【时间旅行者的妻子】65
时间：2017-03-28 07:59:52
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（单词翻译）
“You know, like telling me that I like coffee with cream and sugar before I hardly even taste it. I mean, how am I going to figure out if that’s what I like or if I just like it because you tell me I like it?”
“But Clare, it’s just personal taste. You should be able to figure out how you like coffee whether I say anything or not. Besides, you’re the one who’s always
bugging1 me to tell you about the future.”
“Knowing the future is different from being told what I like,” Clare says.
“Why? It’s all got to do with free will.”
Clare takes off her shoes and socks. She pushes the socks into the shoes and places them
neatly2 at the edge of the blanket. Then she takes my cast-off flip-flops and
aligns3 them with her shoes, as though the blanket is a tatami mat. “I thought free will had to do with sin.”
I think about this. “No, ” I say, “why should free will be limited to right and wrong? I mean, you just
decided4, of your own free will, to take off your shoes. It doesn’t matter, nobody cares if you wear shoes or not, and it’s not sinful, or
virtuous5, and it doesn’t affect the future, but you’ve exercised your free will”
Clare
shrugs6. “But sometimes you tell me something and I feel like the future is already there, you know? Like my future has happened in the past and I can’t do anything about it.”
“That’s called determinism,” I tell her. “It haunts my dreams.”
“Well, if you are feeling boxed in by the idea that your future is unalterable, imagine how I feel. I’m constantly running up against the fact that I can’t change anything, even though I am right there, watching it.”
“But Henry, you do change things! I mean, you wrote down that stuff that I’m supposed to give you in 1991 about the baby with Down
Syndrome8, And the List, if I didn’t have the List I would never know when to come meet you. You change things all the time.”
I smile. “I can only do things that work toward what has already happened. I can’t, for example,
undo9 the fact that you just took off your shoes.”
Clare laughs. “Why would you care if I take them off or not?”
“I don’t. But even if I did, it’s now an unalterable part of the history of the universe and I can’t do a thing about it.”
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