新編大學(xué)英語第一冊unit12 Text C: Let the Questions In
UNIT 12 AFTER-CLASS READING 2; New College English (I)
Let the Questions In
1 I have a friend whose whole life plan consists of keeping questions at bay. "Keep yourself surrounded by sound," Ed says. "Always keep moving."
2 When he is driving, he keeps the radio on in his car. When he walks in the house (he lives alone), he turns on the radio or the television. He never allows himself to be alone with himself.
3 Drumming fingers on the windowpane, it's as if he senses a presence at the window. He doesn't like to go out into the country. He avoids the mountains, the wind, the quiet fields. They make him nervous. He likes to keep busy.
4 A strange thing about life in America it often seems designed to block our questioning. It's so busy, it can rush us into death before we've ever had a chance to stop and think. We might never really stop to ask, "Why?"
5 "Life," Blaise Pascal wrote in an earlier era, "is a search for continual diversion." That is, for distraction, for keeping the mind occupied with superficial things, for keeping out the voices.
6 Which voices? The voices that ask questions.
7 What am I doing on this planet, with the hot sun resting on my face, the wind blowing through my hair? Where am I going? What am I trying to accomplish with my life? Why am I here?
8 Human beings are thinking, question-asking animals. We cannot live like cats or dogs. We keep asking ourselves that simple question, "Why?"
9 The questioning impulse in us is our deepest instinct. It is deeper even than the hunger for food. Deeper than the drive to sleep. This instinct to ask questions keeps intruding even during sleep.
10 More than anything else, to live, you must pay attention to such questions and form some satisfactory answers to them. To truly live is to take charge of your liberties and decide what you intend to do with the short span of years that you are given.
11 Bill, another friend of mine, was giving a lecture in Wisconsin some time ago in one of those little rural towns that hosts a branch of the state university. He went for a walk across the late October fields, just to be alone.
12 Geese were flying against the gray clouds overhead. He could see his breath, it was so cold, and his feet crunched the frostbitten earth. Rows of cornstalks lay withering as far as his eye could see, out to the woods.
13 As dusk gathered in the dark shadows, my friend suddenly saw the story line of his life the way he had been living saw it as if it belonged to someone else, and he didn't like it. He felt autumn dying all around him.
14 Bill knew he needed a new start. In which direction, he didn't yet know. When he got back to his motel room to prepare his lecture, his heart was pounding. He has never forgotten that walk in the fields, where in the silence, a question awakened him.
15 If that question had not arisen, he says, he might still be where he was. It makes him shudder.
16 Moments of questioning creep up on us. They are rare. We need to seize them. At such moments, a person may fix a goal, plot a course, or determine a whole life. Some thinkers call these defining moments times when we fill our whole lives with meaning, purpose, goals. The times when we take charge and don't merely drift with the tide. We all have such moments. Presidential candidates certainly have had them. We all have.
17 William Wordsworth wrote of them:
Not for these I raise
The song of thanks and praise;
But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense of outward things,
Failings from us, vanishingss.
20 "The unexamined life is not worth living," Socrates wrote some 23 centuries ago. That is a harsh judgment on my friend and on all of us.
21 Often we do not allow the questions to rise up to full height and meet us. We keep too busy to allow ourselves to take that long valuable look down the years backward maybe, forward certainly.
22 I have often found that air travel is the best time for doing that. It may not seem that I am doing anything. My mind isn't exactly "working." And yet, in fact, the wonder of being alive sweeps over me. And its fragility. And the beauty of it. And the need to concentrate my energies.
23 In any case, I always feel a sense of thankfulness, since to "ex-sist" (to stand forth out of nothingness, as the Latin roots of the word suggest) is to be receiving a moment-by-moment gift from God.
24 Your own views, though, may be less religious.
25 However diverse our perspectives, such moments of reflection have become too rare today. And yet the need to take charge of our fleeting lives to decide who we will be and what we will try to do is just as pressing as it ever was for Socrates and for all those others who have preceded us.
26 Take the time to let the questions in, an old priest once counseled me. I took his advice and never regretted that I did.
