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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.
我的青年時代一直在攀登數學的高峰。登到山坡的一半時，我搖搖晃晃地停下來，呼吸稀薄的空氣，這時，距離我能夠理解愛因斯坦或狄拉克的等式的高度還相差很遠。如今，我可以加、減、乘，并在手邊沒有計算器的情況下做長除法；我還可以在急需的情況下做代數、幾何，甚至三角幾何。這便是我對數字語言了解的僅存碩果。然而，我依然記得匆匆瞥見的數學排列，醒目美麗，如滿天繁星。
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.
在我試圖描述美的時候，就會充分意識到語言的局限性。當然，語言也可以創造出自己的可愛之處，但是，它無法傳達我們所領會到的世界的真正風采，正如照片也無法形象地捕捉山鷹的異常敏捷或超新星隕落時的威力。伊娃的婚禮相冊僅僅體現了婚禮本身的些許光彩。圖片和文字所能做的，只是讓我們不要忘記那些激動人心，稍縱即逝的輝煌時刻。所以，我會一直寫作。
"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.
托馬斯·默頓在觀察中寫道：“大自然中的一切都會帶給我們天堂般的美妙感受”大自然的鬼斧神工在不斷上演，帶給我們免費而又無窮盡的美。只是們需要一定的素養才能體會到一些并不顯而易見的美。原始大爆炸已過了150億年左右，大爆炸的痕跡仍以背景輻射的形式存留在宇宙中間，只比絕對零度高幾度。因此，我相信我們對美的感受是與宇宙中無處不在的秩序和能量的共鳴。測量背景反射需要有精密的儀器，衡量美需要敏銳的智慧和五官。
