看the new yorker有两句话句话不太懂，请大家帮忙看看

我爱瓜小妖UID: 3014785

http://www.newyorker.com/culture ... emoir-status-update
链接在这里，2L贴原文。

不懂的句子分别在第一段的前半部分，和第二段的第一句。
1.A Russian novel’s worth of tragedy and comedy is on display.

汗，这句我抓不出主语。不晓得到底是什么 is on display

2.I wonder what would have become of me if I had come of age as a writer during these years of living out loud.

这句我不是很懂 If I had come of age as a writer, 还有living out loud 的意思。

请大家有空的帮忙看看啦。谢谢

我爱瓜小妖UID: 3014785

In the middle of my writing day, I sometimes take a Facebook break. I know I shouldn’t do this. I counsel my writing students not to do this. But writing is a solitary business, and—well, let’s face it, Facebook is tempting. It’s right there. A lonely writer can be connected with a whole range of humanity without ever leaving her desk chair. A Russian novel’s worth of tragedy and comedy is on display. A friend posts, “As I write this, my mother’s light is going out.” Another friend announces his divorce simply by switching his status from married to single. Still another friend anxiously awaits biopsy results. There are engagements, marriages, anniversaries, illnesses, college graduations, retirements, vacations, and endless photographs of cute dogs. All of these accompanied by responses, some numbering in the hundreds. Condolences and congratulations. Prayers and emoticons of hearts and hands pressed together in namaste. There’s something beautiful and absolutely genuine about it—Facebook is, after all, a way of staying connected in an increasingly busy and disconnected world—but it can also feel thin and undigested, a skimming over of data rather than a deep sink into the specificity and emotional reality of human experience. Death? Check. Divorce? Check. A namaste sign instead of a condolence note. A heart rather than a phone call.


I wonder what would have become of me if I had come of age as a writer during these years of living out loud. My parents were in a car crash in 1986 that killed my father and badly injured my mother. If social media had been available to me at the time, would I have posted the news on Facebook? Tweeted it to my followers as I stood on line to board the flight home? Instead of sitting numbly on the plane, with the help of several little bottles of vodka, would I have purchased a few hours of air time with Boingo Wi-Fi and monitored the response—the outpouring of kindness, a deluge of “likes,” mostly from strangers? And ten years later, would I have been compelled to write a memoir about that time in my life? Or would I have felt that I’d already told the story by posting it as my status update?

In an essay on Emily Dickinson, the poet Adrienne Rich once wrote, “It is always what is under pressure in us, especially under pressure of concealment—that explodes in poetry.” We live in a time in which little is concealed, and that pressure valve—the one that every writer is intimate with—rarely has a chance to fill and fill to the point of explosion. Literary memoir is born of this explosion. It is born of the powerful need to craft a story out of the chaos of one’s own history. One of literary memoir’s greatest satisfactions—both for writer and reader—is the slow, deliberate making of a story, of making sense, out of randomness and pain. In the inimitable words of the memoirist Annie Dillard, “You may not let it rip.”

I’m a bit of an accidental memoirist. I’ve written five novels and three memoirs. I never planned to write memoir at all, and if you had told me, at the beginning of my writing life, that I would write three, I would have laughed. But we don’t choose the forms our work takes. We feel the pressure, wait for the explosion, then stand back, stunned and speechless at the shape that emerges. My first memoir centered on my parents’ accident and its aftermath. The accident itself wasn’t the story. As I often tell my writing students, just because it happened doesn’t make it interesting. In the years that I wrote that memoir, “Slow Motion,” I dove deep into my Orthodox Jewish upbringing, my parents’ contentious marriage, my own powerful rebellion, my lack of any sense of identity or self-worth, and the way that my family’s tragedy turned out to be my unlikely salvation. I’m grateful that I wasn’t a young writer with a blog or a massive following on social media. The years of silence were deepening ones. My story burrowed its way deeper and deeper into my being until it became a story I could turn inside out, hold to the light like a prism, craft into a story that was bigger than its small, sorry details.

I worry that we’re confusing the small, sorry details—the ones that we post and read every day—for the work of memoir itself. I can’t tell you how many times people have thanked me for “sharing my story,” as if the books I’ve written are not chiseled and honed out of the hard and unforgiving material of a life but, rather, have been dashed off, as if a status update, a response to the question at the top of every Facebook feed: “What’s on your mind?” I haven’t shared my story, I want to tell them. I haven’t unburdened myself, or softly and earnestly confessed. Quite the opposite. In order to write a memoir, I’ve sat still inside the swirling vortex of my own complicated history like a piece of old driftwood, battered by the sea. I’ve waited—sometimes patiently, sometimes in despair—for the story under pressure of concealment to reveal itself to me. I’ve been doing this work long enough to know that our feelings—that vast range of fear, joy, grief, sorrow, rage, you name it—are incoherent in the immediacy of the moment. It is only with distance that we are able to turn our powers of observation on ourselves, thus fashioning stories in which we are characters. There is no immediate gratification in this. No great digital crowd is “liking” what we do. We don’t experience the Pavlovian, addictive click and response of posting something that momentarily relieves the pressure inside of us, then being showered with emoticons. The gratification we memoirists do experience is infinitely deeper and more bittersweet. It is the complicated, abiding pleasure, to paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, of finding the universal thread that connects us to the rest of humanity, and, by doing so, turns our small, personal sorrows and individual tragedies into art.

战国英雄UID: 2489149

worth of tragedy and comedy
核心词是worth 价值，是说这个小说作为悲剧和喜剧的价值 on display
live out loud我查了，是活的精彩的意思，这个短语是说作者假如能在这些年像一个作家一样活的精彩会怎么怎么样，是虚拟语气

ftldUID: 3529019

第一句的主语我认为是worth,第二个我也不太明白……

我爱瓜小妖UID: 3014785

多谢楼上每一位！
总结一下大家的意见，
1.A Russian novel’s worth of tragedy and comedy is on display.
主语是worth，指这部小说同时具有悲剧和喜剧的价值，这个价值 is on display

2.I wonder what would have become of me if I had come of age as a writer during these years of living out loud.

come of age: 充分发展，发达，成熟
live out loud:活出精彩，在这里联系上下文应该是指在社交网络上update status
become of :使遭遇…，…降临于，发生…的情况

整句意思为：
我想知道我会怎么样, 如果我成为作家的这几年living out loud（发发微博简短的记录下生活）

或者使劲把become of ,come of age 的意思套进去，就是
如果我这些年来，也总是把生活po在网上（living out loud),我很好奇，需要经历哪些事情，才能让我成为一个成熟的作家？

不过感觉第一种明显更自然，更说得通一些。

再次感谢大家的帮忙。特别感谢@mitkyg
谢谢大家

我爱瓜小妖UID: 3014785

mitkyg 发表于 2014-8-18 22:12
第二句好像不是这个意思

诶。那是什么呢？

是：
如果我这些年来，也总是把生活po在网上（living out loud),我很好奇，需要经历哪些事情，才能让我成为一个成熟的作家？

我爱瓜小妖UID: 3014785

mitkyg 发表于 2014-8-18 22:22
我想知道我会怎么样, 如果我成为作家的这几年living out loud( 发发微博简短的记录下生活咯)

上文说Fa ...

感觉你的更有道理。
不扣become of 和come of age的意思的话，你的理解才是最自然的那一种。

多谢多谢！