I thought that perhaps I might get back those intimations of outlook and relief if I clambered alone into some high solitude2 and thought. I had a crude attractive vision of myself far above the heat and noise, communing with the sky. It was the worst season for climbing, and on the spur of the moment I could do nothing but get up the Rochers de Naye on the wrong side, and try and find some eyrie that was neither slippery nor wet. I did not succeed. In one place I slipped down a wet bank for some yards and held at last by a root; if I had slipped much further I should not be writing here now; and I came back a very weary and bruised3 climber, without any meditation4....
Three nights after when I was in bed I became very lucidly5 awake—it must have been about two or three in the morning—and the vision of life returned to me, with that same effect of enlargement and illumination. It was as if the great stillness that is behind and above and around the world of sense did in some way communicate with me. It bade me rouse my spirit and go on with the thoughts and purposes that had been stirring and proliferating7 in my mind when I had returned to England from the Cape1. "Dismiss your passion." But I urged that that I could not do; there was the thought of Mary subjugated8 and weeping, the smarting memory of injury and defeat, the stains of subterfuge9 and discovery, the aching separation. No matter, the stillness answered, in the end all that is just to temper you for your greater uses.... I cannot forget, I insisted. Do not forget, but for the present this leads you no whither; this chapter has ended; dismiss it and turn to those other things. You are not only Stephen Stratton who fell into adultery; in these silences he is a little thing and far away; here and with me you are Man—Everyman—in this round world in which your lot has fallen. But Mary, I urged, to forget Mary is a treason, an ingratitude10, seeing that she loved me. But the stillness did not command me to forget her, but only to turn my face now to the great work that lies before mankind. And that work? That work, so far as your share goes, is first to understand, to solve, and then to achieve, to work out in the measure of yourself that torment11 of pity and that desire for order and justice which together saturate12 your soul. Go about the world, embrue yourself with life, make use of that confusedly striving brain that I have lifted so painfully out of the deadness of matter....
"But who are you?" I cried out suddenly to the night. "Who are you?"
I sat up on the side of my bed. The dawn was just beginning to break up the featureless blackness of the small hours. "This is just some odd corner of my brain," I said....
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1 cape | |
n.海角,岬;披肩,短披风 | |
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2 solitude | |
n. 孤独; 独居,荒僻之地,幽静的地方 | |
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3 bruised | |
[医]青肿的,瘀紫的 | |
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4 meditation | |
n.熟虑,(尤指宗教的)默想,沉思,(pl.)冥想录 | |
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5 lucidly | |
adv.清透地,透明地 | |
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6 lucid | |
adj.明白易懂的,清晰的,头脑清楚的 | |
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7 proliferating | |
激增( proliferate的现在分词 ); (迅速)繁殖; 增生; 扩散 | |
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8 subjugated | |
v.征服,降伏( subjugate的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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9 subterfuge | |
n.诡计;藉口 | |
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10 ingratitude | |
n.忘恩负义 | |
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11 torment | |
n.折磨;令人痛苦的东西(人);vt.折磨;纠缠 | |
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12 saturate | |
vt.使湿透,浸透;使充满,使饱和 | |
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