生命虽然短暂 却能盛开美丽的花朵

音频下载[点击右键另存为]
This I believe is independently produced by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick. Our new book 'This I Believe Volume II' collecting 75 essays from the series is now available from the NPR shop and from NPR.org/thisibelieve.

I believe in adaptation.

I believe in a silver lining.

I believe that being flexible keeps me going.

I believe every single person deserves to be acknowledged.

This I believe.

Our This I Believe essay today comes from Dalia Sofer, author of the novel, 'The Septembers Of Shiraz'. Sofer was born in Teheran and as a child lived through the 1978 Iranian Revolution, when she says a whole country was coming undone at an incredible speed. Here is our series curator, independent producer, Jay Allison.

After the revolution, when the new regime was in place in Iran, Dalia Sofer's brothers were sent away, her friends were gone and her father was imprisoned. She says she lived with a sense of chaos and instability that may not have created her belief, but certainly had an effect on it. Here is Dalia Sofer with her essay for This I Believe.

I am a child of revolution, alas, not of the flower power (非暴力政治主张)variety, but of turban power. I grew up with absolutes: Love the king, down with the king, love the imam. Walking to school in 1980s Teheran amid slogans sprayed on walls and billboards, I remember this early belief, or rather, a child’s sense of what would eventually become a belief: We all want to prove we exist.

Much is driven by this desire. Nations are built, wars are fought, gangs are formed, political parties are born. Personal actions, too, smaller and more delicate, follow suit. Mortgages are signed, marriage contracts sealed, birth certificates filled in, death certificates handed out. Comfort comes through the signature on the dotted line. Some even take their earthly paraphernalia, a grandfather’s watch, a favorite hat, a love poem, to their graves. Foolish, but affecting codas（尾声） to soon-to-be forgotten lives.

Of course permanence is an illusion. Borders shift, fortunes fall, colors fade, lovers drift, spouses hang by the thread of that dotted line. What once seemed vital gets forgotten.

As a teen I carried 'Nausea' by Sartre(萨特，法国小说家，剧作家，哲学家) everywhere I went, until l actually began to feel nauseated and returned it to the library, unfinished. Existential Nihilism（存在虚无主义）, I decided, was not for me. What I came to believe, as the years progressed, was that the desire to affirm one’s existence is not in itself foolish. The desire to do so through permanence is. I find beauty in life's ephemera, though like most people I am afraid of loss and endings.

Still, despite the only certitude I have, the knowledge that I will die, I find pleasure and love if not meaning. Often, this happens when an experience evokes an unbroken joy. A ray of light beaming into a warm room on a winter morning, the uninterrupted presence of someone I love next to me, and things, less concrete, a memory, a song, a word.

In his 'Myth of Sisyphus'(西西弗的神话), Albert Camus（加缪，法国小说家，剧作家） likens our absurd existence to the fate the Greek mythological figure, whose task was to push a rock up a mountain, watch it roll down, only to begin again fully aware of the futility of this condition. Camus concludes that the "struggle itself toward summits is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Like Sisyphus, I get up every morning, grab a cup of coffee and sit at my desk. I stare at the lines from the poem 'Tobacco Shop' by Fernando Pessoa, pasted on my wall. Pessoa writes: 

But the Tobacco Shop owner has come to the door and stands there.

I looked at him, straining my half-turned neck,

Straining my half-blind soul.

He'll die and so will I.

He'll leave his signboard, I will leave poems.

A little later the street will die where his signboard hung.

And so will the language my poems were written in.

I began writing and I think, "Yes, dear Fernando, but so what? My lines exist for now, not even, mind you, in my original language, which has not yet vanished, but not doubt will in my bloodline." And If I were not overly concerned with the hazards of smoking, I would light up a cigarette.

Dalia Sofer with her essay for This I Believe. Sofer says she finds more than mere relief in her conviction. She finds the possibility of true pleasure and love in an impermanent existence. At NPR.org/thisibelieve you will find our invitation to send us your own essay for this series. For This I Believe, I'm Jay Allison.

Jay Allison is co-editor with Dan Gediman, John Gregory and Viki Merrick of the new book This I Believe Volume II, more personal philosophies of remarkable men and women.

Support for This I Believe comes from Prutential Retirement.