Nineteen Truths and One Beguiling Lie about Life from 20 Years of The Marginalian

It is an odd thing, looking back on your life, trying to recognize in the mirror of memory the people you used to be, finding them strangers: the person who kissed your first kiss, the person who drank your last drink, the person who had your best idea, the person who made your worst mistake, the person who over and over mistook fear for love, the person who thought orange was a good idea.

回顾你的一生，试图在记忆的镜子中认出你曾经是谁，却发现他们是陌生人，这是一件奇怪的事情：亲吻你的初吻的人，喝你最后一杯酒的人，有你最好的主意的人，犯了你最糟糕的错误的人，一遍又一遍地将恐惧误认为爱的人，认为橙色是个好主意的人。

Somehow, you have to grow arms long enough to wrap them around all those people and a heart wide enough to hold each of them with quiet compassion.

不知何故，你必须有足够长的手臂来拥抱所有这些人，你的心必须足够宽，以安静的同情心拥抱他们每个人。

Somehow, you have to both mourn and celebrate that you were them but they are no longer you.

不知何故，你必须哀悼并庆祝你是他们，但他们不再是你。

It has been an odd thing, looking back on twenty years of The Marginalian — the record of half a lifetime of learning how to live.

回顾《边缘人》的二十年，这是一件奇怪的事情——记录了半辈子学习如何生活的记录。

It called for a ritual — to honor those past persons, to celebrate the constant reconfiguration of the self.

它需要一种仪式——纪念那些过去的人，庆祝自我的不断重新配置。

And so: I took the first page of each of the first twenty chapters of my first book, Figuring — who wrote that book?

所以：我拿了我的第一本书《计算》前二十章每一章的第一页——谁写了那本书？

— beginning with the prelude (Chapter 0), and applied my bird divination process to the text, letting the words refigure themselves into something new, something I have learned about life along the way of living, some piece of advice I needed to hear whispered by my own unconscious.

——从序言（第0章）开始，将我的鸟占卜过程应用到文本中，让文字重新组合成一些新的东西，一些我在生活方式中学到的关于生活的东西，一些我需要听到自己无意识低语的建议。

The process itself is a lovely reminder that life is like language — it is not the words you have, your givens, but how you configure them that makes meaning, makes beauty, makes poetry.

这个过程本身就很好地提醒我们，生活就像语言——不是你拥有的词语、你的给予，而是你如何配置它们，才创造了意义、创造了美、创造了诗歌。

And the loveliness of life is that we are endlessly reconfigurable, brightly capable of rewriting the story with each sentence of living.

生活的美妙之处就在于我们可以无限地重新配置，能够用生活的每一句话来重写故事。

Enlisting the help of two of my greatest teachers — clay, which is constantly teaching me how to hold on while letting go and how to say “YES” to life , and lichen, which has a great deal to teach us about loneliness, patience, and resilience — I made twenty ceramic bowls glazed in the color scheme of The Marginalian , with some blue for its existential value and its lens on the universe , and I cast the words in them with resin over lichen from places I have lived over the years, from Bulgaria to Patagonia.

在我两位最伟大的老师的帮助下——粘土，它不断地教我如何在放手的同时坚持下去，如何对生活说“是”，还有地衣，它可以教会我们很多关于孤独、耐心和韧性的知识——我制作了二十个陶瓷碗，釉面采用了《边缘人》的配色方案，蓝色代表了它的存在价值和它对宇宙的镜头，我用来自我居住过的地方的树脂将文字浇在地衣上。年，从保加利亚到巴塔哥尼亚。

To celebrate the monumental role chance plays in any given life, without which none of us would be who we are, or here at all, I am giving these away in a pay-what-you-wish raffle: To enter, make a donation in any amount that is right for you by December 31, so long as you end it with the decimal .20.

为了庆祝机会在任何特定的生活中所扮演的重要角色，没有它，我们任何人都不会成为今天的我们，或者根本不会在这里，我将通过一场随心所欲的抽奖活动赠送这些礼物：要参加，请在 12 月 31 日之前捐款，金额不限，只要您以小数点 0.20 结尾即可。

(The loveliness of a lottery, which is an antipode to the rich-getting-richer ugliness of an auction, is that your odds are equal whether you enter with $1.20 or $10,000.20 — the only difference is by how much you support this ongoing labor of love.)

（彩票的美妙之处在于，无论您以 1.20 美元还是 10,000.20 美元参加，您的中奖几率都是相等的，而拍卖的丑陋之处正是它的反面，它是拍卖中越富越富的丑陋现象的反面——唯一的区别在于您对这种持续不断的爱的劳动的支持程度。）