- Citation From: Neil Gaiman - How to Talk to Girls at Parties
- 摘自《魔是魔法的魔》頁116、119，林嘉倫譯
She said, "We knew that it would soon be over, and so we put it all into a poem, to tell the universe who we were, and why we were here, and what we said and did and thought and dreamed and yearned for. We wrapped our dreams in words and patterned the words so that they would live forever, unforgettable. Then we sent the poem as a pattern of flux, to wait in the heart of a star, beaming out its message in pulses and bursts and fuzzes across the electromagnetic spectrum, until the time when, on worlds a thousand sun systems distant, the pattern would be decoded and read, and it would become a poem once again."
她（Triolet）說：「我們知道這一切很快就會結束。所以我們把一切都放到詩裡，告訴宇宙我們是誰，我們為什麼在這裡，我們的所言、所行、所思、所夢、所欲。我們將夢境裹以文字，排列成陣，讓那些文字得以永生、無法遺忘，然後我們把詩以流體的格式輸出，在恆星的核心內等待，以脈衝波、爆炸、絨毛班飛散的方式把訊息發射出去，傳送到電磁光譜之外，直到訊息抵達一千個太陽系外的世界，於是格式就會被解碼、被閱讀，再次變成詩。」
⋯⋯
"You cannot hear a poem without it changing you," she told me. "They heard it, and it colonized them. It inherited them and it inhabited them, its rhythms becoming part of the way that they thought; its images permanently transmuting their metaphors; its verses, its outlook, its aspirations becoming their lives. Within a generation their children would be born already knowing the poem, and, sooner rather than later, as these things go, there were no more children born. There was no need for them, not any longer. There was only a poem, which took flesh and walked and spread itself across the vastness of the known."
「你聽了一首詩後，不可能不受其改變。」她（Triolet）告訴我（Enn），「他們聽到一首詩，這首詩就殖民了他們，定居在他們身上，其韻律成了他們一部分的思考方式，其意象永遠改變了他們的隱喻方式；其詩句、其觀點、其渴望成了他們的生命。不消一個世代，他們的孩子會生來就知道那首詩，接著，只會早不會遲，一切水到渠成，不會再有孩子出世，不再需要孩子了，永遠都不需要了。只剩下一首詩，那首詩會化成肉身、雲遊四方，將自己散布在浩瀚的已知宇宙中。」
⋯⋯
The streetlights came on, one by one; Vic stumbled on ahead, while I trudged down the street behind him in the dusk, my feet treading out the measure of a poem that, try as I might, I could not properly remember and would never be able to repeat.
路燈一盞一盞亮起。在那片黃昏中，維克（Vic）跌跌撞撞地走在前面，我步履沉重地跟在後頭，我用腳步勉力踏出一首詩的節拍，但我不管再怎麼嘗試都無法好好憶起，也無法再複誦那首詩。
推薦電影插曲：
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- Mitski, Xiu Xiu - Between the Breaths
