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“回忆不管是愉快还是不愉快的，都有一种悲哀，虽然淡，她怕那滋味。她从来不自找伤感，实生活里有的是，不可避免的。”

说起现代文学史上的女作家们，常忍不住要赞张爱玲，别人出道一律是从写自己开始，从写恋爱开始，偏偏她一上来端的是爱情支解过的尸体，皮是皮，骨是骨，肉是肉，早熟得可怕。笔下的主人公虽然是身边熟悉的人，却绝不把自己牵扯进去，一脸置身事外地讲故事道传奇。谁知老来还是犯了一般女作家的通病，绕来绕去终于绕到了自己身上，且剥得分外精光，说是fiction，读起来分明就是她自己。

他们那一辈的文人有很自觉的史料意识，写日记和书信都有将来发表的打算，鲁迅与许广平的《两地书》、徐志摩的《爱眉小札》，还有热衷作自传、出版日记的胡适等等，不知道是太坦荡，还是写得太久物我两忘了。张爱玲倒没有书信集和日记流传，据说因为胡兰成写了《今生今世》，她才决定要写这本《小团圆》。

胡兰成的《今生今世》我没有看，可以想见那种洋洋得意的口吻，他一生在女子中周游，张爱玲自然是其中一个不小的成就。她大概早已把他看透了，为人和为文的伎俩，所以要把他们的往事抖落个明明白白。

九莉爱过两个人，一个是她的生母，也就是被她称为“二婶”的蕊秋，另一个是之雍。九莉逃出了父亲家去投奔生母，是无奈，但心里也有向往和崇拜，长期的分离令她既羞于表达也排斥亲密，她对母亲遮遮掩掩的爱尚未露出行迹，已敏感意识到自己是个累赘。“她（蕊秋）替九莉把额前的头发梳成却尔斯王子的横云度龄式。直头发不持久，回到学校里早已塌下来了，她舍不得去碰它，由它在眼前披拂，微风一样轻柔。”她太敏感，对温情是这样的渴望，不舍得浪费一丝一毫。正因为爱得这样小心翼翼，受得伤害更其惨烈。一次当着客人的面，蕊秋对她大叫：“你这是干什么？猪！”

一般的孩子，对母亲这样的呵斥或哭或闹一场，三两个钟头就忘了。她只装作若无其事的样子，其实心都灰了；还有一次她病了，母亲冲进病房就说：“反正你活着就是害人！像你这样只能让你自生自灭！”她自卑到过分自尊，不在母亲面前哭，也不闹，她后来一定要还上母亲供养她的钱，不过拿钱赎回一点自尊罢了。

她爱之雍，也是一样的卑微姿态。本来是之雍寻上门来访她，不知怎的，一来二去竟成了她崇拜他，她是不太会端架子作假的，崇拜就崇拜。“她崇拜他，为什么不能让他知道？等于走过的时候送一束花，像中世纪欧洲流行的恋爱一样绝望，往往是骑士与主公的夫人之间的，形式化得连主公都不干涉。她一直觉得只有无目的的爱才是真的。”“他走后一烟灰盘的烟蒂，她都拣了起来，收在一只旧信封里。”小说里的“九莉”和现实里的张爱玲，都给人一种精明、心思细密的感觉，就为了“无目的的爱才是真的”，竟然就不顾一切地爱上了之雍。其实他绝非一个好的恋爱对象，家中已有几房妻妾，又是“职业志士”，刚从牢里放出来。但他绝对是个恋爱高手，后来就连在避难、逃难过程中都能生出一些罗曼司，九莉这样初出茅庐的丫头，实在是手到擒来。她要是稍使一点欲擒故纵术，或是冷眼看透这个人，虽难免受伤，不至于这么惨烈。

之雍对她也并非不真心，得知她想还母亲那笔钱，便送了几笔款子来，数目不小，又知道作家生存不易，想资助她。只是他的词典里没有“专一”这两个字，并且因为她是作家，从不隐瞒，甚至对她倾诉以获得成就感。

就像对她母亲一样，她对之雍的伤害只有逆来顺受，默默听他讲那些女人，他连与她们的性爱都不避讳她。她终于洞穿了他绝不会在她和她们之间做出选择，他要的是全部，于是她死了心。把之前他给的钱，陆续都还给他了。

关于《小团圆》，被诟病的有两点：一是九莉（或者说张爱玲）的冷漠，尤其是写到堕胎那一节；二是通篇讲钱。有人推论张爱玲既冷漠且庸俗，这个推论不算新，大概早在她成名时就有过。她是不是冷漠，见仁见智吧，反正不博爱，有限的爱触了钉，从此有点心灰意冷。她讲钱是没错，但从头到尾是念叨着还母亲钱，还之雍钱，如果那人不爱她，花在她身上的钱倒成了她的负担。钱是紧要的，但她真不爱钱。

《小团圆》作小说看也好，作自传看也罢，是伤感的。像开头的引言所说，怎会不伤感呢，通篇都是回忆。那些年里她把自己越来越紧地缩成小小的一团，努力不妨碍着谁，触碰着谁，但她实在太敏感了，一碰就碎。

Early in the morning on the fifth of February AD 62, a gigantic earthquake rippled beneath the Roman province of Campania and in seconds, killed thousands of unsuspecting inhabitants. Large sections of Pompeii collapsed on top of people in their beds. Attempts to rescue them were stopped when fires broke out. The survivors were left destitute in only the soot-covered clothes they stood in, their noble buildings shattered into rubble. There was horror, disbelief and anger throughout the Empire. How could the Romans, the world's mightiest, most technologically sophisticated people, who had built aqueducts and tamed barbarian hordes, be so vulnerable to the insane tempers of nature?

The suffering and confusion – only too familiar today in the wake of the Sichuan earthquake – attracted the notice of the Roman philosopher, Seneca, one of the key figures in the school of Western philosophy known as Stoicism. He wrote a succession of essays to comfort his readers but, typically for Seneca, the consolation on offer was of the stiffest, darkest sort: ‘You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.' Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened...?' Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them – in the spring of AD62 – that natural and man-made disasters will always be a feature of our lives, however sophisticated and safe we think we have become. We must therefore at all times expect the unexpected. Calm is only an interval between chaos. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the ground we stand on.

If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden giant quakes and pay a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across generations, on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible invitation to assume that tomorrow will be much like today, and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same again. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the latter scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the Goddess of Fortune. This Goddess can scatter gifts, then with terrifying speed watch us choke to death on a fishbone or disappear under an apartment building.

Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything (‘There is nothing which Fortune does not dare'), we must, argued Seneca, hold the possibility of the most obscene events in mind at all times. No one should undertake a journey by car, or walk down the stairs or say goodbye to a friend without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of fatal possibilities.

Given our technological prowess, it's become natural to think of ourselves as controlling our destiny. Man doesn't any longer have to be a plaything of random forces and with the application of reason, all our problems may be solved. Nothing could be further from a Stoic mindset. We must, stressed Seneca, expand our sense of what may at any time go wrong in our lives: ‘Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break. A body weak and fragile.'

In the wake of the Calabria earthquake, many people argued that the whole area should be evacuated, and nothing more built on earthquake zones. But Seneca disagreed with the underlying belief that there might be somewhere on earth, in Liguria or Calabria perhaps, where someone could actually be wholly safe, out of reach of Fortune's will: ‘Who promises them better foundations for this or that soil to stand on? All places have the same conditions and if they have not yet had an earthquake, they can none the less have quakes. Perhaps tonight or before tonight will split open the spot where you stand securely. How do you know whether conditions will henceforth be better in those places against which Fortune has already exhausted her strength or in those places which are supported on their own ruins? We are mistaken if we believe any part of the world is exempt and safe... Nature has not created anything in such a way that it is immobile."

To try to prepare ourselves psychologically for disaster, Seneca asked us to perform a strange exercise every morning which he called in Latin a praemeditatio – a premedition – and which involved lying in bed before breakfast and imagining everything that could go wrong in the day ahead. This exercise was no idle fun, it was designed to prepared you if your town burnt down that evening or your children died: ‘We live in the middle of things which have all been destined to die,' ran one example of a premeditation, ‘Mortal have you been born, to mortals have you given birth. So you must reckon on everything, expect everything.'

Does Stoicism mean accepting everything that life throws at you? No, it simply means recognising how vulnerable we remain, despite all our advances. Seneca asked us to think of ourselves like dogs who have been tied to a charriot driven by an unpredictable driver. Our leash is long enough to give us a degree of leeway, but is not long enough to allow us to wander wherever we please. A dog will naturally hope to roam about as it wants. But as Seneca's metaphor implies, if it can't, then it's better for the animal to follow obediently behind the cart rather than dragged and strangled by it. As Seneca put it: ‘An animal, struggling against the noose, tightens it... there is no yoke so tight that it will not hurt the animal less if it pulls with it than if it fights against it. The best alleviation for overwhelming evils is to endure and bow to necessity.'

By turning back to the wisdom of the Stoic philosophers, we may find a helpful way of tempering some of our expectations and dampening our shock at disasters and bloodshed. When, in AD 65, Seneca was ordered to kill himself by the crazed Emperor Nero, his wife and family collapsed in tears, but Seneca had learnt to follow the charriot of life with resignation. As he calmly took the knife to his veins, he remarked – in a sentence we may be wise to repeat to ourselves as we read the news on certain particularly sad mornings – ‘What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.'