Love
by Toni Morrison
She's dead now, so I can say that she laughed like us, played like us, and her adult life turned out okay – so I heard. But then, when we were all twelve or less, it seemed as though she floated behind a scrim. Markedly pretty, she had eyes full of distance – a smile made more attractive by what it withheld; some knowingness it appeared unwilling to share. In the early forties,"cool" was our word to describe her, although, at the time, I thought she was simply sad. Something treasured had been irretrievably lost, and there was nothing to be done about it. Her attitude reminded me of what I saw in the eyes of scary old people sitting in rocking chairs on the porch or leaning on a fence looking at us as though in a little while we would know the doom and catastrophe they already knew."Uh huh," they murmured when we tripped over the door saddle or ruined our clothes. "Where is your mind?" they asked when we dropped the milk bottle, let the coal fire go out. Seriously asking a serious question, they showed no surprise. They knew we would always fall down, drop things,be ruined, and forget. And that it was possible to lose your mind. She too seemed aware of our haplessness, but she did not wear their frown. A mournful sympathy infected her smile.
The big thing – the most obvious sign of her behind-the-scrim life – was that she didn't like boys. That is, she was indifferent to our giggle and babble about who was "sharp" or"fine" or who "liked" whom. She made no contribution to such talk. Very grown up, I thought, for a twelve-year-old who had no reason to be. When I learned, later, what separated her from us (from the world, perhaps)，I became afraid of wakefulness as well as of sleep. Trying to picture the acts foisted upon her by her father was impossible – out of range. Nothing came clearly into view. They were literally unimaginable. What was easily imaginable was the implacable danger brought on by the things those scary old people recognized in us. Ruin, falling, losing, mindlessness were not only in our nature now, they signaled our future. Before we even knew who we were, someone we trusted our lives to could, might, would make use of our littleness, our ignorance, our need, and sully us to the bone, disturbing the balance of our lives as theirs had clearly been disturbed.
When the gossip about her surfaced, the deepest scorn was for the complicit mother who apparently never heard of lye, ground glass, or a baseball bat. The women seethed; the men turned their lips down in raw disgust.
People tell me that I am always writing about love. Always, always love, I nod, yes, but it isn't true – not exactly. In fact, I am always writing about betrayal. Love is the weather . Betrayal is the lightning that cleaves and reveals it.
I liked so much the challenge that writing Jazz gave me: breaking or dismissing conventional rules of composition to replace them with other , stricter rules. In that work, the narrative voice was the book itself, its physical and spatial confinement made irrelevant by its ability to imagine, invent , interpret, err, and change. In Love, the material (forms of love, kinds of betrayal) struck me as longing for a similar freedom – but this time with an embodied, participating voice. The interior narrative of the characters, so full of secrets and partial insights, would be interrupted and observed by an"I" not restricted by chronology or space – or the frontier between life and not-life. Thus the character called"L" is meant to exhibit and represent the imaginative and transformative nature of her name along with its constructive and destructive talents.
The first scene that came clear to me involved a boy new to his neighborhood, eager to belong. Hostage to the needs of his own flesh, he nevertheless disobeys his body's command and keeps faith with his heart. In an environment where immediate and brutal gratification reigns, his want on tenderness for a stranger humiliates him. From that initiation into the mysteries and terror of social arrangements evolved the stories of other characters whose vulnerability is turned into shame, into loneliness – the clear sense of having no one on whom one can safely rely. The most bitter betrayal, of course, does not come from an enemy whose deceit one expects. It comes most chillingly from a friend, a trusted one – or one's own self. While marveling at that bromide, I could hardly avoid the parallels between those specific lives and wider cultural ones. I became interested in the manner in which African Americans handled internecine, intraracial betrayals, and the weapons they chose in order to survive them. The decades-long civil-rights revolt, like other radical changes, required consensus (mutual love) for success . Dissension, healthy or malign, was frequently understood as betrayal, as lethalas apathy. While the move away from or toward social cohesion is by no means unique to any single people, racial politics (like religion) certainly heightens the stress . Beneath (rather, hand-in-hand with) the surface story of the successful revolt against a common enemy in the struggle for integration (in this case,white power) lies another one: the story of disintegration – of a radical change in conventional relationships and class allegiances that signals both liberation and estrangement. Heed and Christine live in the easy weather of precivil rights intimacy until they are explosively interfered with. The fault line between them was drawn by the ability of power to satisfy its whimsand ignore the consequences. The sundering of their natural alliance was met by fear, compliance, resistance, flight, and iron clad distrust. Unmediated and left to its own devices, distrust – personal or political – can have predictable consequences : irrational contempt, violence, self-delusion, exceptionalism, hatred, and the renunciation of a shared language, all of which play out among those of the novel's population who believe they are irrevocably cut off at the root. For among the things Christine, Heed, and Junior have already lost, besides their innocence and their faith, are a father and a mother, or, to be more precise , fathering and mothering. Emotionally unprotected by adults, they give themselves over to the most powerful one they know, the man who looms even larger in their imagination than in their lives.
What could possibly scour away their excuses for maintaining the false face they wore for protection from further abandonment, further betraval? What is the raw material of reconciliation?
It was not just a feisty mother, a supportive father, and insatiable reading habits that kept me later on from giving myself over to a life of girlish submission – some form of smiling or frowning female resignation. It was the comfort of learning from those countering sources that there were weapons – other kinds of baseball bats: defiance, exit, knowledge ; not solitude, but other people; not silence, but speech. An arsenal could begathered against whatever threatened our future well-being. Adroitness, of course, would have to be cultivated to know what and how to defend; what and how to cherish.
She chose humility and bowed to violation. Having lost respect, even the frail status of a child, what else was there to lose? She was properly judged; silently condemned. So what if she had used her tongue and spoken? To whom? Us? Hardly. Back then , in the forties, we believed we were already forsaken, destined to fall down, drop things, forget, and misplace our minds. I suppose we could have loved her. Somehow. I suppose.
给你介绍一篇吧！
这篇是诺贝尔文学奖获得者Toni Morrison女士名著the beloved里面的一篇，名字叫做“爱”。
这篇散文文笔很美。并且保证国内没有翻译版。因为这曾经是一项国内翻译比赛的征稿原文。
希望你能满意！有问题问我！
Love
by Toni Morrison
She's dead now, so I can say that she laughed like us, played like us, and her adult life turned out okay – so I heard. But then, when we were all twelve or less, it seemed as though she floated behind a scrim. Markedly pretty, she had eyes full of distance – a smile made more attractive by what it withheld; some knowingness it appeared unwilling to share. In the early forties,"cool" was our word to describe her, although, at the time, I thought she was simply sad. Something treasured had been irretrievably lost, and there was nothing to be done about it. Her attitude reminded me of what I saw in the eyes of scary old people sitting in rocking chairs on the porch or leaning on a fence looking at us as though in a little while we would know the doom and catastrophe they already knew."Uh huh," they murmured when we tripped over the door saddle or ruined our clothes. "Where is your mind?" they asked when we dropped the milk bottle, let the coal fire go out. Seriously asking a serious question, they showed no surprise. They knew we would always fall down, drop things,be ruined, and forget. And that it was possible to lose your mind. She too seemed aware of our haplessness, but she did not wear their frown. A mournful sympathy infected her smile.
The big thing – the most obvious sign of her behind-the-scrim life – was that she didn't like boys. That is, she was indifferent to our giggle and babble about who was "sharp" or"fine" or who "liked" whom. She made no contribution to such talk. Very grown up, I thought, for a twelve-year-old who had no reason to be. When I learned, later, what separated her from us (from the world, perhaps)，I became afraid of wakefulness as well as of sleep. Trying to picture the acts foisted upon her by her father was impossible – out of range. Nothing came clearly into view. They were literally unimaginable. What was easily imaginable was the implacable danger brought on by the things those scary old people recognized in us. Ruin, falling, losing, mindlessness were not only in our nature now, they signaled our future. Before we even knew who we were, someone we trusted our lives to could, might, would make use of our littleness, our ignorance, our need, and sully us to the bone, disturbing the balance of our lives as theirs had clearly been disturbed.
When the gossip about her surfaced, the deepest scorn was for the complicit mother who apparently never heard of lye, ground glass, or a baseball bat. The women seethed; the men turned their lips down in raw disgust.
People tell me that I am always writing about love. Always, always love, I nod, yes, but it isn't true – not exactly. In fact, I am always writing about betrayal. Love is the weather . Betrayal is the lightning that cleaves and reveals it.
I liked so much the challenge that writing Jazz gave me: breaking or dismissing conventional rules of composition to replace them with other , stricter rules. In that work, the narrative voice was the book itself, its physical and spatial confinement made irrelevant by its ability to imagine, invent , interpret, err, and change. In Love, the material (forms of love, kinds of betrayal) struck me as longing for a similar freedom – but this time with an embodied, participating voice. The interior narrative of the characters, so full of secrets and partial insights, would be interrupted and observed by an"I" not restricted by chronology or space – or the frontier between life and not-life. Thus the character called"L" is meant to exhibit and represent the imaginative and transformative nature of her name along with its constructive and destructive talents.
The first scene that came clear to me involved a boy new to his neighborhood, eager to belong. Hostage to the needs of his own flesh, he nevertheless disobeys his body's command and keeps faith with his heart. In an environment where immediate and brutal gratification reigns, his want on tenderness for a stranger humiliates him. From that initiation into the mysteries and terror of social arrangements evolved the stories of other characters whose vulnerability is turned into shame, into loneliness – the clear sense of having no one on whom one can safely rely. The most bitter betrayal, of course, does not come from an enemy whose deceit one expects. It comes most chillingly from a friend, a trusted one – or one's own self. While marveling at that bromide, I could hardly avoid the parallels between those specific lives and wider cultural ones. I became interested in the manner in which African Americans handled internecine, intraracial betrayals, and the weapons they chose in order to survive them. The decades-long civil-rights revolt, like other radical changes, required consensus (mutual love) for success . Dissension, healthy or malign, was frequently understood as betrayal, as lethalas apathy. While the move away from or toward social cohesion is by no means unique to any single people, racial politics (like religion) certainly heightens the stress . Beneath (rather, hand-in-hand with) the surface story of the successful revolt against a common enemy in the struggle for integration (in this case,white power) lies another one: the story of disintegration – of a radical change in conventional relationships and class allegiances that signals both liberation and estrangement. Heed and Christine live in the easy weather of precivil rights intimacy until they are explosively interfered with. The fault line between them was drawn by the ability of power to satisfy its whimsand ignore the consequences. The sundering of their natural alliance was met by fear, compliance, resistance, flight, and iron clad distrust. Unmediated and left to its own devices, distrust – personal or political – can have predictable consequences : irrational contempt, violence, self-delusion, exceptionalism, hatred, and the renunciation of a shared language, all of which play out among those of the novel's population who believe they are irrevocably cut off at the root. For among the things Christine, Heed, and Junior have already lost, besides their innocence and their faith, are a father and a mother, or, to be more precise , fathering and mothering. Emotionally unprotected by adults, they give themselves over to the most powerful one they know, the man who looms even larger in their imagination than in their lives.
What could possibly scour away their excuses for maintaining the false face they wore for protection from further abandonment, further betraval? What is the raw material of reconciliation?
It was not just a feisty mother, a supportive father, and insatiable reading habits that kept me later on from giving myself over to a life of girlish submission – some form of smiling or frowning female resignation. It was the comfort of learning from those countering sources that there were weapons – other kinds of baseball bats: defiance, exit, knowledge ; not solitude, but other people; not silence, but speech. An arsenal could begathered against whatever threatened our future well-being. Adroitness, of course, would have to be cultivated to know what and how to defend; what and how to cherish.
She chose humility and bowed to violation. Having lost respect, even the frail status of a child, what else was there to lose? She was properly judged; silently condemned. So what if she had used her tongue and spoken? To whom? Us? Hardly. Back then , in the forties, we believed we were already forsaken, destined to fall down, drop things, forget, and misplace our minds. I suppose we could have loved her. Somehow. I suppose.
The Morals of Chess by Benjamin Franklin
Wrote in 1779
Playing at Chess, is the most ancient and the most universal game known among men; for its original is beyond the memory of history, and it has, for numberless ages, been the amusement of all the civilized nations of Asia, the Persians, the Indians, and the Chinese. Europe has had it above a thousand years; the Spaniards have spread it over their part of America, and it begins lately to make its appearance in these States. It is so interesting in itself, as not to need the view of gain to induce engaging in it; and thence it is never played for money. Those, therefore, who have leisure for such diversions, cannot find one that is more innocent ; and the following piece, written with a view to correct (among a few young friends) some little improprieties in the practice of it, shows at the same time that it may, in its effects on the mind, be not merely innocent, but advantageous, to the vanquished as well as to the victor. The Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it, so as to become habits, ready on all occasions. For Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and ill events, that are, in some degree, the effects of prudence or the want of it. By playing at chess, then, we may learn,
I Foresight , which looks a little into futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action ; for it is continually occurring to the player, "If I move this piece, what will be the advantages of my new situation? What use can my adversary make of it to annoy me? What other moves can I make to support it, and to defend myself from his attacks?"
II. Circumspection , which surveys the whole chess-board, or scene of action, the relations of the several pieces and situations, the dangers they are respectively exposed to, the several possibilities of their aiding each other, the probabilities that the adversary may make this or that move, and attack this or the other piece ; and what different means can be used to avoid his stroke, or turn its consequences against him.
III. Caution , not to make our moves too hastily. This habit is best acquired by observing strictly the laws of the game, such as, "If you touch a piece, you must move it somewhere ; if you set it down, you must let it stand:" and it is therefore best that these rules should be observed, as the game thereby becomes more the image of human life, and particularly of war; in which, if you have incautiously put yourself into a bad and dangerous position, you cannot obtain your enemy's leave to withdraw your troops, and place them more securely, but you must abide all the consequences of your rashness.
And, lastly, we learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present bad appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favorable change , and that of persevering in the search of resources . The game is so full of events, there is such a variety of turns in it, the fortune of it is so subject to sudden vicissitudes, and one so frequently, after contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one's self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty, that one is encouraged to continue the contest to the last, in hopes of victory by our own skill, or, at least, of giving a stale mate, by the negligence of our adversary. And whoever considers, what in chess he often sees instances of, that particular pieces of success are apt to produce presumption, and its consequent, inattention, by which more is afterwards lost than was gained by the preceding advantage, while misfortunes produce more care and attention, by which the loss may be recovered, will learn not to be too much discouraged by the present success of his adversary, nor to despair of final good fortune, upon every little check he receives in the pursuit of it, That we may, therefore, be induced more frequently to choose this beneficial amusement, in preference to others which are not attended with the same advantages, every circumstance which may increase the pleasures of it should be regarded; and every action or word that is unfair, disrespectful, or that in any way may give uneasiness, should be avoided, as contrary to the immediate intention of both the players, which is, to pass the time agreeably.
Therefore, firstly: If it is agreed to play according to the strict rules, then those rules are to be exactly observed by both parties ; and should not be insisted on for one side, while deviated from by the other: for this is not equitable. Secondly. If it is agreed not to observe the rules exactly, but one party demands indulgences, he should then be as willing to allow them to the other. Thirdly. No false move should ever be made to extricate yourself out of a difficulty, or to gain an advantage. There can be no pleasure in playing with a person once detected in such unfair practices. Fourthly. If your adversary is long in playing, you ought not to hurry him, or express any uneasiness at his delay. You should not sing, nor whistle, nor look at your watch, nor take up a book to read, nor make a tapping with your feet on the floor, or with your fingers on the table, nor do any thing that may disturb his attention. For all these things displease ; and they do not show your skill in playing, but your craftiness or rudeness. Fifthly. You ought not to endeavour to amuse and deceive your adversary, by pretending to have made bad moves, and saying you have now lost the game, in order to make him secure and careless, and inattentive to your schemes; for this is fraud, and deceit, not skill in the game. Sixthly. You must not, when you have gained a victory, use any triumphing or insulting expression, nor show too much pleasure ; but endeavour to console your adversary, and make him less dissatisfied with himself by every kind and civil expression, that may be used with truth, such as, "You understand the game better than I, but you are a little inattentive ;" or, "You had the best of the game, but something happened to divert your thoughts, and that turned it in my favour." Seventhly. If you are a spectator while others play, observe the most perfect silence: For if you give advice, you offend both parties ; him, against whom you give it, because it may cause the loss of his game; him, in whose favour you give it, because, though it be good, and he follows it, he loses the pleasure he might have had, if you had permitted him to think till it occurred to himself. Even after a move or moves, you must not, by replacing the pieces, show how it might have been played better: for that displeases, and may occasion disputes or doubts about their true situation. All talking to the players, lessens or diverts their attention, and is therefore unpleasing: Nor should you give the least hint to either party, by any kind of noise or motion. If you do, you are unworthy to be a spectator. If you have a mind to exercise or show your judgement, do it in playing your own game when you have an opportunity, not in criticising, or meddling with, or counselling the play of others. Lastly. If the game is not to be played rigorously according to the rules above mentioned, then moderate your desire of victory over your adversary, and be pleased with one over yourself. Snatch not eagerly at every advantage offered by his unskillfulness or inattention; but point out to him kindly, that by such a move he places or leaves a piece in danger and unsupported; that by another he will put his king in a dangerous situation, &c. By this generous civility (so opposite to the unfairness above forbidden) you may, indeed, happen to lose the game to your opponent, but you will win what is better, his esteem, his respect, and his affection; together with the silent approbation and good will of impartial spectators
你好，这两篇文章加起来就符合你的要求了
字数【1040】
这篇文章是一个关于外貌的深度探讨，非常有哲理，作者观点也十分有个性，强力推荐。
Beauty
Susan Sontag
For the Greeks, beauty was a virtue: a kind of excellence. Persons then were assumed to be what we now have to call – lamely, enviously – whole persons. If it did occur to the Greeks to distinguish between a person’s “inside” and “outside”, they still expected that inner beauty would be matched by beauty of the other kind. The well-born young Athenians who gathered around Socrates found it quite paradoxical that their hero was so intelligent, so brave, so honorable, so seductive – and so ugly. One of Socrates’ main pedagogical acts was to be ugly and teach those innocent, no doubt splendid-looking disciples of this how full of paradoxes life really was.
2They may have resisted Socrates’ lesson. We do not. Several thousand years later, we are more wary of the enchantments of beauty. We not only split off – with the greatest facility – the “inside” (character, intellect) from the “outside”(looks); but we are actually surprised when someone who is beautiful is also intelligent, talented, good.
3It was principally the influence of Christianity that deprived beauty of the central place it had in classical ideals of human excellence. By limiting excellence (vritus in Latin) to moral virtue only, Christianity set beauty adrift – as an alienated, arbitrary, superficial enchantment. And beauty has continued to lose prestige. For close to two centuries it has become a convention to attribute beauty to only one of the two sexes: the sex which, however Fair, is always Second. Associating beauty with women has put beauty even further on the defensive, morally.
4A beautiful woman, we say in English. But a handsome man. “ Handsome” is the masculine equivalent of – and refusal of – a compliment which has accumulated certain demeaning overtones, by being reserved for women only. That one can call a man “beautiful in French and in Italian suggests that Catholic countries – unlike those countries shaped by the Protestant version of Christianity – still retain some vestiges of the pagan admiration for beauty. But the difference, if one exists, is of degree only. In every modern country that is Christian or post-Christian, women are the beautiful sex – to the detriment of the notion of beauty as well as of women.
5To be called beautiful is thought to name something essential to women’s character and concerns. (In contrast to men – whose essence is to be strong, or effective, or competent) it does not take someone in the thrones of advanced feminist awareness to perceive the they way women are taught to be involved with beauty encourages narcissism, reinforces dependence and immaturity. Everybody (women and men) knows that. For it is “everybody”, a whole society, that has identified being feminine with caring about how one looks. (In contrast to being masculine – which is identified with caring about what one is and does and only secondarily, if at all, about how one looks.) Given these stereotypes, it is no wonder that beauty enjoys, at best, a rather mixed reputation.
6It is not, of course, the desire to be beautiful that is wrong but the obligation to be – or to try. What is accepted by most women as a flattering idealization of their sex is a way of making women feel inferior to what they actually are – or normally grow to be. For the ideal of beauty is administered as a form of self-oppression. Women are taught to see their bodies in parts, and to evaluate each part separately. Breasts, feet, hips, waistline, neck, eyes, nose, complexion, hair, and so on – each in turn is submitted to an anxious, fretful, often despairing scrutiny. Even if some pass muster, some will always be found wanting. Nothing less than perfection will do.
7In men, good looks is a whole, something taken in at a glance. It does not need to be confirmed by giving measurements of different regions of the body, nobody encourages a man to dissect his appearance, feature by feature. As for perfection, that is considered trivial – almost unmanly. Indeed, in the ideally good-looking man a small imperfection or blemish is considered positively desirable. According to one movie critic ( a women) who is a declared Robert Redford fan, it is having that cluster of skin-colored moles on one cheek that saves Redford from being merely a “ pretty face”. Think of the depreciation of women – as well as of beauty – that is implied in that judgment.
8“The privileges of beauty are immense,” said Cocteau. To be sure, beauty is a form of power. And deservedly so. What is lamentable is that it is the only form of power that most women are encouraged to seek. This power is always conceived in relation to men; it is not the power to do but the power to attract. It is a power that negates itself. For this power is not one that can be chosen freely – at least, not by women – or renounced without social censure.
9To preen, for a woman, can never be just a pleasure. It is also a duty. It is her work. If a woman does real work – and even if she has clambered up to a leading position in politics, law, medicine, business, or whatever—she is always under pressure to confess that she still works at being attractive. But it so far as she is keeping up as one of the Fair Sex, she brings under suspicion her very capacity to be objective, professional, authoritative, thoughtful. Damned if they do—women are. And damned if they don’t.
10One could hardly ask for more important evidence of the dangers of considering persons as split between what is “inside” and what is “outside” than that interminable half-comic half-tragic tale, the oppression of women. How easy it is to start off by defining women as caretakers of their surfaces, and then to disparage them ( or find them adorable) for being “superficial”. It is a crude trap, and it has worked for too long. But to get out of the trap requires that women get some critical distance from that excellence and privilege which is beauty, enough distance to see how much beauty itself has been abridged in order to prop up the mythology of the “feminine”. There should be a way of saving beauty from women – and for them.
From: J. Trimmer and M. Hairston, pp.300-304.
字数【446】
这篇文章说的是有一种能力对于我们来说很重要，叫“恢复速度”，就是从沮丧中回到平衡的速度，这个是现代成功人士的一种重要指标。文章比较新，主题也新，非常励志！
What is Your Recovery Rate?
What is your recovery rate? How long does it take you to recover from actions and behaviors that upset you? Minutes? Hours? Days? Weeks? The longer it takes you to recover, the more influence that incident has on your actions, and the less able you are to perform to your personal best. In a nutshell, the longer it takes you to recover, the weaker you are and the poorer your performance.
You are well aware that you need to exercise to keep the body fit and, no doubt, accept that a reasonable measure of health is the speed in which your heart and respiratory system recovers after exercise. Likewise the faster you let go of an issue that upsets you, the faster you return to an equilibrium, the healthier you will be. The best example of this behavior is found with professional sportspeople. They know that the faster they can forget an incident or missd opportunity and get on with the game, the better their performance. In fact, most measure the time it takes them to overcome and forget an incident in a game and most reckon a recovery rate of 30 seconds is too long!
Imagine yourself to be an actor in a play on the stage. Your aim is to play your part to the best of your ability. You have been given a script and at the end of each sentence is a ful stop. Each time you get to the end of the sentence you start a new one and although the next sentence is related to the last it is not affected by it. Your job is to deliver each sentence to the best of your ability.
Don’t live your life in the past! Learn to live in the present, to overcome the past. Stop the past from influencing your daily life. Don’t allow thoughts of the past to reduce your personal best. Stop the past from interfering with your life. Learn to recover quickly.
Remember: Rome wasn’t built in a day. Reflect on your recovery rate each day. Every day before you go to bed, look at your progress. Don’t lie in bed saying to you, “I did that wrong.” “I should have done better there.” No. look at your day and note when you made an effort to place a full stop after an incident. This is a success. You are taking control of your life. Remember this is a step by step process. This is not a make-over. You are undertaking real change here. Your aim: reduce the time spent in recovery.
The way forward?
Live in the present. Not in the precedent.
Three Days to See
All of us have read thrilling stories in which the hero had only a limited and specified time to live. Sometimes it was as long as a year, sometimes as short as 24 hours. But always we were interested in discovering just how the doomed hero chose to spend his last days or his last hours. I speak, of course, of free men who have a choice, not condemned criminals whose sphere of activities is strictly delimited.
Such stories set us thinking, wondering what we should do under similar circumstances. What events, what experiences, what associations should we crowd into those last hours as mortal beings, what regrets?
Sometimes I have thought it would be an excellent rule to live each day as if we should die tomorrow. Such an attitude would emphasize sharply the values of life. We should live each day with gentleness, vigor and a keenness of appreciation which are often lost when time stretches before us in the constant panorama of more days and months and years to come. There are those, of course, who would adopt the Epicurean motto of “Eat, drink, and be merry”. But most people would be chastened by the certainty of impending death.
In stories the doomed hero is usually saved at the last minute by some stroke of fortune, but almost always his sense of values is changed. He becomes more appreciative of the meaning of life and its permanent spiritual values. It has often been noted that those who live, or have lived, in the shadow of death bring a mellow sweetness to everything they do.
Most of us, however, take life for granted. We know that one day we must die, but usually we picture that day as far in the future. When we are in buoyant health, death is all but unimaginable. We seldom think of it. The days stretch out in an endless vista. So we go about our petty tasks, hardly aware of our listless attitude toward life.
The same lethargy, I am afraid, characterizes the use of all our faculties and senses. Only the deaf appreciate hearing, only the blind realize the manifold blessings that lie in sight. Particularly does this observation apply to those who have lost sight and hearing in adult life. But those who have never suffered impairment of sight or hearing seldom make the fullest use of these blessed faculties. Their eyes and ears take in all sights and sounds hazily, without concentration and with little appreciation. It is the same old story of not being grateful for what we have until we lose it, of not being conscious of health until we are ill.
I have often thought it would be a blessing if each human being were stricken blind and deaf for a few days at some time during his early adult life. Darkness would make him more appreciative of sight; silence would teach him the joys of sound.
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