On the Feeling of Immortality in Youth
We look round in a new world, full of life and motion, and ceaseless progress, and feel in ourselves all the vigour and spirit to keep pace with it, and do not foresee from any present signs how we shall be left behind in the race, declineinto old age, and drop into the grave. It is the simplicity and, as it were, abstractedness of our feelings in youth that (so to speak) identifies us with Nature and (our experience being weak and our passions strong) makes us fancy ourselves immortal like it. Our short-lived connexion with being, we fondly flatter ourselves, is an indissoluble and lasting union.Fromliuxuepaper.com.
As infants smile and sleep, we are rocked in the cradle of our desires, and hushed into fancied security by the roar of the universe around us -- we quaff the cup of life with eager thirst without draining it, and joy and hope seem ever mantling to the brain -- objects press around us, filing the mind with their magnitude and with the throng of desires that wait upon them so that there is no room for the thoughts of death.
----Hazlitt
请您参考作文地带提供论青年的永生感中文翻译:
我们环视这个崭新的世界,生气勃勃,运动不止,前进不息;觉得自己也精力充沛,精神焕发,可与之并驾齐驱。从眼前的情形不会预见到在自然的发展过程中我们会被抛在后面,会慢慢衰弱,进入老年,踏进坟墓。正是这种我们年轻时感觉上的单纯,那种可谓“心不在焉”的特点,使我们(可以说)把自己同自然等同起来,并且(我们经验不足但是感情丰富)自欺欺人地认为自己也会跟自然一样不朽。
我们天真地认为自己与生存的短暂联系是牢不可分和持续长存的——似乎是一个不知道冷淡、不和谐或分离为何物的蜜月。就像婴儿微笑着沉睡,我们在自己恣意想象的摇篮的晃动中随着宇宙之声欣然入睡——我们急切地痛饮生命之泉,好像它永不干涸而只会溢出更多——万物将我们包围,占据我们的心灵,让我们充满各种欲望,从而没有余地去考虑死亡。