优秀英语短篇散文：你知道自己为了什么而生存?

英语自学网

　　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 my life for a few hours for
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 it 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 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.