Change Makes Life Beautiful
By 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 theme 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.
参考译文
生命美于变化
将一切事物和事物的原则统统看作经常变化着的形态或风尚，日益成为近代思想界的趋势。让我们从表面的事情——我们的生理活动说起。譬如说，选取这么一个微妙的时刻，即在酷暑中猛然浸入滔滔清流的那一刹那和极其愉快的感觉。
在那一刹那间的全部生理活动，难道不是具有科学名称的各种元素的一种化合作用吗?不过，这些元素，像磷、石灰、微细的纤维质，不仅存在于人体之中，而且在与人体毫不相干的地方也能检查出它们的存在。我们的生理活动——血液的流通，眼睛中水晶体的消耗和恢复，每一道光波、每一次声浪对于脑组织所引起的变异——都不外是这些元素的永久的运动，而科学把这些运动过程还原为更为简单和基本的力量的作用。
正像我们身体所赖以构成的元素一样，这些力量在我们身体以外也同样发挥着作用——它可以使铁生锈，使谷物成熟。这些元素，在种种气流吹送之下，在我们身外向四面八方传播：人的诞生，人的姿态，人的死亡，以及在人的坟头上生长出紫罗兰——这不过是成千上万化合结果的点滴例子而己。
人类那轮廓分明、长久不变的面颜和肢体，不过是一种表象，在它那框架之内，我们好把种种化合的元素凝聚一团——这好像是蛛网的纹样，那织网的细丝从网中穿出，又引向他方。在这一点上，我们的生命有些像那火焰——它也是种种力量会合的结果，这会合虽不断延续，那些力量却早晚要各自飘散。
