人生的后半场(4)

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.