Death in the Open

列举(illustration)是一个很重要也很实用的写作手法。列举即用若干例子来说明观点(to present and to support a point through several examples), 能使抽象或难懂的概念具体易懂，而且能避免读者感到枯燥晦涩。在举例的时候要注意最好有若干个例子，而不是仅有一个，如果只举一个例子，那么这个例子必须有很强的说服力，而且要写得很详细。另外，在列举的时候例子顺序和祥略安排也要得当，最重要的例子一般都放在最后，当然也要花最多笔墨了。因为举例是引用你所知道的东西，就要用到叙述和描写(narration and description), 以前在这方面的积累这时就派上用场了。此外，以后要进一步学到的写作手法，如比较和对比（contrast and comparison），因果(cause and effect)，分类(classificatioin)等又要用到举例。

本期我们就来看一篇运用了列举的文章－Lewis Thomas 的 Death in the Open。作者是生物医学专家，但是他写了大量的科普文章，像普通读者介绍科学，医学，以及生命结构等等。我们几段文章出自他的Lives of A Cell一书，此书曾获得1975年的美国国家艺术文学图书奖(the National Book Award for Arts and Letters)。文章探索了自然界生物死亡的现象，请特别注意作者对列举的运用。

Most of the dead animals you see on highways near the cities are dogs, a few cats. Out in the countryside, the forms and coloring of the dead are strange; these are the wild creatures. Seen from a car window they appear as fragments, evoking memories of woodchucks, badgers, skunks, voles, snakes, sometimes the mysterious wreckage of a deer.

It is always a queer shock, part a sudden upwelling of grief, part unaccountable amazement. It is simple astounding to see an animal dead on a highway. The outrage is more than just the location; it is the impropriety of such visible death, anywhere. You do not expect to see dead animals in the open. It is the nature of animals to die alone, off somewhere, hidden. It is wrong to see them lying out on the highway; it is wrong to see them anywhere.

Everything is the world dies, but we only know about it as a kind of abstraction. If you stand in a meadow, at the edge of a hillside, and look around carefully, almost everything you can catch sight of is in the process of dying, and most things will be dead long before you are. If it were not for the constant renewal and replacement going on before your eyes, the whole place would turn to stone and sand under your feet.

There are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish totally into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again. The cycles of the slime mold have episodes that seem as conclusive as death, but the withered slug, with its stalk and fruiting body, is plainly the transient tissue of a developing animal; the free-swimming amebocytes use this organ collectively in order to produce more of themselves.

There are said to be a billion billion insects on the earth at any moment, most of them with very short life expectancies by our standards. Someone has estimated that there are 25 million assorted insects hanging in the air over every temperate square mile, in a column extending upward for thousands of feet, drifting through the layers of the atmosphere like plankton. They are dying steadily, some by being eaten, some just dropping in their tracks, tons of them around the earth, disintegrating as they die, invisibly.

Who ever sees dead birds, in anything like the huge numbers stipulated by the certainly of the death of all birds? A dead bird is an incongruity, more startling than an unexpected live bird, sure evidence to the human mind that something has gone wrong. Birds do their dying off somewhere, behind things, under things, never on the wing.

Animals seem to have an instinct for performing death alone, hidden. Even the largest, most conspicuous ones find ways to conceal themselves in time. If an elephant missteps and dies in an open place, the herd will not leave him there; the others will pick him up and carry the body from place to place, finally putting it down in some inexplicably suitable location. When elephant encounter the skeleton of an elephant out in the open, they methodically take up each of the bones and distribute them, in a ponderous ceremony, over neighboring acres.

It is a natural marvel. All of the life of the earth dies, all of the time, in the same volume as the new life that dazzles us each morning, each spring. All we see of this is the odd stump, the fly struggling on the porch floor of the summer house in October, the fragment on the highway. I have lived all my life with an embarrassment of squirrels in my backyard, they are all over the place, all year long, and I have never seen, anywhere, a dead squirrel.

I suppose it is just as well. If the earth were otherwise, and all the dying were done in the open, with the dead there to be looked at, we would never have it out of minds. We can forget about it much of the time, or think of it as an accident to be avoided, somehow. But it does make the process of dying more exceptional than it really is, and harder to engage in at the times when we must ourselves engage.

…

自然界生物死亡大都是以隐蔽的方式来进行的，为了证明这一点，作者举了很多例子，从细胞，到昆虫，到鸟类，到哺乳动物和人，不难看出这样的安排不是随意的，而是按照生命形态由简单，低级到复杂，高级。另外每种生物形态的论述里还有进一步的例子。可谓是层层递进，井然有序。

此外，文章的题目Death in the Open 也是一语双关，“open”既指death in open places, or death that can be seen, 又指 an open attitude towards death。真是十分巧妙。

思考题：
Lewis Thomas对形容词的使用十分灵活，使得描写显得很生动，如queer shock, unaccountable amazement, visible death 等，你还能找到其他类似的形容词吗？

从第四段到第八段都是举例说明，请找出每段的主题句(topic sentence)，并分析一下该段的结构，哪里是详细写，哪里是简略写。

自己写
写一篇文章，用列举的手法写你对死亡的初次印象，可以是你的亲人，朋友，或者名人。