书城工具书哲理英语
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第25章 我生命中的过客

当他告诉我他要离开的时候,我感觉自己就像花瓶裂成了碎片,散落落在褐色瓷砖地板上。他一直在说话,解释着为什么要离开,说这是最好的,我可以过得更好,都是他的错,与我无关。虽然这些话我已经听上好几千遍了,可每次听完都让我很受伤,或许在这样巨大的打击面前没有人能不感到难过。

他走了,我尝试着继续过自己的生活。我烧上开水,拿出红色杯子,看着咖啡颗粒一点点地落入骨灰瓷的杯子里。这正是我自己的鲜活写照,不断地往下掉咖啡颗粒,却从来没有真正地泡成一杯咖啡。

水开了,水壶发出鸣响,我假装没有听见。迈克的离去也是一样,突如其来,并且无可挽回。要知道,我宁愿忍受分与不分的煎熬,也不愿意以这样的方式被宣判“死刑”。想着想着我不禁笑了,自己竟然为一杯咖啡有如此多的人生感慨,我一定是老了。

可是镜子里回望着我的那个女孩还是那么年轻,明目皓齿,充满了前途与希望,光明的未来在向她招手。没关系的,反正我也从来没有爱过迈克。况且,生命中还有比爱更重要的东西在等待着我,我对自己坚持说。我将咖啡罐的盖子盖好,也将所有关于迈克的记忆尘封起来。

令我没想到的是,那天晚上,他并没有入到我的梦中。在梦里,我飞过田野和森林,俯瞰着大地。突然间,我掉了下来……醒来后才发现原来自己被猎人打中了,但是令我坠落的不是他的子弹,而是他的灵魂。我后来才渐渐明白,原来迈克就是那个使我坠落的猎人,而我是那只渴望飞翔的小鸟。到了。

Poetic Life

I think that, from a biological standpoint, human life almost reads like a poem. It has its own rhythm and beat, its internal cycles of growth and decay. It begins with innocent childhood, followed by awkward adolescence trying awkwardly to adapt itself to mature society, with its young passions and follies, its ideals and ambitions; then it reaches a manhood of intense activities, profiting from experience and learning more about society and human nature; at middle age, there is a slight easing of tension, a mellowing of character like the ripening of fruit or the mellowing of good wine, and the gradual acquiring of a more tolerant, more cynical and at the same time a kindlier view of life; then In the sunset of our life, the endocrine glands decrease their activity, and if we have a true philosophy of old age and have ordered our life pattern according to it, it is for us the age of peace and security and leisure and contentment; finally, life flickers out and one goes into eternal sleep, never to wake up again.

One should be able to sense the beauty of this rhythm of life, to appreciate, as we do in grand symphonies, its main theme, its strains of conflict and the final resolution. The movements of these cycles are very much the same in a normal life, but the music must be provided by the individual himself. In some souls, the discordant note becomes harsher and harsher and finally overwhelms or submerges the main melody. Sometimes the discordant note gains so much power that the music can no longer go on, and the individual shoots himself with a pistol or jump into a river. But that is because his original leitmotif has been hopelessly over-showed through the lack of a good self-education. Otherwise the normal human life runs to its normal end in kind of dignified movement and procession. There are sometimes in many of us too many staccatos or impetuosity, and because the tempo is wrong, the music is not pleasing to the ear; we might have more of the grand rhythm and majestic tempo o the Ganges, flowing slowly and eternally into the sea.

No one can say that life with childhood, manhood and old age is not a beautiful arrangement; the day has its morning, noon and sunset, and the year has its seasons, and it is good that it is so. There is no good or bad in life, except what is good according to its own season. And if we take this biological view of life and try to live according to the seasons, no one but a conceited fool or an impossible idealist can deny that human life can be lived like a poem. Shakespeare has expressed this idea more graphically in his passage about the seven stages of life, and a good many Chinese writers have said about the same thing. It is curious that Shakespeare was never very religious, or very much concerned with religion. I think this was his greatness; he took human life largely as it was, and intruded himself as little upon the general scheme of things as he did upon the characters of his plays. Shakespeare was like Nature itself, and that is the greatest compliment we can pay to a writer or thinker. He merely lived, observed life and went away.