Katherine's Wonderland 10 --- Beauty

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Beauty

美

作者：拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form?

品德开花古人名之曰美。从面容形体一闪而过难以言传的妩媚，谁能说的头头是道？

We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points.

我们为之触动的是温柔自负的感情，可是我们无从发现这种优雅的感情、这种游移的闪光指向何方。

It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and foreshow.

倘若尝试把美归之于调理，那就破坏了美而毫无想象的余地。美也不表明社会上大家知道和形容的友情或爱情方面的任何关系，不过在我看来，美表明一个迥然不同无从企及的领域，表明玄奥微妙和甜美的关系，表明玫瑰和紫罗兰的暗示和预示的意味。

We cannot approach the beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustrous, hovering and evanescent ...

美的本质犹如乳白色鸽项的光泽，飘忽即逝......

Personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

外貌的美所以首先是妩媚而且在于本身，这时美不带任何目的而令人不满；这时美化为一个没有结局的故事；这时美令人想到的是闪光和幻境，而非尘世的满足，这时美使得观者感觉到自己的微不足道；这时他不可能感到自己有资格拥有美，哪怕他是凯撒；他不可能感到自己有资格拥有美，如同面对苍穹和夕阳的辉煌。