人生的后半场
William James Sidis is perhaps the most intelligent man of all time. His father Boris Sidis is one of the inaugurators of preschool psychology in the 20th century. Boris and his wife, one of the few women obtained a medical degree and became a doctor after graduation, fled Ukraine for the reason of political and religious persecution and settled in New York. Sidis was their first child. As he inherited the couple's excellent genes, he was born to be a child prodigy and revealed remarkable talent at an early age. You may wonder how smart he is, he could read New York Times at 2, Homer's Epic in Greek and the Gallic War in Latin at 4, learnt anatomy and Aristotle's Logic on his own at 6, passed the entrance examination of MIT and simultaneously not only could speak Latin, Greek, French, Russian, Hebrew and Turkish fluently, but gave birth to a new language called Vendergood at 8, corrected mistakes of the logic manuscript of a Harvard professor at 10, and was formally admitted to Harvard as one of the youngest students of it at 11. At the time, he was very proficient in astrophysics and advanced mathematics, stood on the platform and showed thousands of people in the hall his research on four dimensional space and everyone drawn to it had high expectations for this rising star. He had been tipped by professors in MIT to be a great mathematician and the leading figure in the realm. Having graduated with honors from Harvard, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree at 16. Anyway, Sidis' talent is half inherited, half gained through education. For his child, Boris was more of a psychologist doing all kinds of experiment on him than a kind father. At the time the child was born, the family spent their savings on books, maps and school supplies and crammed him with preschool curriculum. They hung English alphabet around Sidis' cot and spelled over and over again for him. As they replaced toys with textbooks, Sidis' boyhood was surrounded by all kinds of knowledge consisted of geometry, geography and foreign language. Without a friend to communicate and a single toy to entertain, Sidis was unable to make out the life of his contemporaries. Most of times, he behaved too calm and suppressed to be a child.
威廉·詹姆斯·席德斯或许是有史以来最聪明的人，他父亲鲍里斯·席德斯是20世纪幼教心理学的创始人之一，鲍里斯和他的妻子，一位极少数能拿到医学学位并在毕业后从事医生职业的女性，因为政治和宗教迫害被迫逃离乌克兰并定居在纽约。席德斯是他们的第一个孩子，因为遗传了父母优秀的基因，他刚出生就是个神童并且很早就展露出惊人的天赋，你可能会好奇他究竟有多聪明：2岁时他就能阅读纽约时报，4岁阅读希腊文的荷马史诗和拉丁文的高卢战争，6岁时自学了解剖学和亚里士多德的逻辑学，8岁时通过了MIT的入学考试，同时不仅能流利使用拉丁语、希腊语、法语、俄语、希伯来语和土耳其语，还自创了一门Vendergood语言，10岁时修正了哈佛教授逻辑学书稿中的错误，11岁时被哈佛正式录取并成为该校最年轻的学生之一。当时的他精通天体物理和高等数学，站在讲台上向礼堂里数以千计的人展示他对于四维空间的研究，台下所有为之着迷的听众都对这位明日之星充满了期待，他被麻省理工的教授预言能成为一个伟大的数学家和这个领域的领军人物，16岁时他以优异的成绩从哈佛毕业并拿到了文科学士学位。不管怎么说，席德斯的天赋一半是遗传的，一半是教育出来的，他的父亲鲍里斯对待这位孩子更像是一个在他身上做各种实验的心理学家而不是一位慈祥的父亲，孩子刚出生家里就把积蓄拿出来花在买书、买地图和学习用具上面，并为他排满了各种早教课程，他们在席德斯的小床周围挂满了英语字母并一遍又一遍地拼给他听，他们用教科书代替玩具，使席德斯的童年被各种诸如几何学、地理学和语言的知识所包围。在没有一个可以交心的朋友和一件可供娱乐的玩具的情况下，席德斯根本就搞不懂同龄人的生活，绝大多数时候，他表现得过于冷静和压抑而不像个孩子。
On the pretext of his immature mentality, Harvard turned Sidis down in spite of the fact that he passed the entrance examination at the age of 9. Still, this prestigious university was pressed to accept him when he was 11. Sidis' parents wanted more than this little kid could endure. Although little Sidis was head and shoulders above his contemporaries in IQ, he was a child psychologically and emotionally and thus couldn't become a part of his surroundings. Gradually, this child prodigy was found abnormal by people around him. His frequent eccentric laughter narrowly turned him into the asylum. He was a ridicule in Harvard and sized up viciously by everyone. Every minute in it was a torture to him, he did everything to flee this hostile academia and lead a normal life. His trauma led to his abandonment of his master degree. Then, to evade public view, he moved from one city to another, changed dozens of jobs. Having left his parents, Sidis made up his mind for a break from the past and applied himself to manual occupations. Although he was gifted in math, he managed to avert it when he was grown up and did writing under all kinds of assumed names. It is more like a revolt against his genius childhood experiences.
尽管席德斯9岁时通过了哈佛的入学考试，哈佛却以他心智不成熟为借口将他拒之门外，然而这所最负盛名的大学却迫于压力在11岁时不得不接纳他为学生。席德斯的父母想在孩子身上得到的早已超出了他所能承受的极限，尽管小席德斯在智力上远超同龄人，可在心理和情感上他还是个孩子，因此很难融入周围的环境。渐渐地，周围的所有人发现这位小神童并不正常，他频繁地怪笑险些就让众人把他送进了精神病院，在哈佛他成了笑柄并被所有人恶意的打量，呆在那里的每一秒钟对他来说都是个折磨，他千方百计想要逃离这个充满敌意的学术圈并过一个正常人的生活。他的心理创伤使他放弃了硕士学位，之后为了逃离公众视野，他从一个城市搬到了另一个，从一份工作换到了另一份，离开父母以后，席德斯下决心跟过去一刀两断并因而从此干起了体力活，尽管他在数学上颇有天赋，却在长大成人后竭力避免数学，他用各种化名写作，更像是对童年天才经历的一种反叛。
He hated his father, for he was more of a inculcating machine and a pressing dictator than a reliable and amiable elder. He grasped a good deal of knowledge in his childhood at the cost of being deprived of its happiness. In the subsequent long years, he stayed incognito and wrote a good deal of books, although none of them was widely published and no one knows how many he had composed in obscurity. Writing and ordinary life brought happiness to him. When he was grown up, it was freedom which gave him a break. However, this kind of life didn't last long. In a summer day in 1944, he was found in a coma as a result of serious stroke. Since then he never regained consciousness. Thus a meteor streaked across the sky and left everybody endless regret.
他恨父亲，因为父亲对他来说与其说是一个信赖可靠、和蔼可亲的长辈倒不如说是一个灌输知识的机器和压迫人的独裁暴君，他童年掌握大量知识的代价是被剥夺了身处其中的乐趣，在随后的漫长岁月中，他隐姓埋名并写了一大堆书，尽管其中没有任何一本被广泛出版，也没人知道他在默默无闻中究竟创作了多少作品，写作和平凡的生活带给他快乐，当他成年后，是自由给了他喘息的余地，然而这种日子并没有维持多久。1944年的一个夏日，他被发现因为中风而昏迷不醒，自此以后再也没有清醒过来，就这样一颗流星从天际划过，留给世人无限的遗憾。
Lin Jiawen (Lin for short) was born into an intellectual family in 1998. His mother is a primary school teacher and his father holds a post in a law college. There had a fashion to read and tell history and his family members was watching Lecture Room when Lin was at primary school. He not only joined their company, but buried himself in monographs such as History as a Mirror and The Spring and Autumn Annals. As time goes by, he became increasingly knowledgeable and his skills became more and more mature. He had already had the ability to probe into ethnic history and go through first-hand literature of history of Song when he was in junior middle school. In the meantime, he learnt Tangut, philology, bibliography and knowledge concerning academic norms on his own, and communicated and discussed history with predecessors on social media. Although he impressed everyone as a boy wet behind the ears and was nothing but a middle school student, he was already the author of two monographs: When Taoists rule China: The Political Practice of Taoist Thinking and The Rapid Rise of Han Empire, a book of 300,000 words reinterpreted the reigns of Emperors Wen and Jing from the perspective of Taoist politics and Sadness and Happiness to the world: Fan Zhong Yan and Qingli Reforms, A book to which Li Yumin, the giant of history of Song, made an exception to preface and praised him as "the youngest author with academic research ability after liberation". The two influential monographs made Lin a new star of the realm of history of Song. He was also hailed as "a genius of historical research".
林嘉文（简称林）在1998年出生在一个知识分子家庭，他的母亲是一名小学教师，父亲在一所法律院校任职，在他读小学的那阵子有一种读史、说史的风尚，家里人看百家讲坛的时候他也亦步亦趋地紧随其后，同时他埋头苦读了诸如《资治通鉴》和《吕氏春秋》一类的大部头专著，随着时间的流逝，他积累的知识越来越多，他的技巧也日趋成熟，读初中的时候他已经具备了深究民族史和翻阅一手宋史资料的能力，同时他自学了西夏文、文献学、目录学和学术规范的知识，并在社交媒体上跟史学界的前辈们交流和探讨历史。尽管他在绝大多数人眼里只不过是个乳臭未干的小孩子和一个中学生而已，他已经是两部学术专著的作者了：《当道家统治中国：道家思想的政治实践与汉帝国的迅速崛起》，一部洋洋洒洒三十万字从道家政治的视角重新解读文景之治的书和《忧乐为天下：范仲淹与庆历新政》，一本宋史巨擘李裕民破例为其作序并称赞其为“自解放以来最年轻的具有学术研究能力的作者”，这两本颇有影响力的书使林嘉文成了宋史领域冉冉升起的一颗新星，并使其被媒体誉为“史学研究天才”。
Nevertheless, like most geniuses, Lin had difficulty in dealing with people around him. He always put on airs of superiority when he got along with his classmates and gave them a feeling that he was talented without a equal. He always sneered at those top students, "you can only study, you have no ability to do research". His praise of one of the few close friends of himself goes like this, "all of you know nothing, even if Zhang (his friend's name) knows something, it is very superficial." So, you can easily infer he was an antipathy to everybody. "He was generally disliked because of his loftiness, his habit of keeping himself from doing the cleaning and his unsociability." One of his classmates recalled. Half a year earlier, he was diagnosed with depression and had to take medicine. "The side effect of it, as the instruction says, is gaining weight, yet I feel pain and sleepy everyday after taking it……" He wrote on his Wechat moments. On the evening of January 26th, he let his friends see another one, "I become more and more confused why I try such hard, if it is for myself, it could only be said trying hard is for itself." On the night of February 23rd, Lin jumped to his death and in this way said farewell to the world. (From his words I presume he was unable to concentrate on his study after taking medicine. As he was no more hard-working than before, he must lag behind his classmates. Those who had been humiliated by him must take revenge and do everything to embarrass him. As he couldn't let go of his pride and bow to them, he had no other choice but commit suicide and only in this way could him get rid of competition.)
然而就像绝大多数天才那样，林在跟周围人相处时遇到了很大的困难，他总是在同学面前摆出一副高高在上的姿态，给他们一种舍我其谁的感觉，他总是语带讥讽地对那些优等生说：“你们只会学习，你们不会做研究。”他是这样褒扬某个身边极少数跟他要好的朋友的：“你们什么都不懂，即便张（他朋友的名字）懂一点，那也仅仅是皮毛而已。”仅凭这点你就能推断出所有人有多反感他，“大家都不喜欢他，不喜欢他的高傲，不喜欢他不打扫卫生，不喜欢他的不合群，”他的某个同班同学回忆道。半年前，他被诊断患有抑郁症并不得不服药，“说明书上说它的副作用是增加体重，可我吃了药后却感觉浑身疼痛，每天想睡觉……”他在微信朋友圈中说道，1月16日傍晚，他又写了一条“我越来越搞不懂自己为什么这么拼，如果是为了我自己，只能说我为了拼而拼。”2月23日子夜，林跳楼身亡并以这种方式告别了世界。（从他的话我推测吃了药以后他就没法专心学习了，一旦他不如以前那般用功就必定会落后于他的同学们，那些之前被他羞辱过的必定会反过来报复他让他感到难堪，既然他放不下自尊在同学面前认怂，也只能选择自杀并以这种方式摆脱竞争。）
What does these two instances indicate? Genius, by and large, doesn't end well. Although they left other runners far behind at the start, most of them retired before finishing the race and left infinite regret to those backing them up. Most of my friends regarded me as a child prodigy, because within 2 years of training, I emerged as the most important disciple in master Zhao's eyes; 2 years of self-study, the brand of Pulei campus of Aptech. To live up to their expectations and become a real genius, I devoted the first 20 years of my life to assimilate all kinds of knowledge: martial arts, computer science, humanities and music. The fact that I felt myself considerably learned and there was neither a rival to compete nor an equal to communicate bewildered me and kept me from finding a direction for myself: I was already the most excellent man in the world, what to do next? How could I make progress when there is no progress to make? In the meanwhile, the common fault of genius—arrogance and being too big for my boots showed by me caused wide antipathy, those misunderstanding me became increasingly aggressive and hostile to this good-for-nothing in their eyes: who the hell do you think you are? Open your eyes, you are just a shortsighted man and there were hundreds of thousands of people better than you! In this respect, nevertheless, piano changed me. When I learnt it from scratch at the age of 20, began to practice Chopin after a few months and aspired to be a maestro, I was "slapped hard on the cheek" by teachers and students in the humblest piano company. Since I was reduced to a public enemy and a homeless dog, I began to be suspicious of that self-satisfied Claudio Huang who was narrowly to quit the race halfway: am I not that best one in the world? Were they blind, and couldn't see a big talent here? Where is my future? Were I going to be another "Pity Zhong Yong"?
这两个例子说明了什么？天才通常都不会有好下场，尽管他们在起跑线上甩开所有人一大截，他们中的绝大多数没跑完全程就退赛了，留给挺他们的那些人无限遗憾，我的绝大多数朋友把我看作是一个天才，因为我仅用了两年的时间就成了赵师傅眼里最器重的弟子；额外两年时间通过自学就成了北大青鸟普雷校区的头块牌子，为了不负众望做一个货真价实的天才，我花了自己人生的头二十年掌握各种知识：武术、计算机、人文科学和音乐。当我感觉自己相当有学问、在自己身边找不到一个竞争对手和一个够资格跟自己交流的人之时，我就开始困惑且找不到方向了：我已经是世界上最厉害的人了，下一步该怎么走？当我看不到任何进步的余地之后，我该怎样才能取得进步？同时，我身上暴露出的天才的通病招致了所有人的反感，那些不理解我的人开始对这个在他们眼里一文不值的小瘪三抱有越来越大的敌意：你以为你是谁啊？醒醒吧，你不过就是一个井底之蛙，比你有本事的人多的去了！然而在这方面，钢琴却改变了我，当我20岁开始学琴，练习几个月就开始弹肖邦，并立志成为一个音乐大师的时候，我被一个最最蹩脚琴行的老师和学生们“狠狠地扇了一巴掌”，自从我沦落为全民公敌和丧家之犬以后，我就开始对那个自鸣得意、差一点就中途退赛的黄越青充满了狐疑：难道我不是那个世界上最厉害的人吗？难道他们都瞎了狗眼，看不见眼前的这么个惊世大才子吗？我的前途在哪里？我会成为另一个伤仲永吗？
Somewhat out of competitiveness, somewhat to escape the fate of "Pity Zhong Yong", I walked on with confusion in the darkness for a long time and at length see the light. If it can be said, in any case, I adopted "competitive thinking" previously, (for example, when somebody asked me "how is your wushu study", I was sure to answer "I am the best physically and technically, and I can at least knock down two bulks"; if he asked "how is you coming along with your computer programming", I was bound to say "I got a first in the latest exam"), through playing piano, I learnt a kind of "degree thinking": when there is no rival, I can compete with myself. (This creed can also be applied to cultural study: having learnt English for 3 years, I have a grasp of 1 thousand new words, I go much further in the comprehension of sentences and words now, having composed 10 pieces of music this year, there are 10 extra "children" born to me); even if there is no one around to be a match for me, when I keep on my study, my degree deepened and my understanding to some particular knowledge is more penetrating than before. (This mindset is inspired by the observation that with years of practice, a piano player may "ascend to different grades" and thus handle different textbooks for himself. Instead of competitive thinking, most of piano players are prone to improve their skills to higher degrees and in the course perfect themselves). A highbrow man always feels lonely, while a man accompanied by himself and his pursuit never feels alone. When I changed my thinking mode, I found everything was changed. The door to a new world is opening before me and I can see my future lays inside it. Although the dark thoughts of taking evasive action like Sidis and putting an end to my own life like Lin Jiawen had ever occurred to me, I felt myself, with these two chips in hands, courageous and odds-on enough to win the second half of the race. Having adopted this kind of attitude, I felt motivated and the progress I make now is twice or thrice as much as before. Well, I am ready for the second half of the race, let's begin.
或许是出于好胜心，或许是想逃避伤仲永的命运，我带着困惑在黑暗中走了很长一段时间并最终看到了光。如果说我之前采用的是“比较思维”，（比如说，如果有人问我“你武术学得怎么样”，我必定会答道“无论是身体素质还是技巧上我都是最棒的，我至少能放倒两个大块头”；如果他问我“你计算机编程搞得怎么样”，我必定会说“在上次考试中我拿到了第一名”），通过弹钢琴我学会了一种“程度思维”：找不到对手时我就跟自己比，（这一信条用在文化学习上也屡试不爽：三年英语学下来，我掌握了一千个新词汇，我对单词和句子的理解比之前要更上一层楼了。今年创作了10首音乐，我又多了10个“孩子”）；就算在身边找不到一个与自己旗鼓相当的人，只要我继续学下去，我的程度就会越来越深，我对某件学问的理解就会越来越透彻，（这种思维模式的灵感来源于我自己观察到一个练习钢琴的人随着琴龄的增长，他会上升到不同的级别并随之驾驭不同的教材，相较于在自己的身边找对手，绝大多数弹琴的更加偏向于将自己的技艺提升至更高的程度，并在这过程中使自己趋于完善）。一个曲高和寡的人总会感到孤独，而一个与自己和自己的追求为伴的人永远不会孤单，当我改变了思维模式以后，我发现身边的一切都随之改变了，通往新世界的大门正在向我敞开，我能看见自己的前途就在其中，尽管我也曾经有过诸如席德斯的逃避念头、林嘉文结束自己生命的阴暗想法，手中握着两个筹码的我感觉自己有足够的勇气和胜算打赢人生的下半场，采用了这种人生态度以后，我感觉动力十足，学业上的进展是以前的两三倍之多，好吧，我已经准备好长跑比赛的后半段了，我们开始吧。
That is my understanding of genius and the planning of my own life.
这就是我对天才的理解和对自己人生的规划。
