听着有点意思， 找到一个读后感， 觉得比专业的写得好多了。 WCW的这句话牛
"There are boundaries around my life, but there are no boundaries around ME."
Denis Franklin • 3 months ago
I loved the film and watched the credits through to the end. At which time
there was only one other person left in the theater, a few seats to my left.
I turned to him and said, "I have to tell SOMEONE. I knew William Carlos
Williams. He was my doctor. He delivered me at Passaic General hospital in
1934. (Paterson is the county seat of Passaic County.) No one in town knew
he was a poet, and I didn't discover it until I went to college in Chicago
at 16, but afterward I visited him on every college break until his death in
1962, when I was half-way through medical school."
If you know his poetry, I explained, the entire film was just like one of
his poems.
He thanked me for speaking, saying he had planned to walk out several times
but hoped that finally something would happen. Which it never did.
He had not known that one of Doctor Williams' major works was the epic poem,
"Paterson", written, some say, after he had discovered Joyce's "Ulysses". I
had tried to read Paterson, the poem, when I was young, but became bored
with my difficulty in understanding it.
What I do know about Doctor Williams was that he led a double life, and that
he used to pull his car over as he drove to house calls and jot down some
lines that had come to him.
When, as a 17-year-old, I asked him how come he was a doctor AND a writer,
he thought about it for a minute and said words to the effect of, "There are
boundaries around my life, but there are no boundaries around ME."
At the time I knew him he had been working on expressing a "foot" of poetry
for the American language, as opposed to the iamb, trochee, dactyl or
anapest of British English poetry.
As can be seen in his poems and short stories, Doctor Williams has a keen
ear and good memory for things of great charm and poignancy that people say
to him or to others in his presence. He sought to write some of his poetry
formatted in such a way as to emulate the natural sound of that speech. He
called it "the American foot".
In the Film, Paterson overhears conversations while preoccupied with driving
the bus, and perhaps hearing the meter and musicality almost more than the
content. Then he writes in what is very much the style of William Carlos
Williams.
In "The Doctor Stories" collected by doctor Robert Coles there is a short
story about the final days in the life of 11-month old Jean Beicke. In it
one infers the need for an exquisitely sensitive man to stand a little back
from the death of a child if he is to be of any use whatever as a doctor.
It was that story, I believe, along with Doctor Williams himself, that
inspired me to leave law school and go back to complete pre-med and later,
medical school, and to practice as a family doctor despite the allure money
and stature that a “specialty” might have conferred.
The relationship between Paterson and his wife reminded me of that between
Doctor Williams and his wife Flossie. Observing them together, it always
seemed to me that he was constantly amazed and delighted by her, as Paterson
seemed to be by the irrepressibly creative Laura.
As a doctor myself I understood the need to share the most intimate moments
and stories of my patients while maintaining the invisible distance
necessary to interpose the medical metaphor for which they had come to me.
What’s going no with me? Is it serious? What can I do about it? What will
happen to me? Will I be OK?
And I wrote each patient history and note for 40 years as if it were a
little story about a real person. Which, of course, it was.
