名稱：77 Three Passions I Have Lived for
內容簡介：
晨讀英語美文 文化百科
[00:05.91]Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life:
[00:14.00]the longing for love, the search for knowledge,
[00:17.28]and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.
[00:21.44]These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither,
[00:27.13]in a wayward course over a deep ocean of anguish,
[00:31.41]reaching to the very verge of despair.
[00:34.36]I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy
[00:39.17]—ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of my life
[00:44.97]for a few hours for this joy.
[00:47.70]I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness
[00:52.19]—that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness
[00:57.46]looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss.
[01:04.12]I have sought it, finally, because in the union of love I have seen,
[01:10.02]in a mystic miniature,
[01:11.89]the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined.
[01:17.90]This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life,
[01:23.92]this is what—at last—I have found.
[01:28.08]With equal passion I have sought knowledge.
[01:32.12]I have wished to understand the hearts of men.
[01:36.06]I have wished to know why the stars shine ...
[01:40.44]A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.
[01:45.37]Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens.
[01:53.35]But always pity brought me back to earth.
[01:56.96]Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart.
[02:01.67]Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people
[02:08.23]—a hated burden to their sons,
[02:10.97]and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be.
[02:19.28]I long to alleviate the evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer.
[02:25.73]This has been my life.
[02:28.36]I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again
[02:32.52]if the chance were offered me.