Life is so much fuller than any book can be. All this story can be read, I suppose, in a couple of hours or so, but I have been living and reflecting upon and reconsidering the substance of it for over forty years. I do not see how this book can give you any impression but that of a career all strained upon the frame of one tragic relationship, yet no life unless it is a very short young life can have that simplicity5. Of all the many things I have found beautiful and wonderful, Mary was the most wonderful to me, she is in my existence like a sunlit lake seen among mountains, of all the edges by which life has wrought6 me she was the keenest. Nevertheless she was not all my life, nor the form of all my life. For a time after her death I could endure nothing of my home, I could not bear the presence of your mother or you, I hated the possibility of consolation7, I went away into Italy, and it was only by an enormous effort that I could resume my interest in that scheme of work to which my life is given. But it is manifest I still live, I live and work and feel and share beauty....
It seems to me more and more as I live longer, that most poetry and most literature and particularly the literature of the past is discordant8 with the vastness and variety, the reserves and resources and recuperations of life as we live it to-day. It is the expression of life under cruder and more rigid9 conditions than ours, lived by people who loved and hated more naïvely, aged10 sooner and died younger than we do. Solitary11 persons and single events dominated them as they do not dominate us. We range wider, last longer, and escape more and more from intensity12 towards understanding. And already this astounding13 blow begins to take its place among other events, as a thing strange and terrible indeed, but related to all the strangeness and mystery of life, part of the universal mysteries of despair and futility14 and death that have troubled my consciousness since childhood. For a time the death of Mary obscured her life for me, but now her living presence is more in my mind again. I begin to see that it is the reality of her existence and not the accidents of her end that matter most. It signifies less that she should have flung out of life when it seemed that her living could only have meant disaster to herself and to all she loved, than that all her life should have been hampered15 and restricted. Through all her life this brave and fine and beautiful being was for the most part of her possibilities, wasted in a splendid setting, magnificently wasted if you will, but wasted.
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1 tragic | |
adj.悲剧的,悲剧性的,悲惨的 | |
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2 sketchy | |
adj.写生的,写生风格的,概略的 | |
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3 labored | |
adj.吃力的,谨慎的v.努力争取(for)( labor的过去式和过去分词 );苦干;详细分析;(指引擎)缓慢而困难地运转 | |
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4 industrious | |
adj.勤劳的,刻苦的,奋发的 | |
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5 simplicity | |
n.简单,简易;朴素;直率,单纯 | |
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6 wrought | |
v.引起;以…原料制作;运转;adj.制造的 | |
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7 consolation | |
n.安慰,慰问 | |
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8 discordant | |
adj.不调和的 | |
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9 rigid | |
adj.严格的,死板的;刚硬的,僵硬的 | |
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10 aged | |
adj.年老的,陈年的 | |
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11 solitary | |
adj.孤独的,独立的,荒凉的;n.隐士 | |
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12 intensity | |
n.强烈,剧烈;强度;烈度 | |
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13 astounding | |
adj.使人震惊的vt.使震惊,使大吃一惊astound的现在分词) | |
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14 futility | |
n.无用 | |
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15 hampered | |
妨碍,束缚,限制( hamper的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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