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《美国孤独》142页，希望朋友们有时间看看，堪称美国的红楼梦。
Prologue
To Be or Not to Be
We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HAMLET (1601)
Do you worry? You look like you do. Worrying is the way the responsible citizen of an
advanced society demonstrates his virtue: he feels good about feeling bad.
But what to worry about? Iranian nukes? Nah, that's just some racket cooked up by the
Christian fundamentalist Bush and his Zionist buddies to give Halliburton a pretext to take
over the Persian carpet industry. Worrying about nukes is so eighties. "They make me want
to throw up .... They make me feel sick to my stomach," wrote the British novelist Martin
Amis, who couldn't stop thinking about them during the Thatcher Terror. In the
introduction to a collection of short stories, he worried about the Big One and outlined his
own plan for coping with a nuclear winter wonderland:
Suppose I survive. Suppose my eyes aren't pouring down my face, suppose I am
untouched by the hurricane of secondary missiles that all mortar, metal, and glass has
abruptly become: suppose all this. I shall be obliged (and it's the last thing I feel like doing)
to retrace that long mile home, through the firestorm, the remains of the thousand-miles-anhour
winds, the warped atoms, the groveling dead. Then - God willing, if I still have the
strength, and, of course, if they are still alive - I must find my wife and children and I must
kill them.
But the Big One never fell. And instead of killing his wife Martin Amis had to make do
with divorcing her. Back then it was just crazies like Reagan and Thatcher who had nukes, so
you can understand why everyone was terrified. But now Kim Jong-il and the ayatollahs have
them, so we're all sophisticated and relaxed about it, like the French hearing that their
president's acquired a couple more mistresses. Martin Amis hasn't thrown up a word about
the subject in years. To the best of my knowledge, he has no plans to kill the present Mrs.
Amis.
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