两篇最温馨动人的英文散文.docVIP

我为何而活 What I Have Lived for 伯特兰.罗素/Bertrand Russell Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me here and there, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life for this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and thought it might seem too good for human life, this is what- at last-I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not too much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always it brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a hated burden to their sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate the evil, but I can’t, and I too suffer. This has been my life, I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me. 对爱情的渴望，对知识的追求，对人类苦难不可遏制的同情，是支配我一生的单纯而强烈的三种感情。这些感情如阵阵飓风，吹拂在我动荡不定的生涯中，有时甚至吹过深沉痛苦的海洋，直抵绝望的边远。 生命中不能承受之轻 The Unbearable Light