詹姆斯·卡梅隆:失败是人生的选项 但畏惧不是

I grew up on a steady diet of science fiction. In high school I took a bus to school an hour each way every day. And I was always absorbed in a book, science fiction book, which took my mind to other worlds, and satisfied, in a narrative form, this insatiable sense of curiosity that I had.

And you know that curiosity also manifested itself in the fact that whenever I wasn't in school I was out in the woods, hiking and taking "samples," frogs and snakes and bugs and pond water, and bringing it back, looking at it under the microscope. You know, I was a real science geek. But it was all about trying to understand the world, understand the limits of possibility.

And my love of science fiction actually seemed to mirrored in the world around me, because what was happening, this was in the late 60's, we were going to the moon, we were exploring the deep oceans. Jacques Cousteau was coming into our living rooms with his amazing specials that showed us animals and places and a wondrous world that we could never really have previously imagined. So, that seemed to resonate with the whole science fiction part of it.

And I was an artist. I could draw. I could paint. And I found that because there weren't video games and this saturation of CG movies and all of this imagery in the media landscape, I had to create these images in my head. You know, we all did, as kids having to read a book, and through the author's description put something on the movie screen in our heads. And so, my response to this was to paint, to draw alien creatures, alien worlds, robots, spaceships, all that stuff. I was endlessly getting busted in math class doodling behind the textbook. That was, the creativity had to find its outlet somehow.

And an interesting thing happened, the Jacques Cousteau shows actually got me very excited about the fact that there was an alien world right here on Earth. I might not really go to an alien world on a spaceship someday. That seemed pretty darn unlikely. But that was a world I could really go to, right here on Earth, that was as rich and exotic as anything that I had imagined from reading these books.

So, I decided I was going to become a scuba diver at the age of 15. And the only problem with that was that I lived in a little village in Canada, 600 miles from the nearest ocean. But I didn't let that daunt me. I pestered my father until he finally found a scuba class in Buffalo, New York, right across the border from where we live. And I actually got certified in a pool in a YMCA in the dead of winter in Buffalo, New York. And I didn't see the ocean, a real ocean, for another two years, until we moved to California.

Since then, in the intervening 40 years, I've spent about 3,000 hours underwater, And 500 hours of that was in submersibles. And I've learned that that deep ocean environment, and even the shallow oceans, are so rich with amazing life that really is beyond our imagination. Nature's imagination is so boundless compared to our own meager human imagination. I still, to this day, stand in absolute awe of what I see when I make these dives. And my love affair with the ocean is ongoing, and just as strong as it ever was.

文本大意：

我是看科幻小说长大的。高中时，我连坐校车上下学时都在读科幻小说。这些书将我带到了另一个世界，满足了我无止境的好奇。每当我在学校，我总是在树丛中寻找一些"标本"--青蛙、蛇、昆虫......我把它们放在显微镜下观察。我总是试图认知这个世界，想找到它可能的边界。

我对科幻小说的热爱或许是那个时代的写照。60年代末期，人类登上了月球，去探索深海。通过电视，我们看到了不同的动物和地方。这都是我们不曾想象的。在这种氛围下，我不知不觉地喜欢上了科幻小说。每当我看完小说，故事中的影像就会在我脑海中不断闪现。或许是因为创造力必须找到一个发泄方式，我开始画外星人、机器人、飞船......我甚至会在数学课上在课本的背面画画。

对科幻小说的不断接触让我想到：外星人不一定生存在外太空，他们很有可能就生活在我们星球上。所以在我15岁时，我决定成为一名潜水员。而当时实现梦想唯一的问题是我生活在加拿大的一个小山村，离最近的海有6英里远。但我父亲并没有让这成为我梦想的障碍，他在边境对岸的美国纽约州布法罗找到了一个潜水培训班。于是我便在布法罗的一个泳池里获得了潜水证书。直到两年后，当我们全家搬到加州，我才第一次有机会真正地潜水。在这之后的40年里，我在海底大约总共花了3万个小时。大海如此丰富多彩，在那里生活着许多神奇的生物。比起我们的想象力，自然的想象力完全没有边界。我想，至今我对大海的了解还是很少，但我对海洋的好奇却一直延续着。

小贴士：

Jacques Cousteau （雅克·库斯托）是法国最著名的海洋探险家之一，以广泛的海底调查而闻名。他发明了水肺型潜水器和水下使用电视的方法，不仅能让探险家们更长时间停留在海下，摸清海底情况，也成功地将海底这一神秘世界让大众知晓。

库斯托还亲自充当电影制作人，将所拍摄的海洋世界制作成电影和电视片，在电影院和电视机前吸引了无数观众。库斯托还写了很多科普著作，介绍他的探险经历，普及海洋知识。这些著作包括：《通过水下18米》（1946）、《寂静的世界》（1953）、《活跃的大海》（1963）、《三次探险：加加拉帕戈群岛、的的喀湖和蓝洞》（1973）、《多尔芬群岛》（1975）和《雅克·库斯托：海洋世界》（1985）等多部。

库斯托是个传奇式的人物，他的生命是和蔚蓝色的大海联系在一起的。在半个多世纪的海上生涯中，他先后推动了海洋探险、海洋电影、海洋保护等多项事业的发展，取得举世公认的成就，成为深受公众爱戴的人物。在法国，库斯托始终高居"最受欢迎的法国人物榜"的榜首；在欧美，他是一个享有戴高乐将军那样的世界性声誉的法国人。