研究生公共英语思辨阅读与写作
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2020.02.10 ~ 2020.05.31
  • 福建师范大学
  • 建议每周学习2-3小时
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第3次开课

开始:2020-02-10

截止:2020-05-31

课程已进行至

16/16周

成绩预发布时间 2020-05-30

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福建师范大学
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福建师范大学
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福建师范大学
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福建师范大学
副教授

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The Art of Living

By 赵静怡2019李新庭班历史 2020-05-30 795次浏览

The art of living is to know when to hold fast and when to let go. For life is a paradox: it
enjoins us to cling to its many gifts even while it ordains their eventual relinquishment. The
rabbis of old put it this way: "A man comes to this world with his fist clenched, but when he
dies, his hand is open."
Surely we ought to hold fast to life. For it is wondrous, and full of a beauty that breaks
through every pore of God's own earth. We know that this is so, but all too often we
recognize this truth only in our backward glance when we remember what it was and then
suddenly realize that it is no more.
We remember a beauty that faded, a love that waned. But we remember with far greater
pain that we did not see that beauty when it flowered, that we failed to respond with love
when it was tendered.
A recent experience re-taught me this truth. I was hospitalized following a severe heart
attack that had been in intensive care for several days. It was not a pleasant place.
One morning, I had to have some additional tests. The required machines were located
in a building at the opposite end of the hospital, so I had to be wheeled across the courtyard
on a gurney.
As we emerged from our unit, the sunlight hit me. That's all there was to my experience.
Just the light of the sun, and yet how beautiful it was - how warming, how sparkling, how
brilliant!
I looked to see whether anyone else relished the sun's golden glow, but everyone was
hurrying to and fro, most with eyes fixed on the ground. Then I remembered how often I, too,
had been indifferent to the grandeur of each day, too preoccupied with petty and
sometimes even mean concerns to respond to the splendor of it all.
The insight gleaned from that experience is really as commonplace as was the
experience itself: life's gifts are precious-but we are too heedless of them.
Here then is the first pile of life's paradoxical demands on us: Never too busy for the
wonder and the awe of life. Be reverent before each dawning day. Embrace each hour. Seize
each golden minute.
Hold fast to life... but not so fast that you cannot let go. This is the second side of life's
coin, the opposite pole of its paradox: we must accept our losses, and learn how to let go.
This is not an easy lesson to learn, especially when we are young and think that world is
ours to command, that whatever we desire with the full force of or passionate being can, nay,
will, be ours. But then life moves along to confront us with realities, and slowly but surly this
second truth dawns upon us.
At every stage of life we sustain losses- and grow in the process. We begin our
independent lives only when we emerge from the womb and lose its protective shelter. We
enter a progression of schools, then we leave our mothers and fathers and our childhood
homes. We get married and have children and then have to let them go. We face the
gradual or not so gradual waning of our own strength. And ultimately, as the parable of the
open and closed hand suggests, we must confront the inevitability of our own demise, losing
ourselves, as it were, all that we were or dreamed to be.
But why should we be reconciled to life's contradictory demands? Why fashion things of
beauty when beauty is evanescent? Why give our heart in love when those we love will
ultimately be torn from our grasp?
In order to resolve this paradox, we must seek a wider perspective, viewing our lives as
through windows that open on eternity. Once we do that, we realize that though our lives
are finite, our deeds on earth weave a timeless pattern.
Life is never just being. It is a becoming, a relentless flowing on. Our parents live on
through us, and we will live on through our children. The institutions we build endure, and
we will endure through them. The beauty we fashion cannot be dimmed by death. Our flesh
may perish, our hands will wither, but that which they create in beauty and goodness and
truth lives on for all time to come.
Don't spend and waste your lives accumulating objects that will only turn to dust and
ashes. Pursue not so much the material as the ideal, for ideals alone invest life with meaning
and are of enduring worth.
Add love to a house and you have a home. Add righteousness to a city and you have a
community. Add truth to a pile of red brick and you have a school. Add religion to the
humblest of edifices and you have a sanctuary. Add justice to the far-flung round of human
endeavor and you have civilization. Put them all together, exalt them above their present
imperfections, add to them the vision of humankind redeemed, forever free of need and
strife and you have a future lighted with the radiant colors of hope.
 

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