面對逆境,謝莉爾·桑德伯格的B選項
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). 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.
“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. 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. 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.
《向前一步》引發了一場運動，但批評它的也大有人在，其中包括單身母親、不在美國商企工作的女性，以及那些沒有能力僱用保姆和幫工的人——桑德伯格-戈德伯格一家顯然非常依賴保姆和幫工。也有人認爲這本書所強調的主要價值是有缺陷的。他們不想找到辦法讓自己的工作更加激動人心；他們只想找到辦法，讓工作更適應他們爲人父母的生活。這場悲劇惡毒地讓我們想起那個我們努力去忘記的真相：生命是殘酷的。它會漫不經心地帶走我們最愛的人。當你在失去所愛之人的時候，即使是被大肆稱讚的“企業高層”工作，也不能帶來多少安慰。如今，戈德伯格去世已經兩年，桑德伯格寫了一本新書《B選項》，它直截了當地指出了所有這些問題。這是一部了不起的作品：寬宏、誠實，有着幾乎令人難以忍受的辛酸。這本書顯示出桑德伯格性格中樂於助人的衝動，這在《向前一步》中就有所表現，但是——由於那本書的核心是精英主義——並沒有得到充分展示。她在書中分享了過去兩年中她生活中的種種事情，有各種令人痛苦的細節，這樣做並不會給她帶來什麼好處。這會是一本靜靜地在人們之間傳遞的書，肯定會爲它的目標讀者提供不少安慰。“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. She was shielded from the financial disaster that often accompanies sudden widowhood, but in every other way she was unprotected from great pain.
“我有個可怕的消息，”她從墨西哥回家後告訴孩子們。“爸爸死了”。書中這些充滿親密感的細節是令人不安的；有時候我覺得自己進入了一個人的祕密領域，我本不應該擁有這些看起來很私密的東西。但是她分享所有這一切時顯得坦率而樸實——比如他們來到墓園時，孩子們倒在地上，無法走到父親的墳前——這是一種天賦。她沒有遭受突然喪夫的女人往往會經歷的財政災難，但是在其他所有方面，她同樣經歷了巨大的痛苦打擊。
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. 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. “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.
正如她在丈夫去世一個月後所寫的那篇令人難忘的Facebook帖子中那樣，她向心理學家亞當·格蘭特傾訴痛苦，這位飛往加利福尼亞參加葬禮的朋友是創傷後復原領域的專家。她告訴他，自己最大的恐懼是孩子們永遠不會再有快樂。她寫道，他“爲我講解數據，”她學到的東西爲她帶來了安慰。“講解數據”是現代人對悲傷的迴應，而“復原”則是某種科學的概念。這本書中講了幾個說明性的故事，似乎是來自格蘭特的研究，但它們留下的印象並不深。桑德伯格本人的故事才吸引着我們深切的關注，她對這一可怕事件的自然與本真的反應是最動人的。“這是我們生命中第二個糟糕的時刻，”在墓園，她告訴哭泣的孩子們。“我們已經走過了第一個糟糕的時刻，我們也會走過這個時刻。從今以後，只會變得更好。”那是悲傷：不知怎麼，你就可以找到一種語言；不知怎麼，你就可以挺過去。沒有任何研究可以在那一刻幫助她。她就是那個知道該怎麼說、怎麼做的人。他們是她的孩子，她知道該怎麼安慰他們。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.
死亡以不同的方式令我們每個人感到卑微。突然間成了單身母親的桑德伯格意識到，她在《向前一步》中關於讓丈夫（“伴侶”）充分參與的那一章，對於未婚女人們來說有多麼空洞。她想，如果她早知道自己只能和丈夫共度這樣一點時間，她就會花更多時間和他待在一起。但生活並不是這樣的；戴夫·戈德伯格愛上了一個想做領袖的女人，而不是一個想等着他從辦公室回家的女人。幸運的是，死亡之後那種令人無法忍受的清晰之感，會隨着時間的推移而逐漸消失。我們不能每一天都這樣生活。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.
謝莉爾·桑德伯格依循了這世上最古老的數據組，它顯示：孩子們還小，你必須繼續前進。慢慢地，霧靄開始消散。她發現自己在會議上可以提供一些有用的東西；她爲孩子們過了第一個沒有父親的生日；她度過了還不錯的一天，接着又是一個還不錯的一天。她挺過了一年的時間，所有的“紀念日”都過去了，她內心有什麼東西開始復活了。悲傷是愛的最後行爲，從中恢復則是走向未來所必需的背叛。生命只有一次，我們的人生要自己走完。
