Their Wonderfulness
她是我见到过的最善良、慷慨的人之一，爱穿灰色衣服。或许有人会觉得她朴素得像只蛾子，但我知道，灰色外表之下的她，胜过绚烂的七彩虹。
I Still Have My Hand To Play Violin我还有一双可以拉琴的大手
1. If you have ever been to a concert by the violinist Itzhak Perlman, you know that getting on stage is no small achievement for him. He was stricken with polio as a child, and so he has braces on both legs and walks with the aid of two crutches. He walks painfully, yet majestically, until he reaches his chair. Then he sits down, slowly, put his crutches on the floor, undoes the clasps on his legs, tucks one foot back and extends the other foot forward. Then he bends down and picks up his violin, put it under his chin, nods to the conductor and proceeds to play.
2. One day Perlman went on stage to give a concert. The audience sat quietly while he made his way across the stage to his chair. They waited until he was ready to play. But this time something went wrong. Just as he finished the first few bars, one of the strings on his violin broke.
3. People who were there that night thought to themselves: He will either find another violin or else replace the string on this one.
4. But he didn’t. Instead, he waited a moment, closed his eyes then signaled the conductor to begin again. The orchestra began, and he played from where he had left off. He played with overwhelming passion and power and purity.
5. Of course, it is impossible to play a symphonic work with just three strings. But that night Itzhak Perlman refused to know that. You could see him modulating, changing and recomposing the piece in his head. At one point, it sounded like he was de-tuning the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before.
6. When he finished, there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered. There was an extraordinary outburst of applause from every corner of the auditorium. He smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, and then he said, You know, sometimes it is the artists task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.
1. 如果你曾经参加过小提琴家伊萨克?帕尔曼的音乐会，你就会知道，这对于他而言是一项不小的成就。他从小就受到小儿麻痹症的折磨，所以他的两条腿都戴着假肢，依靠拐杖走路。他走起来非常痛苦，很艰难，走到椅子上以后，他才慢慢地坐下来，把拐杖放到地上，解开腿上的扣子，把一条腿缩回来，再把另一条腿往前伸展，这样才能弯下身子拿起他的小提琴，把它放在下巴下，再向指挥点头示意，开始他的演奏。
2. 有一次帕尔曼举行音乐会，当他在舞台上试图走向他的椅子时，舞台下一片寂静。等到他坐到椅子上，观众们才开始有动静。但在演奏中发生了一件意外，帕尔曼刚拉了几下，他琴上的其中一条琴弦断了。
3. 那晚，观众们想，他得再找一把小提琴，或者修好他自己的琴。
4. 但帕尔曼并没有这么做。他停顿了一会，闭上了眼睛，然后示意指挥继续。乐团开始演奏了，他从之前停下的地方拉起。他的演奏竟具有压倒性的激情、力量和技术。
5. 当然，要用三根琴弦弹奏出一首交响乐是不可能的。但那晚的帕尔曼拒绝接受这个事实。人们看见他在头脑中调制、改变、重组了音符。在那一刻，那乐声听起来像是他让琴弦演奏出了人们从未听过的弦律。
6. 当他结束演奏的时候，台下是一片充满敬畏的沉默。接着，人们沸腾起来了，狂热地欢呼着。礼堂的每一个角落都传来不平凡的掌手。帕尔曼微笑着，掠去了礼堂的喧嚣，说到：“你们都知道，有时候，在你丢失的音符处继续创造音乐是最好的艺术。”
Beauty 她很美
1. There were sensitivity and a beauty to her that have nothing to do with looks. She was one to be listened to, whose words were so easy to take to heart.
2. It is said that the true nature of being is veiled. The labor of words, the expression of art, the seemingly ceaseless buzz that is human thought all have in common the need to get at what really is so. The hope to draw close to and possess the truth of being can be a feverish one. In some cases it can even be fatal, if pleasure is one’s truth and its attainment more important than life itself. In other lives, though, the search for what is truthful gives life.
3. I used to find notes left in the collection basket, beautiful notes about my homilies and about the writer’s thoughts on the daily scriptural readings. The person who penned the notes would add reflections to my thoughts and would always include some quotes from poets and mystics he or she had read and remembered and loved. The notes fascinated me. Here was someone immersed in a search for truth and beauty. Words had been treasured, words that were beautiful. And I felt as if the words somehow delighted in being discovered, for they were obviously very generous to the as yet anonymous writer of the notes. And now this person was in turn learning the secret of sharing them. Beauty so shines when given away. The only truth that exists is, in that sense, free.
4. It was a long time before I met the author of the notes.
5. One Sunday morning, I was told that someone was waiting for me in the office. The young person who answered the rectory door said that it was "the woman who said she left all the notes." When I saw her I was shocked, since I immediately recognized her from church but had no idea that it was she who wrote the notes. She was sitting in a chair in the office with her hands folded in her lap. Her head was bowed and when she raised it to look at me, she could barely smile without pain. Her face was disfigured, and the skin so tight from surgical procedures that smiling or laughing was very difficult for her. She had suffered terribly from treatment to remove the growths that had so marred her face.
6. We chatted for a while that Sunday morning and agreed to meet for lunch later that week.
7. As it turned out we went to lunch several times, and she always wore a hat during the meal. I think that treatments of some sort had caused a lot of her hair to fall out. We shared things about our lives. I told her about my schooling and growing up. She told me that she had worked for years for an insurance company. She never mentioned family, and I did not ask.
8. We spoke of authors we both had read, and it was easy to tell that books are a great love of hers.
