双语有声阅读：自由人的信仰(罗素)

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人的生命存在就在于死亡来袭之前,珍惜那些使他短暂的生命变得高贵的思想,鄙弃对命运的恐惧,对自建的圣坛顶礼膜拜,不受机缘的摆布,摆脱主宰他外部生活的粗暴统治而取得心灵的自由,敢于骄傲地向那些不可抗拒的压力挑战

 

A Freeman's Worship

 

 

The life of Man, viewed outwardly, is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of Nature. The slave is doomed² to worship Time and Fate and Death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour³. But, great as they are, to think of them greatly, to feel their passionless splendour, is greater still. And such thought makes us free men; we no longer bow before the inevitable⁴ in Oriental subjection, but we absorb it, and make it a part of ourselves. To abandon the struggle for private happiness, to expel all eagerness of temporary desire, to burn with passion for eternal things--this is emancipation⁵, and this is the free man's worship. And this liberation is effected by a contemplation of Fate; for Fate itself is subdued⁶ by the mind which leaves nothing to be purged⁷ by the purifying fire of Time.

 

United with his fellow-men by the strongest of all ties, the tie of a common doom¹, the free man finds that a new vision is with him always, shedding over every daily task the light of love. The life of Man is a long march through the night, surrounded by invisible foes⁸, tortured by weariness and pain, towards a goal that few can hope to reach, and where none may tarry long. One by one, as they march, our comrades vanish from our sight, seized by the silent orders of omnipotent⁹ Death. Very brief is the time in which we can help them, in which their happiness or misery¹⁰ is decided¹¹. Be it ours to shed sunshine on their path, to lighten their sorrows by the balm of sympathy, to give them the pure joy of a never-tiring affection, to strengthen failing courage, to instil¹² faith in hours of despair. Let us not weigh in grudging¹³ scales their merits and demerits, but let us think only of their need--of the sorrows, the difficulties, perhaps the blindnesses, that make the misery of their lives; let us remember that they are fellow-sufferers in the same darkness, actors in the same tragedy as ourselves. And so, when their day is over, when their good and their evil have become eternal by the immortality¹⁴ of the past, be it ours to feel that, where they suffered, where they failed, no deed of ours was the cause; but wherever a spark of the divine fire kindled¹⁵ in their hearts, we were ready with encouragement, with sympathy, with brave words in which high courage glowed.

 

Brief and powerless is Man's life; on him and all his race the slow, sure doom falls pitiless and dark. Blind to good and evil, reckless of destruction, omnipotent matter rolls on its relentless¹⁶ way; for Man, condemned¹⁷ to-day to lose his dearest, to-morrow himself to pass through the gate of darkness, it remains¹⁸ only to cherish, ere yet the blow falls, the lofty thoughts that ennoble his little day; disdaining¹⁹ the coward terrors of the slave of Fate, to worship at the shrine²⁰ that his own hands have built; undismayed by the empire of chance, to preserve a mind free from the wanton tyranny that rules his outward life; proudly defiant²¹ of the irresistible²² forces that tolerate, for a moment, his knowledge and his condemnation²³, to sustain alone, a weary but unyielding Atlas²⁴, the world that his own ideals have fashioned despite the trampling²⁵ march of unconscious power.

 

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