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love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of love — to examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the meaning of love.
没有比爱更容易的事了——这种态度一直是有关爱的流行看法，尽管大量的证据说明事实恰恰相反。几乎没有什么活动、什么事业像爱情那样带着如此巨大的希望与期待开始，而又如此经常以失败告终。如果从事任何一件其他的活动出现这种情况，人们会渴望知道失败的原因，渴望学会怎样才能做得更好——或者他们会放弃这种活动。既然在爱的问题上不可能选择放弃，看来只有一种合适的方式来克服爱的失败了——这就是研究失败的原因，并进而探讨爱的意义。
The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.
第一步要做的是要意识到，正如生活是一门艺术一样，“爱”也是一门艺术；如果我们想要学会如何去爱，我们就必须像学习其他任何一门艺术，如音乐、绘画、木工或者药学、工程那样，采取同样的方式。
What are the necessary steps in learning any art? 学习任何一门艺术的必要步骤是什么呢？
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The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts; one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one — my intuition, the essence of the mastery of any art. But, aside from learning the theory and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art — the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for music, for medicine, for carpentry — and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obviousfailures, in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love, success, prestige, money, power — almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.
学习一门艺术的过程可以很方便地分为两个部分：一是掌握理论；二是精于实践。如果我想学医，就必须首先了解有关人体和各种疾病的事实。但即使我掌握了所有这些理论知识，我在医术上仍然是无法胜任的。只有经过大量的实践，直到最后我的理论知识的成果和实践的成果融为一体，形成了直觉（这是
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掌握任何一门技艺的本质），我才能成为这门技艺的一位大师。但是除了学习理论和进行实践外，精通任何技艺还必须有第三种因素，即对这门技艺的掌握必须是头等大事；世上再没有比这门技艺更重要的事了。这一点适用于音乐、药学、木工，也同样适用于爱。在我们的文化中，人们尽管在爱的方面明显地屡遭失败，却仍很少去学习这门技艺，其原因也许就在这里：虽然内心深处都渴望爱，却认为其他任何事情都比爱更重要，如成功、声望、金钱、权力；我们几乎把所有的精力都用来学习怎样去实现这些目标，而几乎不花费任何精力来学习爱的艺术。
Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige,and that love, which“only”profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on?
这会不会是因为人们认为只有那些能用来赢得金钱和声望的东西才值得学习，而爱“仅仅”有益于心灵，却不能带来现代意义上的收益，所以就成了我们没有权利为之耗费过多精力的一种奢侈品呢？
unit4
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课文部分：
Is e-mail a blessing or a curse? Last month, after a week’s vacation, I discovered 1, 218 unread e-mail messages waiting in my in box. I pretended to be dismayed, but secretly I was pleased. This is how we measure our wired worth in the late 1990s — if you aren’t overwhelmed by e-mail, you must be doing something wrong.
电子邮件究竟是福是祸？上个月在度假一周之后，我发现我的收件箱里有1218封未读邮件。我假装很沮丧，但是私底下却很愉快。这就是我们在90年代末期衡量自己的联系价值的方式——如果你不能被电子邮件吞噬，那么你肯定出了什么问题。
Never mind that after subtracting the stale office chitchat, spam, flame wars, dumb jokes forwarded by friends who should have known better and other e-mail detritus, there were perhaps seven messages actually worth reading. I was doomed to spend half my workday just deleting junk. E-mail sucks.
如果除去那些无聊的办公室邮件、垃圾邮件、网络口水大战邮件，那些应该更进一步了解我的朋友抄送的沉闷的笑话，以及别的零星电子邮件，其实大概只剩下7封邮件值得一读。但我却注定要花半天的工作时间删除这些垃圾邮件。电子邮件太糟糕了。
But wait — what about those seven? A close friend in Taipei I haven’t seen in five years tells me he’s planning to start a family. A complete stranger
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in Belgium sends me a hot story tip. Another stranger offers me a job. I’d rather lose an eye than lose my e-mail account. E-mail rocks!
但是等一下，这7封邮件又怎么样呢？一位5年未见的在台北的好朋友告诉我他正准备组建家庭。比利时的一个陌生人发给我一个火爆故事的提示。另一个陌生人要给我一份工作。与失去我的电子邮件信箱相比，我宁可失去我的一只眼睛。电子邮件太棒了！
E-mail. Can’t live with it, can’t live without it. Con artists and real artists, advertisers and freedom fighters, lovers and sworn enemies-they’ve all flocked to e-mail as they would to any new medium of expression. E-mail is convenient, saves time, brings us closer to one another, helps us manage our ever-more-complex lives. Books are written, campaigns conducted, crimes committed — all via e-mail. But it is also inconvenient, wastes our time, isolates us in front of our computers and introduces more complexity into our already too-harried lives. To skeptics, e-mail
is just the latest chapter in the evolving history of human communication. A snooping husband now discovers his wife’s affair by reading her private e-mail — but he could have uncovered the same sin by finding letters a generation ago.
电子邮件让人难以忍受，却又无法离开。欺骗大师和艺术大师，广告商和自由斗士，爱人和宿敌都纷纷使用电子邮件作为新的表达工具。电子邮件方便、省
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