What I Have Lived For
Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair.
I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy ― 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 rim 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 apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. 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 reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people ― a hated 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 alleviate the evil, but I can''t, 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.
默 写
默写也是提高写作的一个重要环节，即把背熟的东西付诸纸端。这个过程不仅是为了检验自己的记忆效果，更为重要的是训练正确的书面表达能力。在英语学习中，我们少有机会动笔写英文，长期以来，手笔生疏，导致提笔即错。再者，由于受汉语思维和习惯的种种影响，在潜意识里容易犯一些英语表达错误。普遍存在的语言错误包括主谓一致、时态处理、冠词用法、名词单复数形式、单词拼写等，尤其在单词拼写方面，很多人混淆词性，把society, economy, difficulty写成social, economic, difficult;再如字母位置错误，将true, tired, modern写作ture, tried, morden;诸如此类。这些看似微妙的错误如果不加以有意识的克服，可能会发展为根深蒂固的习惯，成为写作中的重大弊病。通过默写，写出曾经记诵过的段落字句，之后自我查验、批改，发现并纠正在动笔中的错误，可以有效克服自己潜意识中的英文错误，提高实际写作时的熟练和准确程度。