Still, I go to the post office a few times to try to track down my box, to no avail. The Roman postal employee is not at all happy to have her phone call to her boyfriend interrupted by my presence. And my Italian—which has been getting better, honestly—fails me in such stressful circumstances. As I try to speak logically about my missing box of books, the woman looks at me like I'm blowing spit bubbles.

尽管如此，我仍去了邮局几次，试图追踪我的箱子，却徒劳无功。那名罗马邮局员工很不高兴和男朋友的通话被我的出现打断。而我的意大利语——已经愈来愈好，说老实话——在这种紧急状况下辜负了我。我尝试条理分明地说明遗失一箱书，这女人看着我的样子就像我在吹泡泡。

"Maybe it will be here next week?" I ask her in Italian.

也许下礼拜会寄到这儿？我用意大利语问她。

She shrugs: "Magari."

她耸肩说：Magari。

Another untranslatable bit of Italian slang, meaning something between "hopefully" and "in your dreams, sucker."

又是一个无从翻译的意大利俚语，意思介于但愿如此和做你的白日梦，蠢蛋之间。

Ah, maybe it's for the best. I can't even remember now what books I'd packed in the box in the first place. Surely it was some stuff I thought I should study, if I were to truly understand Italy. I'd packed that box full of all sorts of due-diligence research material about Rome that just seems unimportant now that I'm here. I think I even loaded the complete unabridged text of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire into that box. Maybe I'm happier without it, after all. Given that life is so short, do I really want to spend one-ninetieth of my remaining days on earth reading Edward Gibbon?

Eat, Pray, Love

呵，或许这是最好的结果。我现在甚至记不起一开始在箱子里装了哪些书。肯定是我认为自己若想真正了解意大利，就该读的一些东西。我在箱子里装满各式各样应当用功研读的罗马研究资料，如今既已身在此地，这些东西似乎不再重要。我想我甚至把整册爱德华•吉本（Edward Gibbon）的《罗马帝国衰亡史》的完整版装进箱子里。或许没有它，我会比较快乐。毕竟人生如此短暂，我果真想把我在世间余下的九十分之一的日子，花在阅读吉本上吗？