英语美文：What I have lived for 我为什么而活？

　　What I have lived for 我为什么而活？

　　Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing¹ for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable² pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither³, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish⁴, reaching to the very verge⁵ of despair.

　　I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy⁶ - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim⁷ 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 though 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 apprehend⁸ the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux⁹. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved.

　　Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate¹⁰ in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a 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 alleviate¹¹ this evil, but I cannot, 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.

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