摘自《巴黎評論》（The Paris Review）
普立茲獎得主、非虛構作家、詩人和小說家安妮·迪拉德（Annie Dillard）在2011年的回憶錄《美國童年》（*An American Childhood*）開頭寫道，她預想了自己在生命盡頭最清晰的記憶會是什麼：
當腦海中其他一切都已消逝——總統的名字、各州首府、我曾居住過的街區，繼而是我自己的名字以及我曾在世間追尋的目標，再後來是朋友們的面孔，最後是家人的面孔——當這一切都煙消雲散，我相信留存下來的將是拓撲學：關於大地如何蜿蜒展的夢幻般的記憶。
在《巴黎評論》編輯部，我們將銘記關於迪拉德的許多點滴；她於本週早些時候去世，享年八十一歲。迪拉德最廣為人知的作品或許是1974年出版的《汀克溪畔的朝聖者》（*Pilgrim at Tinker Creek*），書中記錄了她對藍嶺山脈（Blue Ridge Mountains）舊居周圍自然世界的探索與沉思。此外，她的著作還包括兩部小說、兩部詩集、四部非虛構類作品（其中包括1989年的散文集《寫作生涯》/ *The Writing Life*），以及一部她自稱為「非正統文學理論」的著作。
「安妮是一位倡導『專注』的人，」瑪吉·尼爾森（Maggie Nelson）在去年秋季我們刊發的「非虛構寫作藝術」訪談中說道。尼爾森曾是迪拉德在衛斯理大學（Wesleyan University）的學生，這位已故作家曾在該校英語系任教二十一年之久。 “在遣詞造句上，她的風格既可以是精細的手術刀，也可以是沉重的鐵鎚，”尼爾森回憶道，“我敢肯定，直到今天，我的寫作風格仍未達到她所推崇的那種嚴謹與精煉。”
迪拉德經常會佈置一些寫作練習，要求學生選擇一個“我們通常絕對不會去的地方”，並寫下“在那裡發生的一切”，尼爾森回憶說。正是這種對「地點」的專注，構成了迪拉德許多作品的核心動力，其中包括她1998年在《巴黎評論》上發表的文章《當下》（*For the Time Being*）——該文記述了法國神父兼科學家皮埃爾·泰亞爾·德·夏爾丹（Pierre Teilhard de Chardin）的生平。 （現可於《巴黎評論》網站免費閱覽）
安妮·迪拉德與瑪姬·尼爾森的合照。
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But biographical facts, applied to Dillard, tell us even less than usual. As she once put it: “Truth rarely interests me — only contact.” On the page, she would do just about anything to establish that contact — with readers, with her unorthodox subjects and especially with the outer borders of her own transcendent mind.
然而，就迪拉德（Dillard）而言，生平事實所能揭示的往往比通常還要少。正如她曾經說過的：「真相很少讓我感興趣——唯有『接觸』才是關鍵。」在筆端，為了建立這種接觸——無論是與讀者、與她那些不落俗套的題材，還是尤其是與她自身那超越凡俗的心靈的邊界——她幾乎願意嘗試任何方式。
! “We teach our children one thing only, as we were taught: to wake up,” Dillard wrote. She was, in profound ways, a lifelong child, and we were her lifelong children, and she was constantly waking us up.
「我們只教給孩子一件事，就像我們小時候被教導的那樣：那就是醒來，」迪拉德寫道。從某種意義上說，她終生都是個孩子，而我們也是她終生的孩子，不斷地喚醒我們。
RIP, the great Annie Dillard.
"The writer studies literature, not the world. He lives in the world; he cannot miss it.
If he has ever bought a hamburger, or taken a commercial airplane flight, he spares his readers a report of his experience.
He is careful what he reads, for that is what he will write.
He is careful of what he learns, because that is what he will know."
Poetry in America pays tribute to the great American writer Annie Dillard, who passed away yesterday at 81.
Taking her place in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, Dillard created one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern American literature. Across books such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974), Holy the Firm (1977), Teaching a Stone to Talk (1982), An American Childhood (1987), The Living (1992), and For the Time Being (1999), Dillard offered readers an inimitable vision of consciousness and nature, life and our world:
“In the deeps are the violence and terror of which psychology has warned us. But if you ride these monsters deeper down, if you drop with them farther over the world’s rim, you find what our sciences cannot locate or name, the substrate, the ocean or matrix or ether which buoys the rest, which gives goodness its power for good, and evil its power for evil, the unified field: our complex and inexplicable caring for each other, and for our life together here.”
—From the essay, “Total Eclipse”
Rest in peace.
致敬偉大的安妮·迪拉德（Annie Dillard）。
「作家研究的是文學，而非世界。他生活在世界之中，自是無法避開它。
若他曾經買過漢堡，或搭乘過民航客機，他會體貼地省去向讀者講述這些經歷的筆墨。
他審慎地選擇閱讀內容，因為那將化作他筆下的文字。
他審慎地選擇學習內容，因為那將成為他認知的底色。 」
「美國詩歌」（Poetry in America）專欄謹向偉大的美國作家安妮·迪拉德致敬，她於昨日逝世，享年81歲。
迪拉德承襲了亨利·大衛·梭羅、拉爾夫·沃爾多·愛默生、艾米莉·狄金森與赫爾曼·梅爾維爾的文學傳統，創作出了現代美國文學中最具獨特性的作品之一。透過《汀克溪畔的朝聖者》（1974年，獲普立茲獎）、《神聖的堅固》（1977年）、《教石頭說話》（1982年）、《美國童年》（1987年）、《生者》（1992年）及《當下》（1999年）等著作，《迪拉德自然》為對世界與自然的視野
「深處潛藏著心理學曾警示我們的那種暴力與恐懼。但若你駕馭這些怪獸向更深處潛行，若你隨它們一道越過世界的邊緣下墜，你便會發現某種科學無法定位或命名的事物——那是支撐萬物的基質，是托舉一切的海洋、母體或以太；它賦予善以行善的力量，賦予惡以作惡的力量；那是一個統一場：即我們彼此之間，以及對我們在此共同生活的歲月，那份複雜而難以言喻的關切。
——摘自《日全食》散文（Total Eclipse）
安息吧。
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Bitter rivals have come together to curb threats to humanity in the past. But enforcing an agreement to limit the training of supremely powerful AI systems would be a huge challenge bit.ly/4rhygrW
Agreeing to make AI safe is impossible
過去，勢不兩立的對手曾聯手遏止威脅人類的隱憂。然而，要落實一項限制訓練超強人工智慧系統的協議，將面臨巨大挑戰。 bit.ly/4rhygrW
要確保人工智慧安全達成協議是不可能的
「Is the end nigh」是一個英文諺語或慣用語，中文意思是「世界末日快到了嗎？」或者「大限將至嗎？」 [1, 2]
- The end：指「結束」，在這裡通常指世界末日、災難降臨或某個重大時代的終結。
- 幽默或誇張用法：現代人也常在生活中開玩笑使用。例如遇到倒楣的事情（像是期末考快到了、工作壓力極大、或是下大雨忘記帶傘），就會誇張地喊一句「The end is nigh!」來形容自己快撐不下去了。 [1]
- From the The Paris ReviewIn the opening paragraph of her 2011 memoir, "An American Childhood," the Pulitzer Prize–winning nonfiction writer, poet, and novelist Annie Dillard predicted what she thought she would, toward the end of her life, remember most clearly:When everything else has gone from my brain—the President’s name, the state capitals, the neighborhoods where I lived, and then my own name and what it was on earth I sought, and then at length the faces of my friends, and finally the faces of my family—when all this has dissolved, what will be left, I believe, is topology: the dreaming memory of land as it lay this way and that.Here at the Review, we will remember many things about Dillard, who died earlier this week at the age of eighty-one. Dillard is probably best known for her 1974 book "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", a meditation on her explorations of the natural world around her then home in the Blue Ridge Mountains. She also authored, among other works, two novels, two collections of poetry, four books of nonfiction (including her 1989 essay collection, "The Writing Life"), and a volume of what she called “unlicensed literary theory.”“Annie was just an advocate of attention,” Maggie Nelson said in her Art of Nonfiction interview, which we published last fall. Nelson was one of Dillard’s undergraduate students at Wesleyan University, where the late writer taught in the English department for more than twenty-one years. “On the level of the sentence she could be anything from a micro-scalpel to a hammer,” Nelson recalls. “I’m sure that to this day I don’t write as tightly as she would prefer.”Dillard would assign writing prompts, asking her students to choose “a place we’d normally never go” and to write down “everything that happened there,” Nelson remembers. It was this sort of attention to place that drove much of Dillard’s writing, including “For the Time Being,” a piece she published in the Review in 1998, about the life of the French priest and scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. (Now free at the website for @parisreview)Photograph of Annie Dillard and Maggie Nelson.
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