John B. McLemore遗书的最后几个段落
The last time you talked to me I told you that I go through these suicidal stages and all that shit and that kind of worried you. But when I think about the end of my own existence, I take the biggest possible picture. I don’t just look at myself as a 49-year-old semi-homosexual atheist living in a Shittown full of Baptists in Buttfucksville, Alabama. I look at myself as a citizen of the world. I try to look at the biggest picture possible. I have coaxed many infirm clocks back to mellifluous life, studies projective geometry and built astrolabes, sundials, taught myself 19th century electroplating, bronzing, patination, micro machining, horology, leaned piano, read Poe, de Maupassant, Boccaccio, O’Connor, Welty, Hugo, Balzac, Kafka, Bataille, Gibran, as well as modern works by Mortimer, Hawking, Kunstler, Klein, Jacoby, Heinberg, Hedges, Hitchings, and Rhodes. But the best times of my life, I realize were the times I spent in the forest and field. I’ve walked in solitude, beside my own babbling creek, and wondered at the undulations, meanderings, and tiny battles that were occasionally swept into its midst. I’ve spent time in idle palaver, with violets, layer leaf sage, heliopsis, and monkshood, and marveled at the mystery of monotropa uniflora. I have audited the discourse of the hickories, oaks, and pines, even when no wind was present. I have peregrinated the woods in winter under the watchful guard of vigilant dogs, and spent hours entranced by the exquisiteness and delicacy of tiny mosses and molds, entire forests, within a few square inches. I have also ran thrashing and flailing from yellow jackets. Before I could commence this discourse, I spent a few hours out under the night sky, reacquainting myself with the constellations like old friends. Sometimes I just spent hours playing my records. Sometimes I took my record players and CD players apart just to peek inside and admire the engineering of their incongruous entrails. Sometimes I watched Laverne & Shirley or old movies or Star Trek. Sometimes I sat in the dark and listened to the creaking of the old house. I have lived on this blue orb now for about 17,600 days, and when I look around me and see the leaden dispiritedness that envelops so many persons, both young and old, I know that if I die tonight, my life has been inestimably better than that of most of my compatriots. Additionally, my absence makes room and leave some resources for others who deserve no less than I have enjoyed. I would hope that all persons reading this can enjoy some of the aspects of life that I have enjoyed, as well as those aspects that I never will, and will take cognizance of the number of waking days he has remaining, and use them prudently. To all that have given so much, much love and respect, John B. McLemore.