读了Julian Barnes有名的作品The Sense of an Ending.

       不愧它享有盛誉，有许多地方写得很精彩，很有哲学味道。我感觉这是深受维特根斯坦影响的一本小说。

     讲年轻与年老之间的区别。 "It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others."

    讲时间对我们人生的作用。"But time ... how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time ... give us eonough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical."

    我们的人生只是我们关于自己人生所讲述的故事。"How often do we tell our own life stories? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but -- mainly -- to ourselves."

    历史是什么。"What was the line Adrian used to quote? 'History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.'"

    人生迟暮时的悔恨。"In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse -- a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred -- about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded -- and how pitiful that was."

     客观时间和主观时间。"I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened -- when these new memories suddenly came upon me -- it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream."

       人生悔恨的缘由。"What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt -- and inflicted for precisely that reason."

       这里所论悔恨和伤痛的来由，和卡夫卡的一句话有异曲同工之处。卡夫卡说："You can hold yourself back from the sufferings of the world, that is something you are free to do and it accords with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided."

            一本书里，能表达出这样的思想，就足以跻身一流作品之列而无愧了。

           所以说，这是本好书。