|
|
No one would like to lift a boulder in the hope of crashing it into one’s own feet. The reason is easy to deduce: At the age of one or two, every one must have bumped into something hard enough to let him or her feel pain, and if such an accident has reoccurred several times, if, unfortunately, this something has had the chance of being heavily connected with one’s front head or back, it will eventually make him or her arrive at the conclusion that such a game is an unpleasant one. Later, it will also be found that a falling object with force, like a cup of tea, is able to produce exactly the same feeling, and thus is completed the whole process of a knowledge of the correct relationship between solid object and any one part of the body. Hard experiences have been done even before one knows what it passes for!
As they grow older, people also accumulate other unpleasant experiences: being cuffed awfully on the hips; standing sadly at the doorway of a classroom; facing the embarrassment of a job interview which seems more certain to fail than not; feeling heartbroken at the sight of a love shifting away without coming back. These experiences, leaving some negative shadows on one’s mind in the first link of a chain of cause-effect relation, will turn out to be good lessons, casting a positive light on one’s later journey. Every person will benefit from an experience, no matter how hard it may be at the moment. It is only in extreme cases that this rule could be broken, with little rewards or nothing at all. This applies particularly to the “over-patient” and the “impatient”.
The “over-patient” are those who, though as intelligent, are too incredulous to believe anything. The fact that “the sun will rise tomorrow” may be put to question by them, and they would gladly set out to clarify it, and seriously believe that the sun may not do the same thing even after having seen it does do it so many times (The sentence “the sun will rise tomorrow” appeared in Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding By David Hume for his demonstration of causal reasoning; it is cited here for understandable reasons). The inveterate gamblers are just a case in point.
The “impatient” here refer to people who take actions too soon. We are familiar with the story that a person cutting potatoes put his fingers under the landing blade of a knife before it was too late to foresee the effect. Similarly, a condemned man who has swiftly taken the life of another with ease will have no time to correct his mistake. An even pitiful situation is to produce the same result with plenty of time and great effort. Such a misfortune befell the government of the United States. When the 9.11 incident took place, a great many bitter tears were shed and terror organizations were rightly aimed at with more words and guns than ever. But people seldom realize that the White House was also partly to be blamed. It has been reported that in its dedicated struggle with the Soviet Union for the power over the world, it had provided the same group of terror attackers with all kinds of help and support including the skill in making as serious as possible trouble to others with as little as likely expense of their own. Well, it is a sad story and shall not be forgotten throughout history.
Broadly speaking, hard experiences may be grouped into two classes: those of others and those of one’s own. In the light of the statement that even a single knowledge is attained through hard investigation, there will be no divided view on the claim that the accumulated human wisdom presented in books or other medium belongs to the realm of hardness, and, of course, mostly of others. But the significant thing is that those wisdoms are only the result of hard experiences, not the course itself; and human beings seem to appreciate thoroughly the former while paying little attention and interest to the latter. It is therefore only natural if history unfortunately repeats itself someday.
一二不过三，第三篇还是应该有的。总算明白了为什么本版原创帖比较少，“知识”的获得是要付出代价的，新手自然更是如此。 |
|
发表于 2007-8-13 12:48:15
