Never Let Me Go

今天听到第八章……我忽然觉得这一段关于sex的内容真的很有意思……its so so soooooooo cute！

Looking back now, I can see we were pretty confused about this whole area around sex. That’s hardly surprising, I suppose, given we were barely sixteen. But what added to the confusion—I can see it more clearly now—was the fact that the guardians were themselves confused. On the one hand we had, say, Miss Emily’s talks, when she’d tell us how important it was not to be ashamed of our bodies, to “respect our physical needs,” how sex was “a very beautiful gift” as long as both people really wanted it. But when it came down to it, the guardians made it more or less impossible for any of us actually to do much without breaking rules. We couldn’t visit the boys’ dorms after nine o’clock, they couldn’t visit ours. The classrooms were all officially “out of bounds” in the evenings, as were the areas behind the sheds and the pavilion. And you didn’t want to do it in the fields even when it was warm enough, because you’d almost certainly discover afterwards you’d had an audience watching from the house passing around binoculars. In other words, for all the talk of sex being beautiful, we had the distinct impression we’d be in trouble if the guardians caught us at it.

KATH认为学生对于性的困惑，其实很大程度上源于监护人本身的困惑。监护人一方面告诉他们要“尊重生理需求”，将性描述为“一件非常美好的礼物”，只要是在双方都想要并且愿意的情况下……；但是另一方面，又对他们的行为有所限制，实际上学生们似乎不太可能有机会做爱。因此学生们会有一种想法，虽然性很美妙，但是被抓到之后就会惹上麻烦。可是事实上当监护人真的抓到学生在教室里做爱后，他们的态度却还是让学生们意外而困惑：

I say this, but the only real case I personally knew of like that was when Jenny C. and Rob D. got interrupted in Room 14. They were doing it after lunch, right there over one of the desks, and Mr. Jack had come in to get something. According to Jenny, Mr. Jack had turned red and gone right out again, but they’d been put off and had stopped. They’d more or less dressed themselves when Mr. Jack came back, just as though for the first time, and pretended to be surprised and shocked. “It’s very clear to me what you’ve been doing and it’s not appropriate,” he’d said, and told them both to go and see Miss Emily. But once they’d got to Miss Emily’s office, she’d told them she was on her way to an important meeting and didn’t have time to talk to them. “But you know you shouldn’t have been doing whatever you were doing, and I don’t expect you’ll do it again,” she’d said, before rushing out with her folders.

于是大家有了各种猜想，各种理论：有人认为监护人想要学生们做爱，只是学生们不应该在错误的时间进行。HANNAH认为让他们充分地做爱是监护人的职责，否则学生们的器官就不能很好地运作，不能成为合格的捐赠者。有人说监护人毕竟是“普通人”，虽然他们知道学生们不能生育，但是还是会担心。ANNETTE说学生们和对方做爱让监护人感到不舒服，因为监护人自己也想和学生做爱……（这一段太可爱太可爱了……）KATH认为RUTH的理论更加接近于真实情况：RUTH认为监护人们对学生所讲述的有关于性的东西，都是为了他们离开学校之后做准备。监护人们希望学生们在离开校园之后能够have sex properly，不染上疾病，但显然不想让他们在学校里做爱，因为他们害怕惹上麻烦。他们对待GAY SEX的态度，以及RUTH对此的理论也很有趣：

Gay sex, incidentally, was something we were even more confused about. For some reason, we called it “umbrella sex”; if you fancied someone your own sex, you were “an umbrella.” I don’t know how it was where you were, but at Hailsham we definitely weren’t at all kind towards any signs of gay stuff. The boys especially could do the cruellest things. According to Ruth this was because quite a few of them had done things with each other when they’d been younger, before they’d realised what they were doing. So now they were ridiculously tense about it. I don’t know if she was right, but for sure, accusing someone of “getting all umbrella” could easily end in a fight.

gay sex让他们困惑，尤其是男生之间对待这个问题更加敏感，RUTH说是因为他们小时候在不懂的情况下都做过这样的事情（……）。学校里，大家都声称自己已经和某人做过爱，在这个年纪里，“你是否做过爱”突然变得和几年以前大家对待“你是否富有创造力”一样，似乎成了一种评判个人的指标。KATH就感到自己似乎落后了，尤其是她身边的两个朋友LAURA和RUTH（和TOMMY,QAQ）绝对都已经不再是处女。于是她也下定决心要脱处。

For all that, I’d been holding it off for ages, repeating to myself Miss Emily’s advice—“If you can’t find someone with whom you truly wish to share this experience, then don’t!” But around the spring of the year I’m talking about now, I started to think I wouldn’t mind having sex with a boy. Not just to see what it was like, but also because it occurred to me I needed to get familiar with sex, and it would be just as well to practise first with a boy I didn’t care about too much. Then later on, if I was with someone special, I’d have more chance of doing everything right. What I mean is, if Miss Emily was correct and sex was this really big deal between people, then I didn’t want to be doing it for the first time when it was really important how well it went.

…… So I’d chosen Harry, and I only delayed those couple of months because I wanted to make sure I’d be all right physically. Miss Emily had told us it could be painful and a big failure if you didn’t get wet enough and this was my one real worry. It wasn’t being ripped apart down there, which we often joked about, and was the secret fear of quite a few girls. I kept thinking, as long as I got wet quick enough, there’d be no problem, and I did it a lot on my own just to make sure.

KATH还是很紧张，不断地重读书中关于性的段落：

I realise this may sound like I was getting obsessive, but I remember I also spent a lot of time re-reading passages from books where people had sex, going over the lines again and again, trying to tease out clues. The trouble was, the books we had at Hailsham weren’t at all helpful. We had a lot of nineteenth-century stuff by Thomas Hardy and people like that, which was more or less useless. Some modern books, by people like Edna O’Brien and Margaret Drabble, had some sex in them, but it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details.

这一句实在是太可爱太好笑了

it wasn’t ever very clear what was happening because the authors always assumed you’d already had a lot of sex before and there was no need to go into details.

当然书让RUTH很失望，可是电影也没帮上什么忙：

We’d got a video player in the billiards room a couple of years earlier, and by that spring had built up quite a good collection of movies. A lot of them had sex in them, but most scenes would end just as the sex was starting up, or else you’d only see their faces and their backs. And when there was a useful scene, it was difficult to see it more than fleetingly because there were usually twenty others in the room watching with you. We’d evolved this system where we called for particular favourite scenes to be played again—like, for instance, the moment the American jumps over the barbed wire on his bike in The Great Escape. There’d be a chant of: “Rewind! Rewind!” until someone got the remote and we’d see the portion again, sometimes three, four times. But I could hardly, by myself, start shouting for rewinds just to see sex scenes again.

但是最后她所做的这一系列准备都白费了……因为就在她终于准备好要和HARRY做爱的时候，RUTH和TOMMY分手了，于是一切都乱套了。

So I kept delaying week by week, while I went on preparing, until the summer came and I decided I was as ready as I’d ever be. By then, I was even feeling reasonably confident about it, and began dropping hints to Harry. Everything was going fine and according to plan, when Ruth and Tommy split up and it all got confused.

There was no way to reverse the process. How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back. However uncomfortable people were about your existence, their overwhelming concern was that their own children, their spouses, their parents, their friends, did not die from cancer, motor neurone disease, heart disease. So for a long time you were kept in the shadows, and people did their best not to think about you. And if they did, they tried to convince themselves you weren't really like us. That you were less than human, so it didn't matter.

Then suddenly, with the skeleton in an obscene heap on the desktop, she turned away and began telling us how we had to be careful who we had sex with. Not just because of the diseases, but because, she said, "sex affects emotions in ways you'd never expect." We had to be extremely careful about having sex in the outside world, especially with people who weren't students, because out there sex means all sort of things. Out there people were even fighting and killing each other over who had sex with whom. And the reason it meant so much - so much more than, say, dancing or table-tennis - was because the people out there were different from us students: they could have babies from sex. That was why it was so important to them, this question of who did it with whom. And even though, as we knew, it is completely impossible for any of us to have babies, out there, we have to bahave like them. We had to respect the rules and treat sex as something pretty special.

Miss Emily的说法，虽然没有什么联系，但读这段的时候我经常想到这几天的“恐同”现象。很多时候很多人都说同性恋恶心什么的，我是真的不能理解，读了这段以后觉得可能正式因为同性恋爱这种impossibility to have babies (biologically) 让很多人觉得自己坚守的rules被打乱了。突然sex就像dancing或者table-tennis一样随意，大家只是为了pleasure行事，这的确是对rules的巨大挑战。

看了远山淡影之后就好喜欢石黑一雄的这种性冷淡娓娓道来的文风。比起远山淡影，这本书的故事更加深刻也更引人反思。两本书的写作手法很相同，都是以女主角的回忆的形式让故事展开，故事中充满了女主角个人对这段回忆的诠释。

最后他们去要deferral时的对峙真是挺让人唏嘘的。故事里主角们的生活、梦想和感情纠葛都让作为读者的我毫不怀疑他们是有灵魂的“人”，但那个世界的人却为了减少自己的罪恶感宁愿当他们是没有思想的空壳。最后Miss Emily说，没有任何其他办法的时候真是太悲哀了。没有什么银翼杀手里奋起反抗的桥段，但正是这样才让悲剧更具有冲击力。失望、愤怒与迷惘过后，无法反抗这操蛋的世界的他们只能选择顺从。现实世界对于minority的压迫何尝不是如此呢？所以永远不要停止为自己的权利而抗争。总体来说这个世界观的构思不算原创但也设计挺精巧的。

再说说个人认为的小瑕疵吧。我实在是不能理解主角三人的三角恋情。既然作者想把Kathy和Tom设计成一对真正相爱的恋人，为何又安排Tom和Ruth在一起呢？如果他真的爱Kathy，为什么连一次追求都没有就和别的女生，还是Kathy最好的朋友在一起了？？这个故事线真是很迷...Tom得是有多被动啊。Kathy我还能隐隐约约感到对Tom的在意，但Tom真是...搞不清他到底对Ruth是什么样的情感？？Friends with benefits？全书唯一能让我感到或许他们相爱的剧情就只有Norfolk的旅行了。最后听他们描述自己有多相爱感觉特别没有说服力。Ruth究竟干什么能让真正相爱的两人就是不迈出那一步...