少年老成的Matthew Lyons

刚看到 Matthew Lyons 的插画，觉得像是一个很有童心的老头的作品，非常历练的用色，风格又特别自信，活生生是从六七十年代的科幻电影中脱胎而出。仔细一看个人简历，竟然是一个21岁的英国在读大学生，实在是让人掉了下巴。

2009年你做了什么？

从2005年开始，纽约的设计师 Nicholas Felton 每年都要设计一份关于个人的年鉴，将自己过去一年的活动数据以视觉化的形式总结起来，对于其他设计师而言，更让人感兴趣的是他对于数据视觉化 (data visualization) 的前瞻概念。丰富又统一的视觉元素，高度抽象但又异常直观的数据表现，几乎每一年的个人年鉴，都是设计师自身对数据视觉化的重新认识和挑战。用这样的形式回顾自己的一年，倒也是让人充满期待的。

新年寄语

2010是个很好看的数字，我一直在唠叨，小时候看的科幻电影小说，很多都是以这个年份为背景展开的，于是我一直觉得人类，社会，思想，科技，到了这一年，应该是何等的先进以及智慧，我们的生活应当是何等的安逸无忧。即便到了2010年始，当我意识到科幻称之为科幻是有其道理的时候，我仍然对这一年抱有美好的冀望，甚至想写一些鼓励自己和别人的新年寄语。

我效率极低，这篇寄语写了两周有余，仍然还在回忆篇（类似这种），而，仅仅在这两周里，就发生了那么多始未料及的故事，并且不能不说对我的生活产生了不可言喻的影响，而作为一个存在个体，对这一切并没有任何力量去改变。

所以，当我看到村上在 Jerusalem 发表的演说原文的时候 (看过中文翻译，但偶然想起去找原文来看，才发现还是有很大不同)，我突然意识到，全文转载，是当下我能写出的最好的新年寄语。

Good evening. I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies. Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and generals tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?
My answer would be this: namely, that by telling skillful lies–which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true–the novelist can bring a truth out to a new place and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth-lies within us, within ourselves. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.
Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are only a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them. So let me tell you the truth. In Japan a fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this, of course, was the fierce fighting that was raging in Gaza. The U.N. reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded city of Gaza, many of them unarmed citizens–children and old people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me – and especially if they are warning me – “Don’t go there”,”Don’t do that”, I tend to want to “go there” and “do that”. It’s in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

Please do allow me to deliver a message, one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall, rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg.

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will do it. But if there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

But this is not all. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is “The System”. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others – coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I truly believe it is the novelist’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories–stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father passed away last year at the age of ninety. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school in Kyoto, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the small Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the battlefield. He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, and we are all fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others’ souls and from our believing in the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: we made the System.

That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I would like to express my gratitude to the readers in Israel. You are the biggest reason why I am here. And I hope we are sharing something, something very meaningful. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.

Thank you very much.
Murakami Haruki

为生活设计

偶尔从 Graphic Xchange 上看到了 PTMK 为一家本地肉铺做的形象设计，突然就爱不释手，又对这家设计公司产生了几份敬意。在我自己忙着 innovation, visionary prototype, data visualization 以及其他 cool stuff 的时候，当身边广告圈的朋友在忙着做大案，拍大片，赢大奖，以高成本制作及媒体计划为目标的时候，我却被这样质朴低调却有充满亲和力的作品打动了。

设计的本来面目应该是服务于生活，服务于身边的大多数普通人，设计的成功与否，应该是以它在多大程度上改善或改变了人们的生活为衡量标准。所以我很诚恳的推荐这样的作品，有时候优质的生活体验，依赖于优质设计的辅助，而优质的设计，很多时候并不一定是创新，而是以恰当的形式和方法去达成设计的目的。（衍生开来讲，创新的意义应该是寻找更为恰当的方案。）

p.s. 最喜欢的是第5张图上的号票，国外的这些店铺不流行排队，人多的时候比较象我们在银行领票那样，拿个票等着老板叫自己的号码。我几乎可以想到一群老太太拿着这样的号票，一边挑剔着柜台里的牛肉，一边聊着八卦的热闹场面。真的，设计也许不会被注意到，但是好的设计一定会被感受到。