生活的藝術 The Art of Life
安妮·菲普斯/Anne Phipps
I believe that my beliefs are changing. Nothing is positive. Perhaps I am in a stage of metamorphosis which will one day have me emerging complete, sure of everything. Perhaps I shall spend my life searching.
Until this winter, I believed in outward things, in beauty as I found it in nature and art. Beauty passed, swift and sure, from the outside to the inside, bringing intense emotion. I felt a formless faith when I rode through summer woods, when I heard the counterpoint of breaking waves, when I held a flower in my hand. There was the same inspiration from art—here and there, in flashes—in seeing for the first time the delicacy of a white jade vase, or the rich beauty of a rug, in hearing a passage of music played almost perfectly, in watching Markova dance Giselle, most of all in reading. Other people's consciousness, their sensitivity to emotion, color, sound, their feeling for form, instructed me. The necessity for beauty I found to be the highest good, the human soul's greatest gift. It was not, I felt, all.
This winter I came to college. The questions put to me changed. Lists of facts and“who dragged whom how many times around the walls of what?” lost importance. Instead I was asked eternal questions: What is Beauty? What is Truth? What is God? I talked about faith with other students. I read St. Augustine and Tolstoy. I wondered if I hadn't been worshiping around the edges. Nature and art were the edges, an inner faith was the center. I discovered, really discovered, that I had a soul. Just sitting in the sun one day, I realized the shattering meaning of St. Augustine's statement that the sun and the moon, all the wonders of nature, are not God's“first works”, but second to the spiritual works.
I had, up till then, perceived spiritual beauty, only through the outward; it had come into me. Now, I am groping towards an inner spiritual consciousness that will be able to go out from me. I am lost in the middle ground; I am learning.