Swap

Author: (English) Lodge, D. (Author), translated by Zhang Nan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2007-01-01
Features: If you like, you can imagine each of these two British literature professors (both happen to be forty years old) being connected to their homeland, workplace, and home fireplace by an infinitely elastic umbilical cord. This umbilical cord is composed of emotions, attitudes, and values. When the professors fly at 600 miles per hour through the air, the cord stretches and stretches, almost disappearing from sight, but never coming close to completely breaking. Imagine further that as they fly face to face over the Arctic ice cap, their respective Boeing pilots, ignoring regulations and technical feasibility, begin to perform a series of playful aerobatic maneuvers—crossing each other like a mating bluebird, diving, soaring, and looping—thus completely tangling the two aforementioned umbilical cords. After cooling down, they continue forward in accordance with regulations. As a result, when the two professors step onto each other's territory and engage in work and pleasure, any vibration sent back to the homeland by one party will be perceived by the other, and vice versa. This vibration will also return to the source, but it will have been subtly altered by the other party's reaction, and the transmission path may very well be the other party's communication umbilical cord, which has already taken root in their new location. Therefore, soon the entire system begins to resonate due to the back-and-forth vibrations between Professor A and Professor B, sometimes along one line and sometimes along another, sometimes starting with one line and ending with another. In other words, if the two people swap places for half a year, despite the vastly different environments and personalities, and their different attitudes toward the entire exchange arrangement, it would not be surprising for their destinies to influence each other and even reflect each other's experiences in some aspects.
The perfect conclusion to the "Lumech College Trilogy," an extraordinary union between higher education and corporate society, a love-hate entanglement of humanistic tradition and mercenary pursuit.