（外文电子版资料）Christopher Priest - The Discharge.pdfVIP

The Discharge by Christopher Priest Comme tous les songe-creux, je confondis le désenchantement avec la vérité. Jean-Paul Sartre I emerge into my memories of life at the age of twenty. I was a soldier, recently released from boot camp, being marched by an escouade of black-cap military policemen to the naval compound in Jethra harbor. The war was approaching the end of its three thousandth year and I was serving in a conscript army. I marched mechanically, staring at the back of the mans head in front of me. The sky was dark grey with cloud and a stiff cold wind streamed in from the sea. My awareness of life leapt into being around me. I knew my name, I knew where we had been ordered to march, I knew or could guess where we would be going after that. I could function as a soldier. This was my moment of birth into consciousness. Marching uses no mental energy—the mind is free to wander, if you have a mind. I record these words some years later, looking back, trying to make sense of what happened. At the time, the moment of awareness, I could only react, stay in step. Of my childhood, the years leading up to this moment of mental birth, little remains. I can piece together the fragments of a likely story: I was probably born in Jethra, university town and capital city on the southern coast of our country. Of my parents, brothers or sisters, my education, any history of childhood illnesses, friends, experiences, travels, I remember nothing. I grew to the age of twenty; only that is certain. And one other thing, useless to a soldier. I knew I was an artist. How could I be sure of that, trudging along with the other men, in a phalanx of dark uniforms, kitbags, clanking mess-tins, steel helmets, boots, stamping down a puddled road with a chill wind in our faces? I knew that in the area of blankness behind me was a lov