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I spent my teenage years scrambling up the mountain of mathematics. Midway up the slope, however, I staggered to a halt, gasping in the rarefied air, well before I reached the heights where the equations of Einstein and Dirac would have made sense. Nowadays I add, subtract, multiply, and do long division when no calculator is handy, and I can do algebra and geometry and even trigonometry in a pinch, but that is about all that I've kept from the language of numbers. Still, I remember glimpsing patterns in mathematics that seems as bold and beautiful as a skyful of stars.
我的青年时代一直在攀登数学的高峰。登到山坡的一半时，我摇摇晃晃地停下来，呼吸稀薄的空气，这时，距离我能够理解爱因斯坦或狄拉克的等式的高度还相差很远。如今，我可以加、减、乘，并在手边没有计算器的情况下做长除法；我还可以在急需的情况下做代数、几何，甚至三角几何。这便是我对数字语言了解的仅存硕果。然而，我依然记得匆匆瞥见的数学排列，醒目美丽，如满天繁星。
I never more aware of the limitations of language than when I try to describe beauty. Language can create its own loveliness, of course, but it not deliver to us the radiance we apprehend in the world, any more than an capture the stunning swiftness of a hawk or the withering ernova. Eva's wedding allbum holas o a faint glimmer the g itself. All that pictures or words can do is gesture beyond themselves toward the fleeting glory that stirs our hearts. So I keep gesturing.
在我试图描述美的时候，就会充分意识到语言的局限性。当然，语言也可以创造出自己的可爱之处，但是，它无法传达我们所领会到的世界的真正风采，正如照片也无法形象地捕捉山鹰的异常敏捷或超新星陨落时的威力。伊娃的婚礼相册仅仅体现了婚礼本身的些许光彩。图片和文字所能做的，只是让我们不要忘记那些激动人心，稍纵即逝的辉煌时刻。所以，我会一直写作。
"All nature is meant to make us think of paradise," Thomas Merton observed. Because the Creation puts on a nonstop show, beauty is free and inexhaustible, but we need training in order to peceive more than the most obvious kinds. Even 15 billion years or so after the Big Bang, echoes of that event still linger in the form of background radiation, only a few degrees above absolute zero. Just so, I believe, the experience of beauty is an echo of the order and power that permeate the universe. To measure background radiation, we need subtle instruments; to measure beauty, we need alert intelligence and our five keen sensess.
托马斯·默顿在观察中写道：“大自然中的一切都会带给我们天堂般的美妙感受”大自然的鬼斧神工在不断上演，带给我们免费而又无穷尽的美。只是们需要一定的素养才能体会到一些并不显而易见的美。原始大爆炸已过了150亿年左右，大爆炸的痕迹仍以背景辐射的形式存留在宇宙中间，只比绝对零度高几度。因此，我相信我们对美的感受是与宇宙中无处不在的秩序和能量的共鸣。测量背景反射需要有精密的仪器，衡量美需要敏锐的智慧和五官。
