Celliers迷恋死亡，但却是Yonoi的救赎

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A Bar of Shadow

‘The thing you mustn’t forget about Hara,’ he had said, ‘is that he is not an individual or for that matter even really a man.’ He had gone on to say that Hara was the living myth, the expression in human form, the personification of the intense, inner vision which, far down in their unconscious, keeps the Japanese people together and shapes and compels their thinking and behaviour. We should not forget two thousand and seven hundred full cycles of his sun-goddess’s rule burnt in him. He was sure no one could be more faithful and responsive to all the imperceptible murmurings of Japan’s archaic and submerged racial soul than he. Hara was humble enough to accept implicitly the promptings of his national spirit. He was a simple, uneducated country lad with a primitive integrity unassailed by higher education, and really believed all the myths and legends of the past so deeply that he did not hesitate to kill for them. Only the day before he had told Lawrence how in Manchuria the sun-goddess had once lifted a train full of soldiers over an undetected Chinese mine laid for them on the track and put them all down again safely on the other side.

‘Foreseen?’ I asked, surprised.

Yes! He explained Hara had never expected anything except death of some kind in the war. In fact, in an unconscious way, perhaps he had even longed for death. I must please not be too sceptical but try and follow what he was trying to say with intuition rather than with conscious understanding. This was the other half of what he’d been trying to say in the beginning. It was most important, most relevant and the one foundation whereon his understanding either stood erect or fell. . . . He had always felt even when he was in Japan that the Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. As a nation they romanticized death and self-destruction as no other people. The romantic fulfilment of the national ideal, of the heroic thug of tradition, was often a noble and stylized self-destruction in a selfless cause. It was as if the individual at the start, at birth even, rejected the claims of his own individuality. Henceforth he was inspired not by individual human precept and example so much as by his inborn sense of the behaviour of the corpuscles in his own blood dying every split second in millions in defence of the corporate whole. As a result they were socially not unlike a more complex extension of the great insect societies in life. In fact in the days when he lived in Japan, much as he liked the people and country, his mind always returned involuntarily to this basic comparison: the just parallel was not an animal one, was not even the most tight and fanatical horde, but an insect one: collectively they were a sort of super-society of bees with the Emperor as a male queen-bee at the centre. He did not want to exaggerate these things but he knew of no other way of making me realize how strangely, almost cosmically, propelled like an eccentric and dying comet on an archaic, anti-clockwise and foredoomed course, Hara’s people had been. They were so committed, blindly and mindlessly entangled in their real and imagined past that their view of life was not synchronized to our urgent time. Above all they could not respond to the desperate twentieth-century call for greater and more precise individual differentiation. Their view of life refused to be individual and to rise above their own volcanic and quaking earth, as if there was always a dark glass or the shadow of the great dragon’s wings of their submerged selves between them and the light of individual mind, a long blackness of their own spinning globe between them and the sun, darkening the moon for which they yearned so eagerly, and some of the finest stars. He was sorry if it sounded fantastic but he could put it no other way. Unless . . .

‘I admitted the disgrace, if he wished to call it that,’ Lawrence replied. ‘But said that in our view disgrace, like danger, was something which also had to be bravely borne and lived through, and not run away from by a cowardly taking of one’s own life. This was so novel and unexpected a point of view to him that he was tempted to dismiss it as false and made himself say: “No! no! no! it is fear of dying that stops you all.” He spat disdainfully on the floor and then tapping on his chest with great emphasis added: “I am already dead. I, Hara, died many years ago.”

He was born in a cage, a prisoner in an oubliette of mythology, chained to bars welded by a great blacksmith of the ancient gods themselves. And I felt an immense pity for him. （这种傲慢从哪里来？）

‘Oh yes, I said something,’ he said sadly, ‘but it was most inadequate. All I could tell him was that I did not understand myself and that if it lay with me I would gladly let him out and send him straight back to his family.’

"And did that satisfy him?" I asked.

Lawrence shook his head. He didn’t think so, for after bowing deeply again and thanking Lawrence, he looked up and asked: ‘So what am I to do?’

Lawrence could only say: ‘You can try to think only with all your heart, Hara-san, that unfair and unjust as this thing which my people are doing seems to you, that it is done only to try and stop the kind of things that happened between us in the war from ever happening again. You can say to yourself as I used to say to my despairing men in prison under you: “There is a way of winning by losing, a way of victory in defeat which we are going to discover.” Perhaps that too must be your way to understanding and victory now.’

‘That, Rorensu-san,’ he said, with the quick intake of breath of a Japanese when truly moved, ‘is a very Japanese thought!’

1. The Morning After

Good heavens!’ Lawrence exclaimed, his grey eyes quickening with interest: ‘Of course I remember him. He was a remarkable soldier. And apart from that he was almost the only man I’ve ever met whom one could call beautiful. I can see him now . . . walking about . . . almost like an animal, always on his toes and loose in the ankles. Had the guts of a lion too, and the endurance of a camel! That’s the man you mean, isn’t it? And didn’t he have some nickname . . . ?’

2. A Brother

Part of me strongly resented my looks and blamed them too for what became of me. We had a neighbour who was born a dwarf and, as a child, whenever I saw him I used to pity him and feel grateful that I had not been given his shape. Yet today I am not sure that I should not have envied him. I simply do not know which constitutes the greatest danger to the integrity of being: to attract or to repel; to incur the dislikes or likes of one’s fellow men. The dwarf, after all, had only pity to fear and, men being what they are, that is never excessive. But I had their instant, magnetic liking for my enemy and before I knew where, or even who I was, I had become a prisoner of the effect I had on them. The dwarf was firmly shackled to his deformity. But I was shackled not so much to my good looks as to what people, after seeing me, first imagined and then through their imaginations compelled me to be. I know now that from my earliest age the effect that I had on those about me enticed me away from myself, drew me out of my own inner focus of being, and left me irrevocably committed to the role that my admirers and the obscure laws of their magnetic attraction automatically demanded of me.

I must have known instinctively that however much people sympathized with my brother on a perfunctory level, underneath in the more spontaneous world of their emotions, they often felt embarrassed and even threatened by his departure from the norm. They could even secretly resent it and wish him out of the way. I say this confidently because I have found since both in myself and others that the greater the need for individual differentiation from a stagnant normality, the more we struggle and resent those who represent this difference.

3. The Initiation

I saw him again late that night. He was in bed and either asleep or pretending to be. Twenty-four hours before I would without hesitation have called him by name, softly. Now, somehow, I had not the confidence to do so; and so my last natural opportunity for coming to terms with myself vanished. 有时候，错过那个moment就难再回头。

4. The Growth of Nothing

I forced a laugh at their concern and said that as soon as I met the right person I wouldn’t hesitate. But on these occasions the question which always rose immediately to the surface of my mind was: ‘How take on somebody else when I can’t even know myself?’

6. The Sowing of the Seed

The moment Yonoi’s eyes fell on him, Celliers noticed a look of interest, quickly transformed into something akin to alarm, appearing on his handsome face.

I asked why Celliers thought Yonoi had failed where the others succeeded. He had paused a long time before answering and then said slowly: ‘I guess Yonoi and I were birds of a feather caught in the same trap of our own bright plumage. He too was a fugitive from his own, inner law – just as I was.’ He forced a laugh. ‘Talk about loyalty to the old school tie. It’s not a patch on the loyalty of the old Borstal knot.’

As he spoke Celliers saw a flash of satisfaction in Yonoi’s brilliant eyes. Yonoi turned to his judges to suggest with tact and passion that the charge of’ wilfulness’ could not be held because Celliers had obeyed, as any soldier must, the orders of his own Commander-in-Chief in India, who was still fighting. He had not received any orders whatsoever from the General who had surrendered in Java.

He had seen so many people executed, strangled, hanged, decapitated, beaten, starved to death, drowned and bayoneted. He wanted none of these ways of dying. 学学这些词

All this time Yonoi’s inquiries after Celliers became ever more impatient. It became no longer a tense question of: ‘Sick officer? Health, how?’ but more irritably: ‘Sick officer not well? Why? Why not well? Lakas! Quick! Lakas!’

Dazed, Celliers struggled to his feet, swayed and half-turned as if to obey – then swung around suddenly. He took a couple of paces back towards Yonoi, put his hands on Yonoi’s arms and embraced him on both cheeks rather like a French general embracing a soldier after a decoration for valour.

After standing in front of Celliers and looking at him for long in silence, Yonoi put his hand in his pocket and produced something which flashed like silver in the moonlight. Strange as it might seem our watch was convinced that it was a pair of scissors, for Yonoi appeared to bend down over Celliers, take his long hair in his hand and snip some of it off. . . .

For a while longer Yonoi remained there in deep thought before bowing low to Celliers in the same way that the watch had seen him bow to the rising sun on the day of his Emperor’s birthday. That done he walked slowly to the gate where he resummoned the guard. And that was the last we saw of Yonoi.

After that I regret to say I tried to forget what had happened and looking back on it all now I realize I was not alone in my attitude. Deliberately we seemed to avoid talking in camp about this man who had suddenly flashed out of the dark into our prison lives like a shooting-star and had burned out so brilliantly and quickly before our eyes.

‘In that case,’ Yonoi begged, ‘you understand us Japanese and will know how important it is to me. As my last wish would you recover this thing for me and send it to my home to be offered to the spirit of the ancestors in the shrine of my fathers?’

He had cut that strand of hair from the dead head purely so that the spirit of the man should be honoured and given a proper home in the hereafter. It was his intention when the war was over to give a place in the inmost hall of his own ancestors to that strand of hair.

The hair had been dedicated in the sacred fire of his people’s shrine. It was, Yonoi wrote, a beautiful place at the end of a long cryptomeria avenue and among steep hills covered with maples burning like a forest fire on the autumn day of the ceremony. A long elegant waterfall poured out of the heights above the clouds and fed the stream and pools full of carp and wing-swift trout at the foot of the shrine. The air there was fragrant with the scent of leaf and pine and purified with so much water. He hoped Lawrence would agree that it was a suitable home for such a spirit. Finally he, Yonoi, had written a poem for the occasion. Presenting himself at the shrine, bowing low and clapping his hands sharply to ensure that the spirits knew he was there, he had deposited this verse for the ancestors to read:

In the spring,

Obeying the August spirits

I went to fight the enemy.

In the Fall,

Returning I beg the spirits,

To receive also the enemy.

‘You see,’ Lawrence said to me now, his voice low with feeling: ‘the seed sown by brother in brother in that far-off homeland was planted in many places. It was planted that day in your prison in Java. Yes, even in the manner they killed Celliers his enemies acted out their unwitting recognition of the seed of his deed, for they did not only bury him alive but planted him upright like a new young growth in the earth. Even the manner of their denial of the deed was confirmation of what was rejected. He was planted again by Yonoi on the hills and spirit of his native country, and here again the seed is alive and growing in you and me.’

I stood there with a heart full of welcome for the storm and it was as if Celliers had come again from all those many places in which he had been born, lived, died, been buried and enshrined, to stand behind me renewed and reintegrated, saying clearly in my ear: ‘Wind and spirit, earth and being, rain and doing, lightning and awareness imperative, thunder and the word, seed and sower, all are one: and it is necessary only for man to ask for his seed to be chosen and to pray for the sower within to sow it through the deed and act of himself, and then the harvest for all will be golden and great.’

The Sword and the Doll

But all he hastened to say was: ' I would have to be a poet and not a soldier to tell you all that I think and feel about you... I can only say that you are all I imagined a good woman to be... You make me feel inadequate and very humble. . . . Please know that I understand you have turned to me not for yourself, not for me, but on behalf of life. When all reason and the world together seem to proclaim the end of life as we have known it, I know you are asking me to renew with you our pact of faith with life in the only way possible to us.’

That, almost word for word, Lawrence told us, was what he had said to her, and we could judge for ourselves how inadequate it was. But it was the best he could do. The hell of it was that he longed for the ability to express the many complex emotions he had about her in a simple and intelligible way, but all he seemed able to do was to put into rough words only the simplest and most arbitrary of his feelings.

Should I be killed please go to my home and see my mother. My only regret is that I have had no time to tell you all I feel and think about you and how deep my sense of our belonging to life. I take the thought of you wrapped around me like a warm blanket on a cold winter’s night. Please make haste to get away from this place today – I too shall see what I can do to that end before I go. Somewhere in life there will be a dimension wherein we shall be together again. Until then, as you said last night, to God – À Dieu, my dear – John.’

电影看了两遍，又找来小说看。 读了三个月，花费时间超过12个小时，但是有30%看不懂。只记得和电影对照的部分，惭愧惭愧。