第一次在挪威杂志上发表文章

我年初的时候，因为在健身房不慎，腰上受了伤。躺在床上养了很久，闲来无事，就随手在手机上写了一篇小散文，发在了这里。后来有一次回到奥斯陆大学图书馆借专业书籍，在图书馆门口看到奥斯陆大学的学生文学季刊Argument正在征稿，主题是crisis。我于是就顺手改了一个标题，把整个散文的主题改成了“疫情危机之下的中年危机”，别的一个字没改，就投了出去。

截止日期一过，就收到了编辑挪威小哥的邮件，说对稿子很有兴趣，把我例行公事地夸了一通，然后就提了一点修改意见。第一次的修改其实完全是我自己主导的，结构调整了一下，一些词不达意的地方都全部重新写了一下。后来又反反复复改了三次，都是个别的词句，再也没有大的变动。统共改完四稿之后，编辑小哥就把稿件发给了这一期的主编，主编最后看过一次，再给了一点点修改意见，然后拍板决定刊发。终于在今天，我收到了新刊。

封面。

我自己读书的时候，为了学挪威语Argument一期不落地几乎全部读过（当然他们也接受英语稿件）。虽然是学生刊物，但奥斯陆大学最强的就是文科院系，因而期期都能看到一些非常精彩的文章。杂志在巅峰时期时，在挪威更是获得过几个文化大奖。

目录。

我的文章。

还给配了一个可爱的插图。

虽然我只是纯粹业余性质地写作消遣，但是能发表还是觉得很开心。这次跟编辑小哥合作很愉快，下次有合适的主题或许还能投一投玩一玩。以下是修改后的全文。

The story of an early mid-life crisis in the middle of a pandemic crisis

It was the day before the Christmas Eve that I decided to go to the gym for the last time in 2021. I put some extra weight on the lower back machine to get a sense of fulfillment at the end of the year. Then I went home, fell asleep on the sofa while dead-scrolling TikTok—a guilty pleasure indeed. When I woke up, a sharp spasm ran across my lower back, and before I could figure out what went wrong, I could no longer bend over.

Lying in bed and feeling like a hundred years old, I remembered reading one of Geoff Dyer’s essays where he got a stroke. At the age of 55, sportive and thin as a rake, he lost vision in the left eye one afternoon while trying to push a can into a full garbage bin in the kitchen. As it is usually the case with strokes, the contrast between the banality of the action and the severity of the consequences is almost comical.

Unable to do anything other than rest in bed, the Holy Night had literally become a Silent Night.Thankfully, things got increasingly better over the vacation. As the new year came, I no longer experienced any pain walking or standing. Out of some strange New Year’s resolution—in other words, a sudden burst of stupidity, I did ten squats. Then I got so much pain that I could not put my socks on.

To say unable to put the socks on is in fact an understatement. My whole upper body could only move vertically, with my back stiff like a robot built with Lego pieces, and anything that involved areas under the waist became a challenge: changing underwear, scratching my legs in the shower, and the trickiest problem of them all is to figure out how to gyrate the hips to a comfortable enough degree in order to wipe my own ass.

For Dyer, the stroke opened “an infinite series of trapdoors” where he confronted the horror of the end of middle age, and his partially compromised vision called into question his own existence both in the form of a body and a functioning brain. My injury was a much less spiritual experience. According to the basic Law of Relativity, when you stay absolutely still, everything else is moving. The dog downstairs was barking, the kids next door were running around and their parents shouting, and when they all quieted down, I suddenly realised how loud my clock was with its ticking.

At the end of age 35—still another seven months to go, thank you, childless and Chinese, the first question that came to my mind was “this is not gonna affect my sex life, is it?”, followed immediately by the second one: “does my health insurance cover chiropractic treatments?” That is an important life lesson perky 20-year-olds could never get: to a person terrified by the prospect of turning 40 and still refusing to grow up, sex always trumps money. Money, in turn, trumps everything else. While the answer to the first question remains to be seen—not in the near future unfortunately, the second one came as a definitive no. As it turned out, to get covered by the health insurance I got through work, I first need to go to my GP. Then, he must refer me to a nerve system specialist, and then, the nerve expert need to refer me to a chiropractor. “That happens when things get really bad, and you are definitely not there yet,” the woman from the insurance company told me on the phone. Well, out of the whole shitstorm, there was at least this one silver lining.

On the first workday of 2022, I found a chiropractor clinic nearby and immediately booked an appointment. The treatment started with an X-ray consultation and ended with me getting a kick and push on the pelvis. The whole process involved a lot more nakedness and skin-to-skin contact than I had expected. It was a chronical dislocation, coupled with a sudden overload of pressure during the training session in the gym, that triggered the whole issue, according to the chiropractor. I was then sent home to rest and recover. “Things should get much better tomorrow,” my chiropractor said.

In Tarkovsky’s film Solaris, there is a line saying that “since we never know when we are going to die, we are, at any given moment, immortal”. For me, the injury conjured up a similar time-bubble. Nothing is taking place in this artificial vacuum of time now except healing; everything else is cut off from this realm of serenity.

I actually got this Tarkovsky line from Dyer as well. The idea, first germinated in the original book by Stanisław Lem, has passed down from him to Andrei Tarkovsky, and then from Geoff Dyer to me. This chain of transmission, in the height of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis, reminded me of how illness and suffering have connected humanity as a whole. Over the past two years of the virus wreaking havoc across the world, almost 300 million people have gotten sick, and more than five million have died. I weathered through the whole thing unscathed, and instead got a new job, better pay, and a much bigger flat. In some strange way, I saw my injury as a payback for my good fortune. To the vast effort of striking a balance between human happiness and suffering, I had now made my fair share of contribution.

As Dag Solstad, arguably the best Norwegian novelist alive, once put it: one creates meaning by connecting the rituals of the mundane life to a collective consciousness. So here I am, lying in bed on the verge of meaningfulness and meaninglessness, spreading out my legs and arms unapologetically like a piece of gingerbread man biscuit. We are in 2022 now and everything will just get better, I think. Within this injury-induced bubble, I’m blessed to experience, in the purest form, the spirit of the new year.