終於把心一橫接了份長工的我，以後就要本著曾生的「務實進取」精神做好呢份工。雖仍是戰戰兢兢，但也驚不了那麼多。反正，我老細青檸梳打理應驚過我。

昨晚和今天都在看的書”Pale Fire”，是在愛丁堡時美國仔送的生日禮物，已讀了一半，當時覺得很艱深，雖然饒有趣味，卻是很字典-intensive的書…於是又放低了轉戰淺白又跟身心自然接軌的昆德拉。想不到個多月來沒讀過非有關氣候變化的書藉和報紙的我，重新拿起這本Nabokov竟又受到強烈的感動，讓我由充斥著二氧化碳、x氧化氮和步步高9型人格之謎的世界中獲得了救贖。

Pale Fire
by John Spade (by Vladimir Nabokov)
Canto OneI was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the false azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -and I
Lived on, flew on, in the reflected sky.
And from the inside, too, I’d duplicate
Myself, my lamp, an apple on a plate:
Uncurtaining the night, I’d let dark glass
Hang all the furniture above the grass,
And how delightful when a fall of snow
Covered my glimpse of lawn and reached up so
As to make chair and bed exactly stand
Upon that snow, out in that crystal land!

…

…

I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By feigned remoteness in the windowpane.
I had a brain, five senses (one unique),
But otherwise I was a cloutish freak.
In sleeping dreams I played with other chaps
But really envied nothing –save perhaps
The miracle of a lemniscate left
Upon wet sand by nonchalantly deft
Bicycle tires.
A thread of subtle pain,
Tugged at by playful death, released again,
By always present, ran through me. One day,
When I’d just turned eleven, as I lay
Prone on the floor and watched a clockwork toy–
A tin wheelbarrow pushed by a tin boy–
Bypass chair legs and stray beneath the bed,
There was a sudden sunburst in my head.
And then black night. That blackness was sublime.
I felt distributed through space and time:
One foot upon a mountaintop, one hand
Under the pebbles of a panting strand,
One ear in Italy, one eye in Spain,
In caves, my blood, and in the stars, my brain.
There were dull throbs in my Triassic; green
Optical spots in Upper Pleistocene,
An icy shiver down my Age of Stone,
And all tomorrows in my funnybone.
During one winter every afternoon
I’d sink into that momentary swoon.
And then it ceased. Its memory grew dim.
My health improved. I even learned to swim.
But like some little lad forced by a wench
With his pure tongue her abject thirst to quench,
I was corrupted, terrified, allured,
And though old doctor Colt pronounced me cured
Of what, he said, were mainly growing pains,
The wonder lingers and the shame remains.

獲得救贖的同時，我卻沒有騰出時間來溫習普通話。星期二的考試，在完全考天才的情況下，我會有什麼等級呢？歡迎開盤