朗讀練習-The Importance of Living, Chapter 2 part 2

II. EARTH-BOUND
The situation then is this: man wants to live, but he still must live
upon this earth. All questions of living in heaven must be brushed
aside. Let not the spirit take wings and soar to the abode of the gods
and forget the earth. Are we not mortals, condemned to die? The
span of life vouchsafed us, threescore and ten, is short enough, if
the spirit gets too haughty and wants to live forever, but on the other
hand, it is also long enough, if the spirit is a little humble. One can
learn such a lot and enjoy such a lot in seventy years, and three
generations is a long, long time to see human follies and acquire
human wisdom. Anyone who is wise and has lived long enough to
witness the changes of fashion and morals and politics through the
rise and fall of three generations should be perfectly satisfied to rise
from his seat and go away saying, “It was a good show,” when the
curtain falls.
For we are of the earth, earth-born and earth-bound. There is
nothing to be unhappy about the fact that we are, as it were,
delivered upon this beautiful earth as its transient guests. Even if it
were a dark dungeon, we still would have to make the best of it; it
would be ungrateful of us not to do so when we have, instead of a
dungeon, such a beautiful earth to live on for a good part of a
century. Sometimes we get too ambitious and disdain the humble
and yet generous earth. Yet a sentiment for this Mother Earth, a
feeling of true affection and attachment, one must have for this
temporary abode of our body and spirit, if we are to have a sense of
spiritual harmony.
We have to have, therefore, a kind of animal skepticism as well as
animal faith, taking this earthly life largely as it is. And we have to
retain the wholeness of nature that we see in Thoreau who felt
himself kin to the sod and partook largely of its dull patience, in
winter expecting the sun of spring, who in his cheapest moments
was apt to think that it was not his business to be “seeking the spirit,”
but as much the spirit’s business to seek him, and whose happiness,
as he described it, was a good deal like that of the wood-chucks The
earth, after all is real, as the heaven is unreal: how fortunate is man
that he is born between the real earth and the unreal heaven!
Any good practical philosophy must start out with the recognition
of our having a body. It is high time that some among us made the
straight admission that we are animals, an admission which is
inevitable since the establishment of the basic truth at the Darwinian
theory and the great progress of biology, especially bio-chemistry. It
was very unfortunate that our teachers and philosophers belonged to
the so-called intellectual class, with a characteristic professional
pride of intellect. The men of the spirit were as proud of the spirit as
the shoemaker is proud of leather. Sometimes even the spirit was
not sufficiently remote and abstract and they had to use the words,
“essence” or “soul” or “idea,” writing them with capital letters to
frighten us. The human body was distilled in this scholastic machine
into a spirit, and the spirit was further concentrated into a kind of
essence, forgetting that even alcoholic drinks must have a “body”—
mixed with plain water—if they are to be palatable at all. And we
poor laymen were supposed to drink that concentrated quintessence
of spirit. This over-emphasis on the spirit was fatal It made us war
with our natural instincts, and my chief criticism is that it made a
whole and rounded view of human nature impossible. It proceeded
also from an inadequate knowledge of biology and psychology, and
of the place of the senses, emotions and, above all, instincts in our
life. Man is made of flesh and spirit both, and it should be
philosophy’s business to see that the mind and body live
harmoniously together, that there be a reconciliation between the
two.