When I was nine years old, going on ten, I experienced a true metaphysical crisis. Maybe this seems young for such a thing, but I was always a precocious child. It all happened over the summer between fourth and fifth grade. I was going to be turning ten years old in July, and there was something about the transition from nine to ten—from single digit to double di-gits—that shocked me into a genuine existential panic, usually reserved for people turning fifty. I remember thinking that life was passing me by so fast. It seemed like only yesterday I was in kindergarten, and here I was, about to turn ten. Soon I would be a teenager, then middle-aged, then elderly, then dead. And everyone else was aging in hyperspeed, too. Everybody was going to be dead soon. My parents would die. My friends would die. My cat would die. My older sister was almost in high school already; I could remember her going off to first grade only moments ago, it seemed, in her little knee socks, and now she was in high school? Obviously it wouldn't be long before she was dead. What was the point of all this?
在我九岁、即将十岁的时候，我体验到某种真实的玄学危机。或许年纪轻轻似乎不太可能有此体验，但我向来是个早熟的小孩。事情发生在四年级升五年级之间的暑假。我在七月将迈向十岁，从九岁变十岁，不得不让人有所感触——从个位数变成二位数——恐惧使我陷入真正的存在恐慌，而这通常是留待迈向五十岁的人去担心的事。我记得自己心里在想，生命过得如此之快；进幼稚园仿佛还是昨天的事，而现在我即将迈入十岁。过不久，我将成为青少年，而后进入中年，而后迈入老年，而后迈向死亡。其他每个人也是超速老去。每个人不久都不免一死。我的父母会死。我的朋友们会死。我的猫会死。我的姐姐差不多上中学了；我犹记得她似乎才上小学一年级没多久，穿着小长统袜，而现在她上了中学？显然再过不久，她就要死了。这一切有什么意义？

The strangest thing about this crisis was that nothing in particular had spurred it. No friend or relative had died, giving me my first taste of mortality, nor had I read or seen anything particular about death; I hadn't even read Charlotte's Web yet. This panic I was feeling at age ten was nothing less than a spontaneous and full-out realization of mortality's inevitable march, and I had no spiritual vocabulary with which to help myself manage it. We were Protestants, and not even devout ones, at that. We said grace only before Christmas and Thanksgiving dinner and went to church sporadically. My dad chose to stay home on Sunday mornings, finding his devotional practice in farming. I sang in the choir because I liked singing; my pretty sister was the angel in the Christmas pageant. My mother used the church as a headquarters from which to organize good works of volunteer service for the community. But even in that church, I don't remember there being a lot of talking about God. This was New England, after all, and the word God tends to make Yankees nervous.
最奇怪的是，没有任何特别的事情促使这场危机发生。没有亲朋好友的过世让我初尝死亡的滋味，我也未特别读到或看见有关死亡的事情；我甚至尚未读过《夏洛的网》。我在十岁时所感受的恐慌，正是自发而全面地认识到死亡过程的无可避免，而我没有任何心灵词汇帮助自己面对。我们是新教徒，甚至不是虔诚信徒，以致很难对思索这件事有所助益。我们只在圣诞前夕和感恩节大餐前做饭前祷告，不定期上教堂做礼拜。周日早上，我父亲选择待在家里，从农事劳动中来寻找祈祷实践。我在唱诗班唱歌，因为我喜欢唱歌；我漂亮的姐姐在圣诞晚会扮演天使。我母亲以教会做总部，组织社区义工服务。但即使在教会中，我不记得曾谈论很多有关神的事。毕竟这里是新英格兰，“神”一词往往让北方佬神经紧张。

My sense of helplessness was overwhelming. What I wanted to do was pull some massive emergency brake on the universe, like the brakes I'd seen on the subways during our school trip to New York City. I wanted to call a time out, to demand that everybody just STOP until I could understand everything. I suppose this urge to force the entire universe to stop in its tracks until I could get a grip on myself might have been the beginning of what my dear friend Richard from Texas calls my "control issues." Of course, my efforts and worry were futile. The closer I watched time, the faster it spun, and that summer went by so quickly that it made my head hurt, and at the end of every day I remember thinking, "Another one gone," and bursting into tears.
我的无助感压倒一切。我想急踩煞车，让宇宙暂停，就像我们学校专程前往纽约市旅行时，我在地下铁看到的煞车。我想叫停，要求大家“停下来”，直到让我搞清楚一切。我想，这种强迫整个宇宙停住脚步、直到我能掌握自己的冲动，可能就是我亲爱的朋友德州理查所谓“控制问题”的开始。当然，我的努力和忧心都是徒劳。我愈仔细观察时间，时间转得愈快，而那年夏天过得如此之快，使我头痛；每天结束时，我记得自己心想，“又一天过去了”，而后失声痛哭。

I have a friend from high school who now works with the mentally handicapped, and he says his autistic patients have a particularly heartbreaking awareness of time's passage, as if they never got the mental filter that allows the rest of us to forget about mortality every once in a while and just live. One of Rob's patients always asks him the date at the beginning of every day, and at the end of the day will ask, "Rob—when will it be February fourth again?" And before Rob can answer, the guy shakes his head in sorrow and says, "I know, I know, never mind . . . not until next year, right?"
我有个中学朋友罗布，目前从事弱智患者的治疗工作；他说他的自闭症病人对于时间的流逝具有某种令人心碎的认识，仿佛他们缺乏那种让我们偶尔忘却死亡、只是活下去的心理过滤器。他有个病人老是在一天开始的时候问他日期，一天结束的时候则问“罗布——什么时候才会再碰到二月四号？”没等罗布回答，这家伙便哀伤地摇头，说“我晓得，我晓得，不要紧……直到明年才会，对吧？”