11 Change Makes Life Beautiful

Walter Pater

To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought. Let us begin with that which is without—our physical life. Fix upon it in one of its more exquisite intervals, the moment, for instance, of delicious recoil from the flood of water in summer heat.

What is the whole physical life in that moment but a combination of natural elements to which science gives their names? But these elements, phosphorus and lime and delicate fibers, are present not in the human body alone: we detect them in places most remote from it. Our physical life is a perpetual motion of them—the passage of the blood, the wasting and repairing of the lenses of the eye, the modification of the tissues of the brain under every ray of light and sound—processes which science reduces to simpler and more elementary forces.

Like the elements of which we are composed, the action of these forces extends beyond us: it rusts iron and ripens corn. Far out on every side of us those elements are broadcast, driven in many currents; and birth and gesture and death and the springing of violets from the grave are but a few out of ten thousand resultant combinations.

That clear, perpetual outline of face and limb is but an image of ours, under which we group them a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it. This at least of flame—like our life has, that it is but the concurrence , renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.

难词释义

recoil [rɪˈkɔɪl] n. 反冲；后坐力

phosphorus [ˈfɑːsfərəs] n. 磷

perpetual [pərˈpetʃuəl] adj. 不间断的；持续的；长久的

ripen [ˈraɪpən] v. （使）成熟

concurrence [kənˈkɜːrəns] n. 同时发生；同时出现

生命因变化而美丽

沃尔特·佩特

视一切事物及其原则为不断变化的形式或风尚，这已日益成为当代思潮发展的趋势。就先从外部的事情——我们的生理活动说起吧。选取一个无比微妙的间隙，譬如，在炎炎酷暑中，滔滔水流给人带来极度愉悦冲击感的一刻。

在那一刻，全部的生理活动难道不是被科学赋予名称的各种自然元素的化合作用吗？但是这些元素，比如磷、石灰和微小的纤维，并不仅仅存在于人体中：在与人体毫不相关的地方也能发现它们。我们的生理活动就是这些元素的恒久运动——如血液的流动，眼睛晶状体的受损与修复，每一束光线、每一段声波对脑组织造成的变化——这些过程都被科学还原为更简单、更基本的力量的作用。

就像元素构成人体一样，这些力量的作用也在人体之外产生着影响：它可以使铁生锈，使谷物成熟。那些元素在各种气流的作用下，向人体之外的四面八方传播：人的诞生、姿态、死亡以及坟墓上生长的紫罗兰，皆不过是成千上万元素化合作用结果中的个别例子而已。

人类轮廓分明、长久不变的面容和肢体只是表象而已，在这表象之下，我们将各种元素组合成蜘蛛网似的图样，其中的丝线则穿过这张网向外延展，引向他方。从这一方面来看，我们的生命就有些像火焰，它是各种力量的汇集，这种汇集虽不断更新延续，但力量却迟早会飘散。