People need a religious belief to make life alive
已有 116 次阅读 2012-05-24 14:37 标签: best gre conviction Christian currencyI Wish I Could believe
"The best lack all conviction,
While the worst
are full of passionate intesity."
Those two lines of Yeats for me sum up the
matter as it stands today when the very currency of belief seems debased. I was
brought up in the Christian church. Later I believed for a while that communism
offered the best hope for this world. I acknowledge the need for belief, but I
cannot forget how through the ages great faiths have been vitiated by fanaticism
and dogmatism, by intolerance and cruelty, by the intellectual dishonesty, the
folly, the crankiness or the opportunism of their adherents.
Have I no faith
at all, then? Faith is the thing at the core of you, the sediment that's left
when hopes and illusions are drained away. The thing for which you make any
sacrifice because without it you would be nothing - a mere walking shadow. I
know what my own core is. I would in the last resort sacrifice any human
relationship, any way of living to the search for truth which produces my poem.
I know there are heavy odds against any poem I write surviving after my death. I
realize that writing poetry may seem the most preposterously useless thing a man
can be doing today. Yet it is just at such times of crisis that each man
discovers or rediscovers what he values most. My poet's instinct to make
something comes out most strongly then, enabling me to use fear, doubt, even
despair as creative stimuli. In doing so, I feel my kinship with humanity, with
the common ball mill man who carries on
doing his job till the bomb falls or the sea closes over him. Carries on because
of his belief, however inarticulate, that this is the best thing he can
do.
But the poet is luckier than the layman, for his job is always a
vacation. Indeed, it's so like a religious vacation that he may feel little need
for a religious faith, but because it is always trying to get past the trivial
and the transient or to reveal these as images of the essential and the
permanent, poetry is at least a kind of spiritual activity.
Men need a
religious belief to make sense out of life. I wish I had such a belief myself,
but any creed of mine would be honeycombed with confusions and reservations. Yet
when I write a poem I am trying to make sense out of life. And just now and then
my experience composes and transmutes itself into a poem which tells me
something I didn't know I knew.
So for me the compulsion of poetry is the
sign of a belief, not the less real for being unformulated ... a belief that men
must enjoy life, explore life, enhance life. Each as best he can. And that I
shall do these things best through the practice of poetry.
上一篇: Role of coal mining plays in ball mill development 下一篇: The ceaseless love makes achievement
发表评论 评论 (0 个评论)