J的個人生活

中文来自参考消息。英文原文来自The Times

《致D书：情记》——一位满怀爱慕的丈夫写给病中的妻子的长达75页的情书：“你就快到82岁了。你缩短了6厘米，体重不足45公斤，可你依然美丽优雅，令人爱慕。我们共度了58年的时光，我爱你胜过从前。”“我们彼此说过，假若有来生，还要共度。”

　　一张给清洁女工别在门上的留言条，记录下了他们离去的时刻——法国哲学家、作家André Gorz 和妻子Dorine的刻骨之爱翻到了最后一页。留言条很简短：“通知警察。不要上楼。”卧室里，André和妻子Dorine并肩躺在床上，双双服药自杀。他84岁，她83岁。

　　床边桌上，放着朋友们的信，内容是跟朋友们道别，嘱咐将两人合并火葬的后事。无需多言，因为早在一年前，André Gorz 已经为他们的婚姻写下了动人的墓志铭，并付诸发表，其轰动性远远超过他毕生的作品与思想，这就是《致D书：情记》——一位满怀爱慕的丈夫写给病中的妻子的长达75页的情书：“你就快到82岁了。你缩短了6厘米，体重不足45公斤，可你依然美丽优雅，令人爱慕。我们共度了58年的时光，我爱你胜过从前。”“我们彼此说过，假若有来生，还要共度。”

触人心弦

　　去年，André Gorz 的这本小书出版，赢得极大赞誉。自从上个月两人自杀的消息传出，这本书在法国畅销书排行榜排位上升。这番挚爱与感激的朴素告白，触动了无数人的心弦，但是这封信确实只写给一个人，它坦言，如果没有妻子，André Gorz ，思想家、作家、让-保罗萨特的朋友，所有这些头衔，都“没有意义，无足轻重”。

　　“我需要重构我们的爱情，好从各个角度来理解它。因为这让我们之所以成为我们，一个人经由另一个人，一个人为了另一个人。我写信给你，就是为了理解我们经历的一切，我们一起经历的一切。”

　　二人相遇在1947年瑞士洛桑。她，当时名叫Doreen Keir，一个23岁的英国女子，来自破裂的家庭，正在战后的欧洲漫游；他，叫Gérard Horst，24岁，奥地利犹太人，身无分文，前途渺茫，没有祖国。窗外下着大雪，他们在一张牌桌前结识。稍后，羞涩的奥地利小伙邀请这个快乐的红头发英国姑娘去跳舞。

　　Gérard Horst，1923年出生在维也纳，出生时叫Gérard Hirsch。母亲是天主教徒，父亲是犹太人，一个木材经销商，从前当过兵。他的童年并不快乐。1930年父亲加入天主教，改姓Horst。随后反犹太主义兴起，年轻的Gérard随船来到中立国瑞士，进入一家天主教学院，逃脱了在德国服兵役的命运。

　　1945年，他毕业获得化学工程学位。翌年，在瑞士的一个回忆上，结识了萨特和西蒙波伏娃，他们鼓励他从事自己的志趣所向——道德哲学研究。萨特和Gorz之间的知识分子同盟保持了多年，直到1968年，法国知识界的种种骚动导致二人关系永久破裂。但Gorz开始写作生涯，是因为认识了Doreen。从本质上说，两人都是漂泊不定。Doreen出生于伦敦，孩童时被母亲遗弃，在教父(实为生父)的照看下长大，Doreen很少提及自己的过去。

　　“他们最初的人生经验使得他们缺乏安全感，”二人的朋友Michel Contat说，“他们并肩作战，彼此守护。她成为他的档案员，研究员，他的对话者，第一读者，他唯一的评论家。”

　　这对恋人1949年结婚，为了与萨特和左派思想中心靠得更近，移居巴黎。按照法文的拼写，她改名为Dorine。20世纪50年代意识形态氛围极为浓郁，同时，Horst也在等候入籍法国，为了安全起见，他决定以笔名写作，于是成了André Gorz。Gorz的名字取自一个工业城镇的地名，他父亲的军用眼镜就产自那里。

现代思想

　　他的许多观点在今天也是十分现代的：强调平衡工作与个人生活爱好的时间，提出保证全民福利的底线，指出正在迫近的全球化带来的环境威胁。Groz对核武器极为痛恨，率先清晰阐述了生态政治理论。1964年，他参与共同创办左派报纸《新观察家》，5年后，他接手了萨特和波伏娃1945年创办的《现代》杂志的编辑工作。

　　Groz不谙世事，是个知识分子式的人物，为人羞涩谨慎，一个朋友称他为“图书馆里的老鼠”。《新观察家》的共同创办人塞尔日·拉福里回忆，多琳娜与他相反，“非常快乐、敏锐，脸上总挂着微笑。她是他与真实世界的联结点”。

　　他们早在婚姻初期就决定不陷入育儿的麻烦。去年，Groz对《解放报》说：“我认为，好父亲是那些在自己的童年里需要父亲的人。我不想成为好父亲，是因为我从没有爱过我的父亲。如果我们有了孩子的话，我会十分嫉妒Dorine，我宁可她属于我一人。”因为这，他们在所处的时代与环境中，格外与众不同。当时萨特与西蒙·波伏瓦各自情人成串儿，但是André和Dorine彼此忠贞不渝，无论是在身体上还是思想上，始终如一。

　　他们位于巴黎的公寓常常云集着学生、助手和同道的思想家。依照英国的习惯，这里必有下午茶按时提供。Groz夫妇看起来生活清贫但不失优雅。

绝世佳作

　　到1968年，Groz在研究领域已是杰出人物，并享誉文坛。但Dorine却疾病在身。她在1965年的一次例行检查中接受了X射线照相，当时使用了射线造影剂，这种化学药品的副作用极为可怕：化学微粒留在了她的头盖骨里，并在颈部形成囊肿，Dorine身受剧痛折磨。

　　夫妻二人从巴黎迁居到向东80英里外位于Vosnon的一所大宅里。对Doline来说，年事越高，病痛越重。2006年5月，Groz联系了他的出版人Michel Delorme，说有“一个惊喜”送给他。当时，只为Doline一人写的《致D书》已经动笔，Groz“往往是和泪写作”。深思再三，Groz认为这封信以及他们二人的关系应该广为人知。Doline也表示同意，唯一的条件是，信的英文译本要等到她死后出版。“我们马上就意识到这是一部了不起的绝作。”Michel Delorme说。《致D书》一出版就立即获得成功，短短几周内卖出了两万册。

　　2007年9月22日，Groz致信他的出版人兼朋友：“我亲爱的Michel，我最后挂念的是你。我们的友谊堪称典范。我们共度的美好职业生涯就要走到尽头。或者说，快到头了。”床边桌上还有一封信是写给他们另一位密友，Vosnon市市长Eliane Carr：“亲爱的Eliane，我们早就知道我们会一起结束生命，原谅我们把这个不愉快的任务留给你……”封好信封，给情结女工别好纸条，有细心的让前门开着，二人躺下来，手挽手离去。

　　André和Dorine都生逢战后欧洲乱世，一起经历了20世纪50年代60年代的思想动荡。Groz一生著述的千言万语，抵不上他在生命尽头写给爱人的一封博大、真诚公开的情书，令人久久不能忘怀。

　　“我们二人谁都不愿独自活在世上，”他写道，“我们彼此说过，如果有来生，还要共度。”

The suicide of a philosopher and his terminally ill wife after 60 years together has made his final love letter to her a bestseller

by Ben Macintyre

A single sheet of paper, pinned to the door for the cleaning lady, marked the moment when the French writer-philosopher André Gorz and his British-born wife Dorine reached the final chapter in their poignant love story. The note read simply: “Warn the police station. Do not go upstairs.” In the bedroom, lying side by side in bed in the pretty mansion set back from the road in the village of Vosnon, near Troyes, lay the bodies of André and Dorine Gorz. They had killed themselves with a drug overdose. He was 84, and she was 83.

On the bedside table lay some letters, bidding friends farewell and leaving matter-of-fact instructions for their joint cremation. No further explanations were needed, for André Gorz had already written the moving epitaph for their marriage a year earlier, and published it to greater acclaim than anything else he had achieved in a lifetime of writing and thinking.

Lettre à D: Histoire d’un Amour (Letter to D: History of a love affair) is a 75-page love letter from an adoring husband to his ailing wife. It begins: “You will soon be 82 years old. You have shrunk six centimetres, you weigh no more than 45 kilos, and you are still beautiful, gracious and desirable. It is now 58 years that we have lived together. I love you more then ever.” Gorz’s little book was published last year, to huge critical approval. Since the news of the joint-suicide emerged last month, Lettre à D has shot up the French bestseller list. This simple statement of devotion and gratitude touched a chord with thousands, but the letter was really only addressed to one person, an acknowledgement that without his wife, Gorz’s work as a thinker, journalist and friend of Jean-Paul Sartre would be “meaningless and unimportant”.

“I need to reconstruct the history of our love to understand it from every angle. For this is what has allowed us to become what we are, one through the other, and one for the other. I write to you to understand what we have been through, what we have been through together.” When the couple met in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1947, she was Doreen Keir, a 23-year old British woman from a broken home travelling, somewhat aimlessly, through postwar Europe; he was still Gérard Horst, a 24-year-old Austrian of Jewish descent, without money, prospects or a country to call home. They met over a card table. Outside the window, it was snowing heavily. Later, the bashful young Austrian asked the red-haired and vivacious Englishwoman to dance.

Horst had been born Gérard Hirsch in Vienna in 1923, to a Roman Catholic mother and Jewish father, a wood salesman and army veteran. It was a miserable childhood. In 1930, his father converted to Catholicism, took the name Horst, and then, with antiSemitism on the rise, the young Gérard was shipped off to a Catholic college in neutral Switzerland to escape being drafted into the German military.

He graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in 1945. The following year he met Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, in Switzerland for a conference, who encouraged him to pursue his growing interest in moral philosophy. Sartre and Gorz would remain intellectual allies for many years until the tumultuous events of 1968 led to a permanent rupture. But it was the discovery of Doreen that launched Gorz’s writing career.

Both were essentially rootless. Doreen had been born in London, but abandoned by her mother as a child, and grew up in the care of a “godfather” (almost certainly her biological father) in a house by the sea in England. Doreen seldom discussed her past.

“They both knew insecurity as a formative experience,” said one friend, Michel Contat. “They fought side by side, mutually protective . . . she became his archivist and researcher, his interlocutor, his primary reader, his sole critic.” The couple married in September 1949, and moved to Paris, to be closer to Sartre and the heart of left-wing thought. She changed her name to its French equivalent, Dorine. In the fervid ideological atmosphere of the 1950s, while awaiting his French naturalisation papers, Horst decided that it would be safer to write under a pseudonym. He became André Gorz, a peculiar backhanded tribute to the father he had never liked: Gorz was the name of the industrial town where his father’s military-issue spectacles had been manufactured. As a journalist Gorz wrote under the name Michel Bosquet, the French translation of the German word Horst, meaning thicket or grove.

Many of his arguments seem modern today: an emphasis on balancing working time with other pursuits, the need for minimal universal welfare arrangements and the looming environmental threat of globalisation. Gorz, a bitter opponent of nuclear power, was among the first to articulate a theory of ecological politics. In 1964, he co-founded the left-wing newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, and five years later took over the editorship of Les Temps Modernes, the publication founded in 1945 by Sartre and De Beauvoir.

Gorz was an otherwordly, intellectual figure, shy and discreet, a “library-rat” in the words of one friend. Serge Lafaurie, a co-founder of Le Nouvel Observateur, remembers Dorine as his counterpoint, “very joyful, sharp, always smiling . . . she was his contact with the real world”. The couple decided, early in their marriage, that it would not involve having children. Last year, Gorz told the newspaper Libération: “In my view, the good fathers are those who needed a father in their own childhoods. Me, I didn’t want to be a father because I never loved my father . . . If we had had children, I would have been jealous of Dorine. I preferred to have her all to myself.” In this, they were exceptional, given the tenor of their times and the social milieu they moved in. While Sartre and De Beauvoir each had a string of lovers, André and Dorine Gorz were consistently faithful, with a relationship of unquestioning trust, according to friends, physically and intellectually.

Acolytes, student and fellow thinkers often clustered at their Paris apartment, where afternoon tea was served punctually, in the approved British manner. The Gorzes appeared to live on nothing, elegantly. “We know how to live in poverty, but not in ugliness,” Dorine would say.

By 1968, Gorz was enjoying considerable literary success as a prominent figure in the student uprising, but by then Dorine was already unwell. In 1965 she had undergone a routine back operation which involved X-rays using the radio-opaque contrast agent lipiodol. The side-effects of the chemical were horrific: with particles lodged in her cranium and forming cervical cysts, Dorine suffered enormous and mounting pain.

The couple moved out of Paris, and into a large maison de maîre in Vosnon, 80 miles east of the capital. But as Dorine aged, the pain grew worse.

In May 2006, Gorz contacted his publisher, Michel Delorme, of Editions Galilée, to say he had “a surprise” for him. Lettre à D had been written, “often in tears”, for Dorine alone. Only after long hesitation and deliberation did he decide that the letter, and their relationship, deserved a wider audience. Dorine agreed, on condition that it would not be translated into English until after her death. “We knew instantly the greatness and beauty of this work,” says M Delorme.

Lettre à D was an instant hit, selling 20,000 copies in just a few weeks.

Even so, few of the couple’s friends were surprised to learn of their joint suicide. On September 22, Gorz wrote to his publisher and friend: “My dear Michel, my last thought is for you. We have enjoyed an exemplary friendship. A beautiful professional journey together has come to an end. Or very nearly.” Another letter at the bedside was addressed to Eliane Carr, the Mayor of Vosnon and another close friend of the couple: “Dear Eliane, We have always known that we wanted to finish our lives together. Forgive us for the unpleasant tasks we leave you . . .” Having sealed the letters, pinned up the note for the cleaning lady and carefully left the front door unlocked, the couple lay down, and died hand in hand.

André and Dorine Gorz were thrown together in the tumult of postwar Europe; they stayed together through the intellectual ferment of the 1950s and 1960s; and then they died together, concluding an intellectual pact between equals that had been sealed a lifetime before. Of all the millions of words written by Gorz, none will be remembered so long as the open, extended, heartful love letter he penned to his English wife and lover, just before the end.

“Neither one of us would like to outlive the other,” he wrote. “We have said to one another that if, by some impossibility, we had a second life, then we would like to spend it together.”