🔖双语阅读：烬余录 by 张爱玲

围城的十八天里，谁都有那种清晨四点钟的难捱的感觉——寒噤的黎明，什么都是模糊，瑟缩，靠不住。回不了家，等回去了，也许家已经不存在了。房子可以毁掉，钱转眼可以成废纸，人可以死，自己更是朝不保暮。像唐诗上的“凄凄去亲爱，泛泛入烟雾，”可是那到底不像这里的无牵无挂的虚空与绝望。人们受不了这个，急于攀住一点踏实的东西，因而结婚了。

Throughout the eighteen days of the siege, was there anyone who did not experience that unbearable, half-past-four-in-the-morning feeling? Waking to another trembling dawn, surrounded by fog, cowering from the cold with nothing to depend on. No way home. And if or when you got home at all, you might not find it there anymore. Homes can be destroyed, money transformed into worthless paper in the bat of an eyelid, other people can die. And one's own life? Precarious at best. As the Tang poem puts it: "Bleakly I leave those near and dear / moving into distant misty veils." But even lines like these cannot describe the untenable and unmoored quality of that emptiness and despair. It was intolerable to most people and that is why they were so anxious to grasp on to something solid and that is why they got married.

——张爱玲《烬余录》，Andrew F. Jones 译