Chapter 17 "A Drop of Spirits" - Worshiping the Gods as if the Gods Are Here

"A Drop of Spirits" is a story that I remembered to tell in the future.The female companion in the story was still the sculptor Jane and not the prostitute Elaine Madai, and this is its carbon fourteenth isotope, which tells us that this happened after eight million ways of death, because we also already know , Jen would later die of cancer, sober but in pain (why do those two things always go together?).And Jane was the one who had dragged Matthew Scudder into the AA meeting, where, in Mickey Ballou's first words, Scudder's life had turned a corner. "A Drop of Spirit" also helps us fill in a small memory fragment by the way. We didn't know the process of Scudder and Jen's breakup before.At the time, Scudder and our minds were heavily preoccupied with the ensuing murders, which were also the cruelest times in New York.

"There is a long time between this glass of wine and the next glass of wine." - Block said that this quotation hits the gist of the book. We don't fully know what he means, but at least we can see it first A special shape of time, only through memory can time become this peculiar shape.We know that retrospective time is different from the forward time in life, that retrospective time is more tame, it can be reorganized according to our wishes, and five years and ten years can whizz by in the blink of an eye (so stop blinking casually, our short Life can’t bear this), or it can be almost condensed into a shape, allowing you to hold it in your hand and watch it slowly, repeatedly, and turn it over and over to pick what you want to watch.Like this murder story, the deceased Jack Ellery was Scudder's lost childhood playmate. To tell why he died, he had to recall decades ago. In Bullock's favorite way, Jack Ellery It took Lerry decades to justify his death that day with a shot in the forehead and a shot in the mouth.But all this was just one night at the Grogan Hotel, maybe not enough to fill the whole night. Scudder and Mickey Ballou obviously talked about more than this murder, they at least talked about Mickey Ballou's Young wife, his butcher father and three brothers.This evening, Jack Ellery's life came to an abrupt end, perhaps only between Mickey Barlow's 12-year-old Jameson whiskey and the next.

The uniform and uniform real time is like an iron chain in shape and even in essence. We are subordinate to it and obey its actions. Breaking it means liberation; that is, we reverse the master-slave relationship between us and time through recall In relationship, we get back part of ourselves at a time. But our special difficulty today is that we seem to live in an era in human history that is most inappropriate for recalling things. It seems that something will always jump out and interrupt our recall. It is not clear whether it is ourselves or the whole world. Like conspiracy, unconsciously the world has succeeded in convincing us that it is something that is not urgent or even suitable for a strong man, so that we seem to gradually lose the ability to recall things.What I mean is that the activation of memories may happen naturally, but if you want to think about it seriously, you still need to have a basis and a method. Human memory is not a big picture that is spread out in detail, it is more like a dense forest A cave, you have to find a way to get in. The memory touch in our life is only responsible for bringing people to the cave before the jungle.

The murder story of "A Drop" runs almost exclusively between the old days of temperance meetings, and indeed, even Jack Ellery's death was almost certainly a result of his efforts to quit drinking and his excessive As a result of faithful adherence to the religious rules of AA (for which Scudder has maintained his most refined skepticism and irony), we can almost say that the real subject of this old murder is AA, from its cause to every One key point, without AA, Jack Ellery wouldn't have died (or died in some other way, at some other time and place without doing the Scudder thing); De, the real subject of his reminiscences is also AA, those days, those events and the people involved, after all, AA (not Ellery) is the truly irreplaceable richness of Scudder's life thing.The real importance of the Ellery case lies in the fact that it is a special memory key, and a special door of memory can only be opened by it; Murder story) needs to be told from the beginning to the end, and there needs to be enough relevant details to fill it. Therefore, when Scudder told Mickey Ballou, it was also a blazing process of his own memories, and the memories were searched and discovered again. , Confirm and complete, including those things that you would not think about if you have nothing to do, those things that you thought you couldn't remember, and those things that you don't want to think about self-torture.

Isn't that so?How else would we have known about Jane's departure?How can I hear Scudder talk about the manslaughter of a little girl again (Scudder has not thought about it for a long time)?Why add a bunch of earnest advice from the late good old Jim Farber? But the Ellery case is not "Reminiscences of the Past", there is no way to open the whole past at once, in the dense forest of memory where people can hardly exhaust the fragments, it only remembers, absorbs, and sorts out this small part related to the Alcoholics Anonymous Association; a story Only by recalling once can it be in-depth and hopeful to be complete. Other memories have to wait for a different story to wake them up.So here, we have to put it in a more correct way, a story is not a road, but a memory tunnel.

We said earlier that there must be a basis and method for the memory to go on, which means that you have to try to find such passages one by one. "A Drop of Liquor" is easily reminiscent of many years ago. If this time is the murder of the Alcoholics Anonymous Association, then it must be the murder of the hotel bar. ? , at the time, like some kind of prophecy, afraid of being wrong, hesitating, I always believed that this was not just a very special writing of Matthew Scudder's story.I thought, this is still a leak, and sooner or later Scudder will be able to tell us stories in this way of retrospect, and when he is really old himself, is there any other way?

Of course, anyone can see the strange appearance, the most obvious is the discontinuity of time. Scudder, who has been working and resting according to the normal time and accumulating age and experience at a steady pace, suddenly stands for a long time like sitting on a time machine. In the "future" in the future, look back at the murder that happened now; or, he seems to have had a dream. In the dream, he is a much older Scudder, whose son has grown up to be independent. The people in it, the hotel in it And the whole world also looks much older. In the speeding up of time, people get old, die and run away.

Thinking about it carefully, the theory of dreaming seems to be more correct than the theory of time machines, because dreams can only guess the future based on the present, obsessive and wishful thinking. The current dream probes into the future alone, but in fact it does not fully know the future at that moment; it Can't dream of people who haven't appeared yet, can't dream of major accidents, murders, and deaths that haven't happened yet, and don't know for sure how Jim Farber will die in the future or accompany Mickey Ballow as if returning from a trip to hell, There will be no "September 11" in the dream, otherwise, why would Scudder not talk about it?

That is to say, at that time, Scudder and all the existing people were not really old, and the only ones who knew for sure that they were old and dead were the hotels (New York City in reality was one step ahead of the time of the novel, revealing "in advance" The fate of these hotels), the future results of the hotel and the present moment of the hotel are connected in a straight line, and a standard time tunnel appears. I say, this is the truly special and most inspiring place. We don't know for sure what the future will really be, so many people are wise not to believe in the future, such as stop believing in God, seize the moment, be yourself and so on.But Milan Kundera ruthlessly dug up the only present we have. He pointed out that because the present is not complete, everything in the present is still developing, their gains and losses, their results, their Meaning, all meandering into the foggy future, if we don't know the future, how can we say we know the present and have the ability to master the present?

This is also a hard blow that is hard to refute.Yeah, so Borges doesn’t believe in the mass media that reports in real time every day. He said that the big things that really have a profound impact start in an obscure corner and appearance. Something about you, meeting someone or accepting a job and so on.The example Borges chose was the birth of Jesus. Who would have known that on a certain night in a poor carpenter’s house on the outskirts of human civilization two thousand years ago, a little boy was routinely born. The earth-shattering beginning of history?In the future, Van Loon told us in the chapter "The Story of Mankind" that what he will tell next is the story of a manger and an empire, "It is strange that the manger actually defeated the empire".But Fang Loon said it too politely. In fact, this manger almost occupied the whole world, and has been ruling the entire universe of the sun, moon and stars.

Pious religious people will refute this example, because according to the "Bible" and even the church in the future, almost everyone knows it, including the praise of the heavens that night, and the three wise men from the East are not too early. Arrived at Yunyun without delay; including the wicked side, although King Herod was not sure it was this night, at least he knew it was this year, so he ordered to kill all babies born in this year, rather kill the wrong one don't let go - But this refutation actually confirms exactly what we said, because it is all the fruit of later recollection, a story refilled from recollection; that is to say, it is the most important passage of time in the Christian Church, and it is also the most heavily trafficked The Time Corridor, which has been continuously flowing for two thousand years, has developed into a MRT. Back to the Scudder story.What I want to say is that, if we take a closer look, every case of Scudder seems to be going forward in time and groping forward at first glance, but in fact, it is only after the case is closed that it will be fully stated once again.We could change the scene of the night of "Brew in a Drop" and instead of facing Mickey Ballou in Grogan, we could tell it to you and me in some hotel with no time and space, something like this.This is of course not to follow the official code of non-disclosure in investigations, but because stories can only be compiled in retrospect, and things have to come to an end before we know what to look at and what to think and say. All stories are In retrospect, every novel is a tunnel of time. Faulkner once described people’s time situation in this way. He said that we are like sitting on our backs in a fast-moving car. The future is invisible, and the present is fleeting like a shadow. What we can really see clearly is past. The problem lies in how to count the past and the end of the matter-generally speaking, from life to death is only a moment, and a murder is always completed within a few days in a mystery novel, even in a vacation. dinner; but Matthew Scudder (or Bullock) likes to point out with some quips that some murders are slow and patient, killing you a little bit at a time, so we know almost all couples spend their lives murdering Each other, so, in "A Drop of Spirits" this time, Scudder and the others talked about another method of killing people, sending a bottle of fine wine to someone every few days, which lasted for more than ten or twenty years, and he did not die of alcoholism , must also die of abstinence, such as Jack Ellery, who was caught by the devil the moment he received the first bottle, and there was no escape. Every day, all the things that happen to us now have different time scales, some days, some years, and many that take longer than our lifetime. We can't wait for the ending at all, and some don't have an ending at all , like a flower that withers before it blooms, all these.Scudder (or Bullock) makes such jokes again and again, pointing to those things on a longer time scale again and again, we can almost be sure, he knows that there are only a few stories with a beginning and an end that he has successfully told, and more Yeah, he's still waiting and thinking, waiting for some ending to come, or trying to invent some ending so that the story can be told, that's it. When I was a child, I lived not far from Yilan Railway Station. In the era of coal-fired steam locomotives, the sound of the sharp siren when the train entered and exited the station was terrible, and it once penetrated into sleep and turned into a nightmare; but my love The second brother who watched the American West Frontier movie told me that it is very strange, if the train is placed on the open land and listened to from a far away place, the same siren sound will be nice, and there is a certain sense of vastness and sadness— — It’s been almost fifty years, and I always remember this incident. At that time, my second brother was at the age of high school art youth, and I thought he was very smart. A murder story that is close and can be told quickly, we usually have a very strict cognitive limit to its ending, it must be solved, and the murderer must be punished.The ultimate punishment is death, of course, but we are still picky about death. The murderer can be killed when he resists arrest (sometimes we prefer this, because there are not many people who have confidence in the judiciary), or he can know that there is no escape Escape suicide and so on, but we assume that if the murderer suddenly died in a car crash or sudden illness before solving the case, it would be embarrassing. He even thinks of death in this way as a successful escape, damn luck! But is it like this in real life?Of course, there are definitely chances. For example, the most famous Jack the Ripper case in Britain and the Zodiac serial murder case in the United States are probably the same. God solves and arrests the case before the human judicial system, doesn’t he? But such an impossible story, such an ending, if it is placed in an extremely empty time and we listen to it from a distance, it is very strange, it seems to be established automatically, good and evil, misfortune, fortune and loss rise like steam, As if Heaven and Earth had taken over, Fate had absorbed murder, as well as death— This is not the self-healing trick of the old Stoics, this is the magical power of time in nature, and the Stoics just imitated it, artificially reproduced it.what is this?It's the ironic gift of time that sometimes you almost believe it's on purpose - you've waited for this ending, this passage to be completed, but it gives you another passage, maybe more than one, along with those You originally thought that there was no end to your life, and those flowers had no end at all. Many serial stories are never old, and the time in the stories is like a dog biting its own tail in circles.My daughter told me that Detective Conan, a primary school student in Japan, should grow back to the appearance of Shinichi Kudo, a high school student in time, but the bad news is that the author is said to be divorced and has to pay a large amount of alimony. So time must continue to be blocked, keeping its cornucopia. Scudder's series of stories started the flow of time unwisely at the beginning, just like our real life, it is difficult to stay young and never turn back. This is worrying, because the flow rate is not difficult to estimate, and the end of time is waiting Desirable - isn't it?Isn't it all here now?The prostitute is good and makes her life worthless, just like Marx said that the villain of the proletariat marries a young wife who cannot afford to lose. Dying, in that case especially, was like liquidating inventory.These are very normal in real life, but they have always been a taboo in the series of stories.The series of stories are most taboo about the death of a regular team member. You would rather let him move, let him go abroad, let him go away sad, or let him fall into the river and fall off the cliff, but remember not to be found dead (decomposed and unrecognizable corpses are fine), you must Keep him in an agile state where he can die or not die. New York has also changed for the better. It’s not that the roads are never picked up and the doors are closed at night. It’s not that criminals and murderers lost all imagination and practical ability overnight, but that they have gone through the sea. What happens when time is about to end?There are two kinds, one is that all this will end soon, and cherish each other; the other is to take time off and travel through multiple and diverse time tunnels, leading to memories that cannot be reached in the past, and telling the story of those timeless, old age Stories that cannot be told by those who do not come.Here, let me tell you a miraculous thing that will not reveal the case. In "A Drop of Spirits", an opened bottle of good bourbon whiskey (without poison or any additives) and the smell of wine in a room can be The murderer's murder weapon, how could this be true?But it really works. We certainly hope that the Scudder story is the latter, and "A Drop of Spirits" is a good start, only because there are only a few detectives who can go all the way here, and even the former Philip Marlowe ended abruptly at the end of middle age.We can imagine a picture like this, death is near the other end of the dawn, and it will come when the story is finished, so Shanzorud tells one story after another, remembering, then incomplete, and then vaguely forgotten Yes, and then what didn't happen but was supposed to be... Scudder and Mickey Ballou could do the same. In the story of "Odyssey", the lost Odysseus once sailed into Hades and saw the dead souls of his mother and a group of Trojan comrades in arms. There, the prophet Tiresias gave him the most generous gift, telling him that he can have no pain Death is a gift that becomes more and more precious as one grows older.In every investigation process, Scudder always has one or two lingering words, which are used for introspection, for sentimentality, and are also repeatedly transformed to practice jokes. This time in "A Drop of Spirits" is: "God, please give me chastity, but not now." God, please keep me sane, but not now; please keep me from stealing, but not now; please keep me generous, hardworking, and selfless, but not now; please keep me from hitting, but not now Now; please keep me from snacking, but not now... Yes, please let us die without pain, but not now.