈耶斯 (Seth Meyers) 切片奶酪和科林 (Colin) 自己的墓碑都出现在其中。
The aforementioned Rothkos, of course.
当然是前面提到的罗斯科。
At the end, Colin emerges, scrubbed rawer than he’d anticipated, but with a new sense of what his guide calls “spaciousness.” From time to time, he writes, “a look or a conversation or some news or just a passing shadow seems to open like an accordion.”
最后，科林出现了，他比他预想的更干净，但对他的导游所说的“宽敞”有了新的感觉。他时不时地写道，“一个眼神、一次谈话、一些新闻，或者只是一个掠过的影子，似乎像手风琴一样打开。”
That opening demands noticing, which is the true aim of many forms of meditation—another age-old method of heading inward, and a bedrock of Simon Wu’s Buddhist upbringing.
这个开放需要注意，这是许多冥想形式的真正目标——另一种古老的向内走的方法，也是吴西门佛教教养的基石。
The thing is, “upbringing” doesn’t equal “ongoing practice,” so Wu and his brother chafe a bit at the prospect of spending a weekend with their male relatives in a version of a shinbyu monkhood ceremony.
问题是，“教养”并不等于“持续的修行”，因此吴和他的兄弟对与男性亲戚一起度过周末并参加新比僧侣仪式的前景感到有点恼火。
But for their mother and grandmother, they consent to having their heads shaved and spending the weekend steeped in monastic ritual.
但对于他们的母亲和祖母来说，他们同意剃光头并在周末沉浸在修道院仪式中。
While Wu’s Paris Review essay about the weekend primarily observes family and tradition, it also unpacks the role of discomfort in reflection, and the ways we seek to slough off our false selves.
虽然吴的《巴黎评论》关于周末的文章主要观察家庭和传统，但它也揭示了反思中不适的作用，以及我们寻求摆脱虚假自我的方式。
“There is a heat to sitting still,” he writes.
“坐着不动会让人感到很热，”他写道。
“But the sitting, at long intervals, can become euphoric, even transcendental.” He thinks back to another meditation retreat, one in which the agony of stillness gives way to “a clear and free and blue release of pain; a hidden attic I hadn’t known existed in my brain[.]” We all have these spaces inside ourselves.
“但是，长时间的静坐会让人感到欣快，甚至超然。”他回想起另一次冥想静修，在静修中，静止的痛苦被“一种清晰、自由、蓝色的疼痛释放；一个我不知道存在于我大脑中的隐藏阁楼[.]”我们内心都有这些空间。
Whether we can find our way there, or even dare to try, is another question altogether.
我们能否找到通往那里的道路，甚至是否敢于尝试，完全是另一个问题。
Then there is the body: the vessel our mind inhabits, and one we often assume we know more about than we actually do.
然后是身体：我们的思想所居住的容器，我们经常认为我们比我们实际上知道的更多。
Our muscles might ache, or a headache might disrupt our day, but barring extreme inflammation we have no sensory awareness of our innermost, visceral workings.
我们的肌肉可能会疼痛，或者头痛可能会扰乱我们的一天，但除非出现严重的炎症，否则我们对我们最深处的内脏运作没有任何感官知觉。
Only in rare moments do we meet those workings—and recovering from surgery is one of those moments.
只有在极少数情况下，我们才会遇到这些情况，而从手术中恢复就是其中之一。
Ben Lerner’s essay “Cardiography,” in The New York Review of Books, details such a period, and does so with all the spare vividity you’d expect of the acclaimed poet and novelist.
本·勒纳（Ben Lerner）发表在《纽约书评》上的文章“心电图”详细描述了这一时期，并且以这位著名诗人和小说家所期望的所有生动活泼的方式描述了这一时期。
“It isn’t the pain that I need to describe for you; there was little pain,” he writes of having his chest tubes extracted after heart surgery.
“这不是我需要为你描述的疼痛；几乎没有疼痛，”他在心脏手术后拔除胸管时写道。
“It is how I suddenly became aware of a space .
“就这样我突然意识到了一个空间。
.
。
.
。
inside my body that I did not previously know existed, that hadn’t existed until they pulled something out of it.
在我的身体里，我以前不知道它的存在，直到他们从里面取出一些东西之前，它并不存在。
It’s how I could feel the tube moving along the tissue, a shifting deep in my thorax where I previously had no sensory awareness at all, where I was never meant to have sensation, my interior becoming wrongly tangible.” Wrongly tangible.
这就是我如何感觉到管子沿着组织移动，在我的胸腔深处发生移动，我以前根本没有任何感官知觉，我从来不应该有感觉，我的内部变得错误地有形。”错误地有形。
It’s remarkable how our bodies react to such instances of sudden awareness: People faint at the sight of blood, get weak-kneed at the thought of the inside being out.
我们的身体对这种突然意识的反应是值得注意的：人们一看到血就会晕倒，一想到里面的东西就会变得膝盖发软。
But in a cultural moment when our minds and our bodies have never been more distinct from one another, it’s urgently important to consider what familiarity with oneself really means.
但在我们的思想和身体从未如此截然不同的文化时代，考虑熟悉自己的真正含义至关重要。
Armed with a deeper sense of these systems—our minds, our bodies, our conscious and unconscious patterns—we can start to consider how the world affects us.
有了对这些系统（我们的思想、我们的身体、我们有意识和无意识的模式）的更深入的认识，我们就可以开始考虑世界如何影响我们。
In The Atlantic, Jason Anthony details mheibes, an Iraqi bluffing game that makes high-level poker’s mental warfare feel like a freshman psychology seminar.
Jason Anthony 在《大西洋月刊》中详细介绍了 mheibes，这是一种伊拉克虚张声势的游戏，它让高水平扑克的心理战感觉就像一场新生心理学研讨会。
Again in NYTM, Sam Anderson confronts his “[struggle] to metabolize the daily news” by retracing the steps of a 19th-century folk hero known only as The Old Leatherman.
在 NYTM 中，山姆·安德森 (Sam Anderson) 再次回顾了 19 世纪民间英雄“老莱瑟曼”(The Old Leatherman) 的足迹，直面他的“新陈代谢每日新闻的[斗争]”。
It is, he writes, “an excuse to step outside my own life—to look at old American places, firsthand, slowly, to think about how they had changed.
他写道，这是“一个走出自己生活的借口——慢慢地亲眼看看美国的老地方，思考它们是如何变化的。
To walk around like a weirdo, knocking randomly on doors, talking to people whom I had no business talking to.” And in Harper’s, none other than Karl Ove Knausgaard stretches his arms wide around technology: not just today’s destabilizing digital milieu, or the computer that led us here, but how our quest to understand the things around us has led us away from understanding the things within us.
像个怪人一样走来走去，随意敲门，和那些我不该说话的人说话。”在《哈泼斯》杂志中，卡尔·奥夫·诺斯加德 (Karl Ove Knausgaard) 向技术伸出了双臂：不仅是当今不稳定的数字环境，或者引导我们来到这里的计算机，还包括我们对理解周围事物的追求如何使我们远离了对我们内心事物的理解。
It’s this last piece that most succinctly articulates the need for all of this self-investigation.
最后一篇文章最简洁地阐明了所有这些自我调查的必要性。
In a twist, though, it doesn’t come from Knausgaard, a man who has spent multiple volumes seeking to understand himself.
但奇怪的是，这并不是出自克瑙斯加德之手，他花了好几本书来寻求了解自己。
Instead, it comes courtesy of cognitive scientist James Bridle, author of a book about human and nonhuman intelligence called Ways of Being.
相反，它是由认知科学家詹姆斯·布里德尔（James Bridle）提供的，他是一本关于人类和非人类智能的书的作者，名为《存在之道》。
“The world is fucked because we are fucked,” Bridle tells Knausgaard.
“世界被搞砸了，因为我们被搞砸了，”布莱德尔告诉诺斯加德。
“Healing ourselves is part of healing the world.”
“治愈我们自己是治愈世界的一部分。”