My Digital Cemetery

　　你会从手机里删去逝者的联系方式吗

双语：你会从手机里删去逝者的联系方式吗

　　MY digital address book lists 2,743 contacts. This is not because I’m popular or extroverted; I’m neither. It’s because this collection of names stretches back two decades, the oldest contacts tracing to a 1996 Palm Pilot and preserved through transfers involving more devices than I care to remember. It covers life in four cities and work on countless reporting projects. The idea of organizing and pruning this slow-motion data dump is by now unthinkable。

　　佐治亚州萨凡纳——我的电子邮件地址簿里有2743位联系人。这倒不是因为我受人欢迎或者喜欢交际，这两样我都不是。是因为这些名字是我在20年里 收集起来的，其中最早的联系人可以追溯到1996年的Palm Pilot掌上电脑时代，中间我换用过那么多的电子设备，自己都记不清了。这个地址簿涵盖了我在四个城市的生活，以及无数报告项目工作的经历。把它们重新 整理一遍，改善数据转储缓慢的状况，这种事现在已经根本没法想象。

　　One result is that when I start to tap in the name of someone I’m looking for, I often turn up several others as well. Maybe an expert source on a subject I’ll never write about again. Or the best plumber in a place where I no longer live. Possibly a former colleague I have since learned actively dislikes me. Probably at least one name I just can’t place. And, perhaps, someone who is dead。

　　于是，每当我输入某个想找的名字，总会出来好几个结果。可能是某个专家，擅长某个我再也不会去写的领域。抑或是我以前暂住的地方口碑最好的水管工。也没准是以前的同事，我知道他特别讨厌我。可能至少有一个名字是我根本想不起来的，又或者是某个已经去世的人的名字。

　　I might take that moment to delete one or more of these entries. But not the ones for the deceased. Those I keep。

　　我可能会利用这个时间删掉其中的一个或几个人名。但是去世的人我不会删，我要把他们留着。

　　I seldom talk about this habit, because I assume it sounds weird. But recently I was intrigued to read about an incident described in “Becoming Steve Jobs,” the new book by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli. A couple of years after Mr. Jobs died, the anecdote goes, John Lasseter, a founder of Pixar and a close friend of Mr. Jobs’s, showed Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, the “favorites” list on his iPhone contacts app. It still included Mr. Jobs. “I’ll never be able to take that out,” he said. Mr. Cook responded by pulling out his phone, which also included Mr. Jobs’s contact entry。

　　我很少谈起自己的这个习惯，因为觉得听上去有点怪。但是最近我读布伦特·施伦德(Brent Schlender)和里克·特泽尔(Rick Tetzeli)的新书《成为史蒂夫·乔布斯》(Becoming Steve Jobs)，碰巧看到这么一件有意思的事。乔布斯去世几年后，皮克斯公司的创始人和乔布斯的密友约翰·拉赛特(John Lasseter)给苹果公司首席执行官蒂姆·库克(Tim Cook)看自己iPhone里联系人应用中的“特殊联系人”一项，里面还有乔布斯的名字。“我永远不会删掉他，”他说。库克听了拿出自己的手机，里面也 仍然保存着乔布斯的联系方式。

　　I’m not sure if this says something unusual about Mr. Jobs, or Mr. Cook and Mr. Lasseter. But to me it suggests something more universal. However our tools are designed, human behavior determines how we really use them. So while there may not be anything logical about hanging on to the contact details of the departed, Mr. Lasseter’s comment makes perfect sense. And maybe that makes me feel (a little) less weird for thinking that my contacts list has accidentally acquired an involuntary-memories feature, a memento mori functionality。

　　我不确定这个故事是否能说明乔布斯、库克和拉赛特有什么特别之处。我觉得这正好证明了某些事情是普遍的。不管工具被设计成什么样子，人类行为模式决 定了我们怎样使用工具。所以，尽管保留逝者的联系方式可能不是那么合乎逻辑，拉赛特的行为还是非常有意义。我也觉得，我自己保存联系人列表，把它作为一种 无意识的纪念，提醒自己人终有一死，这种行为(稍微有点)不是那么奇怪了。

　　Digital technology has already had notable effects on the ways we mourn, remember the dead, and even think about the afterlife. This has mostly come to our attention as a side effect of the broader tech-driven redefinition of social and public life: a personal blog becomes a kind of monument to be preserved, a social-media profile becomes a site of communal grieving. To some extent, digital services have adjusted to this development: Facebook accounts, for example, can be “memorialized,” a setting that allows friends to share remembrances, but stops posting upsetting birthday reminders。

　　数字科技对我们哀悼、缅怀死者，乃至思考身后世界的方式产生了很大影响。这主要是由于科技更广泛地重新定义了社交与公众生活，它的副作用也引起了我 们的关注：个人博客成了某种可以长久保存的纪念碑；社交媒体个人页面可以供公众缅怀之用。在某种程度上，数字服务也在调整适应这种发展方向：比如说 Facebook账号就可以设置“纪念”模式，亡者的朋友们可以分享哀思，但网站不会再烦人地提醒你逝者的生日。

　　In those public contexts, maintaining a digital connection to the dead seems normal. Unfriending the deceased in full view of your Facebook social circle, for example, might look (or feel) callous. Whatever the reason, we seem to prefer keeping these symbolic ties intact whether they are deeply personal or otherwise. Almost a year after his suicide, Robin Williams’s Twitter profile lists nearly 1.5 million followers。

　　在公众范围内，和逝者保持网络上的联系似乎已经是一件常事。如果浏览Facebook的社交圈，把去世的朋友都删掉，这未免显得太过铁石心肠。我们 似乎更愿意与逝者保持象征性的联系，不管是不是深切的私人亲密关系。比如说，罗宾·威廉姆斯(Robin Williams)自杀去世一年后，他的Twitter账户仍然有将近150万名关注者。

　　In contrast, an address book or contacts app is a distinctly unpublic setting. Even in our “share”-crazy era, this collection of names and coordinates is not a thing to be broadcast and commented upon. Mr. Lasseter’s showing Mr. Cook his contacts might be the most unusual aspect of that story. Certainly nobody looks at my address book but me. Which entries I choose to delete or preserve is a purely personal matter。

　　相反，地址簿或联系方式应用远不是一种公众化的东西。就算在这个“分享”狂热的时代，这堆人名和配套的东西也不可以广而告之，拿出来供人品头评足。 拉赛特给库克看他的联系人，可能是这件事里最不寻常的一点。当然，除了我自己，没有人会看我的地址簿。我删掉谁，留着谁，这完全是我自己的事。

　　And yes, of course, random reminders of those who have passed away can be jarring. I’m 46, an age that’s hard to reach without losing friends and former colleagues who died well before their time. In some cases, the circumstances were a shock, not just unexpected but unnerving, and unfair. Two were suicides, and one of those was a woman I’d been quite close to in my 20s. You might assume I wouldn’t enjoy being reminded of tragedy, and you’d be right。

　　当然，不时有什么东西提醒你想起逝去的朋友， 这也会让人很不舒服。我今年46岁，这个年纪的人总会有几个英年早逝的朋友或者前同事。有时候，他们的去世是种震撼，不仅仅是出人意料，而且还让人不安， 感觉很不公平。我认识的人中，有两个人死于自杀，其中一个女人是我20多岁时的好朋友。你可能会觉得想起这样的悲剧，我心里不会好过，你是对的。

　　BUT for starters, as anyone who has been to a funeral knows, to contemplate any death is also to remember a life, and how it intertwined with and influenced one’s own. I was sad to learn that the writer William Zinsser passed away in May at age 92. But what a life! I worked with him as a young editor years ago, and kept in casual touch for a while afterward: I went to see him play piano, we corresponded about sheet music, that sort of thing. He was a master of the craft, as you’d expect from the author of “On Writing Well,” but what sticks with me is how profoundly kind and generous he was to such a minor acquaintance. He was an example of how to be; any prompt to remember him, I’ll take。

　　但是去过葬礼的人都知道，思考死亡也就意味着纪念生命，纪念逝者的人生是如何与自己有所交集，对自己产生影响。5月，92岁的作家威廉·津瑟 (William Zinsser)的去世让我非常悲伤。但这是多么精彩的人生啊！多年前，我还是个小编辑的时候曾经与他共事，后来偶尔也会联系：我去看他弹钢琴，我们互换 乐谱，以及诸如此类的事情。他是个杰出的手艺人，正是《好的写作》(On Writing Well)的作者应有的样子，但我最难忘的还要算是他的善良与慷慨，哪怕是对待我这样一个无足轻重的熟人。他是做人的典范；我不会放过任何缅怀他的机会。

　　Less sentimentally, there’s Gore Vidal. As a longtime fan, I lament his absence. His entry in my address book, however, consists of a fax number in Italy that worked in 1999. I know it worked because I used it to try to persuade him to write an essay for The New York Times Magazine, where I was then an editor. His response came in a 3 a.m. message on my home answering machine, dismissing the idea, my employer and me. Colorfully. Clearly there’s no sensible reason to save this contact, but whenever I stumble upon it I know: I’ll never be able to take that out。

　　戈尔·维达尔(Gore Vidal)的去世倒并不是那么令人伤感。我一直都是他的书迷，也为他的离去感到悲伤。然而，在我的地址簿里，他的信息只有一个意大利的传真号码，到 1999年还能用。我知道它能用，是因为当时我是《纽约时报杂志》的编辑，正劝他给我们杂志写篇文章。凌晨三点，他在我家的电话答录机里留了消息，拒绝了 我和我老板的主意。真不走运。显然，我没有理由再留着他的联系方式了，但是每当我偶尔看到它，心里都明白我永远也舍不得删。

　　I’ve picked a couple of familiar names to make a point that applies to the many contacts in my address book that you would not recognize. Each brings to mind memories that I welcome, even those who died far too young. And while I’m publicly skeptical of the theory that digital technology usefully allows us to offload our memories, I secretly worry that it’s true enough to make deleting contacts feel a bit like shredding pages of a diary, or even zapping cells from my brain。

　　我地址簿里那一大堆人名你可能根本不认识，所以我选了几个熟悉的名字用来说明问题。所有的名字都会带来美好的回忆，就算那些英年早逝的人也一样。我 非常怀疑那种所谓数字技术能帮我们减轻记忆负担的理论，我私下里担心，删掉联系人有点像从日记上撕下纸页，或者从大脑里切除脑细胞。

　　Or maybe something even more troubling: The convenient-by-design act of deleting the name of a dead friend with a simple tap or click can feel like overtly participating in removing that person from the world。

　　还有些事情更加令人不安：那种轻轻一按，就可以删掉死去朋友的联系方式的方便设计会让人觉得这个人从世界上被抹去了，而且这个过程自己也有一份。

　　Not long after I read that Steve Jobs anecdote, Grantland posted a short video in which Gay Talese thumbed through, and discussed, his address book. Of course it’s not digital (in fact, it’s leatherbound)， but it dates back more than 50 years, and its pages are a gorgeous jumble of handwriting, cross-outs and even paper scraps of new information taped over old entries. The author reads out some celebrated names from this de facto record of personal encounters and professional curiosity. Some, naturally, are dead. “I make a point of not erasing names, as a rule,” he remarks. “I don’t think that it’s ethical to erase the past。”

　　我读到史蒂夫·乔布斯的那个故事不久后，Grantland网站上贴出了一个短视频，上面是盖伊·泰勒斯(Gay Talese)一边翻一边聊自己的地址簿。当然，那不是数字形式的，而是一个皮面精装的本子，它可以追溯到50年前，纸页上有大堆漂亮的手写字体和划线， 甚至还有写着新信息的小纸片，贴在旧信息上面。它实际上是一个私人会面录，以及一件职业角度的珍奇藏品，这位作家读出上面一些名人的名字。当然有些人已经 去世了。“我故意不抹掉这些名字，这是规矩，”他说，“把过去一笔抹掉，这是不道德的。”

　　My address book lacks the aesthetic charisma of Mr. Talese’s analog object, just as any given Pinterest board is less fascinating and visually distinct than your grandmother’s adolescent scrapbook. Contacts software is designed for efficiency and ease of use, not emotional evocation or stealth autobiography. But Mr. Talese’s point holds true for my digital object anyway: “Those people listed in that book have next to nothing in common with any other person in that book,” he observes, “except through me。” For this reason, among others: “That book is a connection to my whole life。”

　　泰勒斯的实体地址簿具有一种别样的美学魅力，我的地址簿可没有，就像任何Pinterest剪切板也不如你祖母青春期的剪贴簿好看一样。联系人软件 是为效率和可用性而设计的，而不是为了唤起情感或积累秘密自传。但是泰勒斯的观点对于我的数字地址簿也适用。“这个本子上的所有人都是独一无二的，和本子 里的其他人绝无相似之处，”他说，“特别是在我眼中。”因此，“这个本子和我的整个人生密不可分。”

　　Mr. Talese has lived a singular life. But then again, haven’t we all? And while for someone my age the urge to preserve a digital address book is tied to memories of physical reference points for personal objects (a clothbound volume, ink on paper)， a young person today is collecting what could be a contact list that will reach back to childhood. It seems to me that even a simple ledger of everyone you’ve ever known is actually an amazing thing, whether anybody gets around to filming you scrolling through it or not。

　　泰勒斯拥有非同凡响的人生。但我们每个人不也是吗？对于我这个年纪的人来说，保留一个数字地址簿，这和实体私人物品的记忆有关(比如一个布面本子， 用墨水在纸上写字)，而如今的年轻人收集的是可以追溯到童年时期的联系人名单。我觉得就算只是一本简单的人名名册，记下所有你所认识的人，这也是一件很棒 的东西，不管最后有没有人来拍你在电子设备上滚动查看它。

　　I can understand why a reminder of a particular death may be painful enough to remove it from a place where it might pop up unexpectedly. As a practical matter, my habit means that any workaday search for the local electrician’s phone number, or whatever, can inadvertently spark a melancholy pang. And just as I have at least some happy associations with even the most heartbreaking losses, every instance of remembrance carries sadness. As fondly as I remember Bill Zinsser, seeing his name will always make me regret not staying in better touch for longer than I did. Other names remind me of things I wish I’d said, or things I wish I hadn’t。

　　我可以理解，为什么有人会觉得地址薄上突然出现死者的名字会让人觉得痛苦，所以干脆把它删掉了事。从实用角度来说，我的习惯会导致让我在工作日找本 地电工的电话号码时，不经意触动了伤感的痛苦情绪。正如痛苦的失落也伴随着美好的回忆，每个回忆的瞬间也承载着悲伤。我满怀深情地回忆比尔·津瑟，看到他 的名字总会让我感到遗憾，为什么当初没有多和他深交呢。还有些名字会让我想起那些我未曾对逝者们说出的话语，或者不曾为他们做过的事。

　　This means that to erase those names would feel like an attempt not just to erase these people, but to erase some part of myself. Perhaps these reminders will in some way make me do a better job with all those other contacts, over the course of whatever life we have left. Even if that proves to be wishful thinking, I’d rather live with these entries than make them disappear. What Steve Jobs’s former colleagues have decided to carry is in some sense a trace of his life. To me, that sounds like something worth keeping. What I’ve lost is part of who I am. So is what I choose to save。

　　因此，删去这些名字不仅意味着抹去这些人，也意味着抹去自身的某些部分。或许这些提示能帮我在余生里更好地善待其他人。就算这只是一厢情愿的念头也 好，我更愿意和这些逝者的纪录一起生存，也不愿让他们消失。史蒂夫·乔布斯的前同事们保存的是他生命的轨迹。对于我来说，这些都是值得保存的。我所失去的 都是我自身的一部分。所以我选择保存它们。

　　本文选自《小火炉的博客》的新浪博客，请点击查看原文。