晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 3. Three Passions I Have Lived for

[00:00.55]Passage 3. Three Passions I Have Lived for

[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.  www.hxen.net

[02:28.36]I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again

[02:32.52]if the chance were offered me.