OPTION B
Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy
替代选项
面对多样性、建立抗性、寻找工作
You could almost hear the collective gasp when news broke, in May 2015, that the internet entrepreneur Dave Goldberg had died suddenly while on vacation in Mexico with his wife, Sheryl Sandberg. Their marriage had become a public one ever since the publication, two years earlier, of “Lean In,” her book about women and leadership. In it she had written some revolutionary things about marriage (she called it having a “partner,” but the book was so much about redefining gender roles that she clearly seemed to be talking about husbands).
2015年5月新闻惊爆时，你几乎可以听见所有人倒抽一口气，网络企业家戴维古德堡在墨西哥跟他老婆，雪柔桑德伯格，度假的时候猝死。他们的婚姻因为两年前发表的一本书《向前一步》而公开，这是一本有关女性与领导力的书。在书中，桑德伯格提出一些对婚姻革命性的想法，她称婚姻为有个「伴」，但书中多在讲有关重新定义婚姻中的性别角色，而且很名显的是在说男性的部份。
- collective /kəˈlek.tɪv/ adj. 共同的
- 例句：We made a collective dicission about where to go this weekend.
- 延伸：collection n. 收集品；collaction n. 自助餐
Deciding to get married — and the choice of whom to marry — weren’t just central to one’s private life, she wrote. Together they made up the “most important career decision that a woman makes.” She observed that most women at the top aren’t the lonely, single women of clichés; they are married women whose husbands support their ambitions and take equal responsibility for making a home. She said that her great success (she is the chief operating officer of Facebook, which has made her a billionaire) would have been impossible without the unwavering support of her husband. Now, in the cruelest way, she had lost him.
「决定踏入婚姻并选择与谁结婚，不只对一个人的私生活很重要」她在书中写道。这两件事共同组成「女人最重要的职业决定」。她观察到大多数的顶尖女性并不是大家常说的孤单、单身女性。她们常是已婚妇女，而且她们的老公支持着她们的野心并对组成家庭负起相同的责任。她说她的成功(她是脸书的首席执行长，这件事让她成为亿万富翁)在没有他丈夫毫不动摇的支持下是不可能的。现在，她以最残酷的方式失去了他。
- central /ˈsen.trəl/ a. 中心的
- 例句：Community involvement is cetral to our plan.
- cliché /kliːˈʃeɪ/ n. 老生常谈
- 例句：My wedding day-and I know it’s a cliché-was the best day of my life.
-waver /ˈweɪ.vɚ/ v. 动摇 - 例句：My concentration are wavering because it’s almost lunch time.
- 延伸：wavy adj. 卷曲的；wax n. 蜡、耳垢
“Lean In” sparked a movement, but it had its critics, among them single mothers, women who worked outside corporate America, and those who could not afford to hire the nannies and helpers upon whom the Sandberg-Goldberg household clearly depended. There were also those who thought the principal value underlying the book was flawed. They didn’t want to find ways to make their work more exhilarating; they wanted to find ways to accommodate it to their lives as parents.
《向前一步》点燃风潮，但同时也有批评者，像是单身母亲、在美国外工作者、和没办法雇用奶妈和佣人，这两者是夫妻均工作的家庭(这里以Sandberg-Goldberg，作者与其丈夫为例)所依靠来处理家务的。也有人认为这本书背后的主要价值有缺点。他们不想要找方法来让他们的工作更令人振奋，而是找办法让工作与身为父母的生活结合。
- flaw /flɑː/ v. 使有瑕疵
- 例句：A tiny mark flawed the otherwise perfect skirt.
- 延伸：flawed adj. 有瑕疵的；flawless adj. 完美无瑕的
- exhilarate /ɪɡˈzɪl.ə.reɪt/ v. 使高兴
- 例句：It will scare the child as much as it will exhilarate him.
The tragedy was a vicious reminder of the truth we work hard to forget: Life is cruel. It will casually take away the people we love the most. Even the vaunted “C-suite” job is cold comfort when it cost you hours with a lost loved one. Now, two years after Goldberg’s death, Sandberg has written a new book, “Option B,” which forthrightly addresses all of these issues.
这场悲剧残酷地提醒我们一项因努力工作而遗忘的事实：生命无常，我们的挚爱随时可能离开我们。当你曾经与逝去的爱人一起花时间在某工作之上，就算这是令人骄傲的主管工作也不能真的让人感到安慰。现在，在古德堡死亡两年后，桑德伯格写了本新书《替代选项》，这本书直白的强调上述这些问题。
- vaunt /vɔːnt/ v. 自吹自擂
- 例句：The local people like to vaunt the glones of their faded past.
- 延伸：vault n. 拱顶
- forthright /ˈfɔːrθ.raɪt/ adj. 坦白的
- 例句：His forthright manner can be mistaken as rudness.
- 延伸：forth adv. 离开；forthcoming adj. 将发生的；forthwith adv. 立刻
It is a remarkable achievement: generous, honest, almost unbearably poignant. It reveals an aspect of Sandberg’s character that “Lean In” had suggested but — because of the elitism at its center — did not fully demonstrate: her impulse to be helpful. She has little to gain by sharing, in excruciating detail, the events of her life over the past two years. This is a book that will be quietly passed from hand to hand, and it will surely offer great comfort to its intended readers.
这是一个值得纪念的成就，其丰富、诚富、不可忍受地辛辣。书中揭示桑德伯格在《向前一步》(因这本书的核心思想是精英主义)有些微提到但没有完整地阐述的人格–她想要成为有用的人的冲动。她不能透过极度详细的分享这两年人生所发生的事得到什么。这是一本会安静的在人们之间流动的书，而且会让预期的读者感到十分满足。
- poignant /ˈpɔɪ.njənt/ adj. 酸楚的
- 例句：It is especially poignant that he died on the day before the wedding.
- 延伸：pogrom n. 大屠杀
- elitism /iˈliː.tɪ.zəm/ n. 优越
- 例句：The accusation of elitism seems unfair as the festival present both end of music type.
- 延伸：elitist n. 精英主义；elite n. 社会上流阶级
- excruciating /ɪkˈskruː.ʃi.eɪ.t̬ɪŋ/ adj. 极痛苦的
- 例句：Sitting all day caused an excruciating pain in my lower back.
- 延伸：exculpate v. 证明无罪；excrete v. 排泄
“I have terrible news,” she told her children, after flying home from Mexico. “Daddy died.” The intimacy of detail that fills the book is unsettling; there were times I felt that I had come across someone’s secret knowledge, that I shouldn’t have been in possession of something that seemed so deeply private. But the candor and simplicity with which she shares all of it — including her children’s falling to the ground, unable to walk to the grave when they arrive at the cemetery — is a kind of gift.
「我有个可怕的消息。」她从墨西哥飞回家后这样告诉她的孩子：「爸爸过世了。」这本书中充斥的隐私细节使人不安。有时候我会感觉我好像看到不应该知道得某人极度隐私的秘密。但是她坦白、简约地分享所有的事，包括她的孩子在墓园昏倒无法走到坟墓，是一种礼物。
- intimacy /ˈɪn.t̬ə.mə.si/ adj. 亲密
- 例句：Intimacy between teachers and students is not recommended.
- 延伸：intimate adj. 亲密的
- unsettling /ʌnˈset̬.əl.ɪŋ/ adj. 令人不安的
- 例句：One of the documentary’s many unsettling images is that a little girl playing her father’s gun.
- 延伸：unsettled adj. 焦虑的
- candor /ˈkæn.dɚ/ n. 坦白
- 例句：”I don’t love you.”she said it with candor.
- 延伸：candy n. 糖果；candlestick n. 烛台
She was shielded from the financial disaster that often accompanies sudden widowhood, but in every other way she was unprotected from great pain.
As she did in the memorable Facebook post composed a month after the death, she reports turning in her misery to the psychologist Adam Grant, a friend who had flown to California to attend the funeral and is an expert in the field of human resilience.
她免于受到突然变成寡妇后常见的经济灾难，但是在其它任何方面她都没法逃离巨大的痛。在她丈夫死后一个月的一篇脸书纪念文中，她提到她因悲伤转向心理学家亚当葛兰特求助，他是她一位朋友，曾飞往加州参加丧礼也是一名人类适应力的专家。
She told him that her greatest fear was that her children would never be happy again. He “walked me through the data,” she writes, and what she learns offers comfort. Getting “walked through the data,” is as modern a response to grief as the notion that “resilience” is some kind of science. The book includes several illustrative stories that seem to come from Grant’s research, but they are not memorable. It is Sandberg whose story commands our riveted attention, and it is her natural and untutored responses to the horror that are most moving.
她告诉他她最担心的是她的小孩将永远不再快乐。「他带领我浏览所有数据。」她在书中写到，而她学到的让她感到安慰。「浏览所有数据」是人对悲伤的反应与抗性是一种科学的概念同样现代化。这本书包括数个应该来自葛兰特的研究的例子，但这些并不值得纪念。是桑德伯格的故事掌控我们的注意力，是她对恐惧自然而不作做的反应令人动容。
- rivet /ˈrɪv.ɪt/ v. 铆接
- 例句：Many part of the airplane is riveted together.
- 延伸：riveting adj. 引人入胜的
-untutored /ʌnˈtuː.t̬ɚd/ adj. 无知的 - 例句：To my untutored eye that just looks like a load of random brush.
“This is the second worst moment of our lives,” she tells her sobbing children at the cemetery. “We lived through the first and we will live through this. It can only get better from here.” That is grief: Somehow, you find a language; somehow you get through it. No research could have helped her in that moment. She is the one who knew what to do and what to say. They were her children, and she knew how to comfort them.
「这是人生中第二遭的时刻。」她在墓园告诉她啜泣的孩子：「我们成功撑过第一个了，而我们将会撑过这个，从现在起只能更好。」这就是悲伤，不知怎地你找到安慰的话语；不知怎地你就撑过去了。在那个时刻，没有研究可以帮助她。她就是那个知道该如何做和该说什么的人。他们是她的孩子，她知道如何安慰他们。
- sob / sɑːb/ v. 呜咽
- 例句：You’re not going to solve the problem by lying there sobbing.
- 延伸：sob your heart out 哭的很伤心；S.O.B=son of bitch n. 狗娘养的
Death humbles each of us in different ways. Suddenly a single mother, Sandberg realized how hollow her “Lean In” chapter about the importance of fully involved husbands (“partners”) must have been to unmarried women. If only she had known how little time she would have with her husband, she thinks, she would have spent more of it with him. But that’s not the way life works; Dave Goldberg fell in love with a woman who wanted to lead, not one who wanted to wait for him to come home from the office. The unbearable clarity that follows a death blessedly fades with time. We couldn’t live with it every day.
死亡让我们以不同方式学会谦虚。突然变成单亲母亲，桑德伯格了解她在《向前一步》的某些有关伴侣全心全意参与的篇章对未婚女性是多么空洞。「如果她早知道她与她老公相处的时间这么少，」她想道：「她会花更多时间来陪他。」但这并不是人生，戴维古德堡爱上的是一个渴望领导的女性，而不是一个想要在家等他从办公室回来的人。人死后不可忍受的空虚将随时间神圣的淡去。我们不可能怀着空虚度过每一天。
- clarity /ˈkler.ə.t̬i/ n. 清晰
- 例句：There as been a call for greater clarity in this area of the law.
- 延伸：clarify v. 澄清；clarification n. 说明
Sheryl Sandberg followed the oldest data set in the world, the one that says: The children are young, and you must keep going. Slowly the fog began to lift. She found she had something useful to offer at a meeting; she got the children through their first birthdays without their father; she began to have one O.K. day and then another. She made it through a year, all of the “milestone days” had passed and something began to revive within her. Grief is the final act of love, and recovery from it is the necessary betrayal on which the future depends. There is only this one life, and we are the ones who are here to live it.
雪莉桑德伯格遵循世界上最古老的格言，它说道：「孩子还年轻，所以你必须继续前进。缓慢的浓雾会离开。」她发现她在某场会议上能提供有用的东西；她帮孩子们度过第一个没有父亲的生日；她开始有个满意的一天然后接下来又一天。她这样度过一年，度过所有的「纪念日」，有东西开始在她体内复苏。悲伤是爱的最后一件事，而从中复原是必需的背叛，好让未来能继续。我们只有这一条命，我们就是那个活出这条命的人。
- revive /rɪˈvaɪv/ v. 使复原
- 例句：A hot shower and a cup of coffee will revive you.
- 延伸：revival n. 复兴；revivify v. 使恢复活力；revoke v. 废除