佛罗里达州的一位读者显然是在个人经历上受过创伤, 他写信来抱怨道: “如果我偷走了五分钱的商品, 我就是个贼, 要受到惩罚, 但是如果我偷走了他人妻子的爱情, 我没事儿。”
This is a prevalent misconception in many people's minds---that love, like merchandise, can be "stolen". Numerous states, in fact, have enacted laws allowing damages for "alienation of affections".
这是许多人心目中普遍存在的一种错误观念——爱情, 像商品一样, 可以 “偷走”。实际上，许多州都颁布法令，允许索取“情感转让”赔偿金。
But love is not a commodity; the real thing cannot be bought, sold, traded or stolen. It is an act of the will, a turning of the emotions, a change in the climate of the personality.
但是爱情并不是商品；真情实意不可能买到，卖掉，交换，或者偷走。爱情是志愿的行动，是感情的转向，是个性发挥上的变化。
When a husband or wife is "stolen" by another person, that husband or wife was already ripe for the stealing, was already predisposed toward a new partner. The "love bandit" was only taking what was waiting to be taken, what wanted to be taken.
当丈夫或妻子被另一个人“偷走”时，那个丈夫或妻子就已经具备了被偷走的`条件，事先已经准备接受新的伴侣了。这位“爱匪”不过是取走等人取走、盼人取走的东西。
We tend to treat persons like goods. We even speak of the children "belonging" to their parents. But nobody "belongs" to anyone else. Each person belongs to himself, and to God. Children are entrusted to their parents, and if their parents do not treat them properly, the state has a right to remove them from their parents' trusteeship.
我们往往待人如物。我们甚至说孩子“属于”父母。但是谁也不“属于”谁。人都属于自己和上帝。孩子是托付给父母的，如果父母不善待他们，州政府就有权取消父母对他们的托管身份。
Most of us, when young, had the experience of a sweetheart being taken from us by somebody more attractive and more appealing. At the time, we may have resented this intruder---but as we grew older, we recognized that the sweetheart had never been ours to begin with. It was not the intruder that "caused" the break, but the lack of a real relationship.
我们多数人年轻时都有过恋人被某个更有诱惑力、更有吸引力的人夺去的经历。在当时，我们兴许怨恨这位不速之客---但是后来长大了，也就认识到了心上人本来就不属于我们。并不是不速之客“导致了”决裂，而是缺乏真实的关系。
On the surface, many marriages seem to break up because of a "third party". This is, however, a psychological illusion. The other woman or the other man merely serves as a pretext for dissolving a marriage that had already lost its essential integrity.
从表面上看，许多婚姻似乎是因为有了“第三者”才破裂的。然而这是一种心理上的幻觉。另外那个女人，或者另外那个男人，无非是作为借口，用来解除早就不是完好无损的婚姻罢了。
Nothing is more futile and more self-defeating than the bitterness of spurned love, the vengeful feeling that someone else has "come between" oneself and a beloved. This is always a distortion of reality, for people are not the captives or victims of others---they are free agents, working out their own destinies for good or for ill.
因失恋而痛苦，因别人“插足”于自己与心上人之间而图报复，是最没有出息、最自作自受的乐。这种事总是歪曲了事实真相，因为谁都不是给别人当俘虏或牺牲品——人都是自由行事的，不论命运是好是坏，都由自己来作主。
But the rejected lover or mate cannot afford to believe that his beloved has freely turned away from him--- and so he ascribes sinister or magical properties to the interloper. He calls him a hypnotist or a thief or a home-breaker. In the vast majority of cases, however, when a home is broken, the breaking has begun long before any "third party" has appeared on the scene.
但是，遭离弃的情人或配偶无法相信她的心上人是自由地背离他的——因而他归咎于插足者心术不正或迷人有招。他把他叫做催眠师、窃贼或破坏家庭的人。然而，从大多数事例看，一个家的破裂，是早在什么“第三者”出现之前就开始了的。
励志英语美文欣赏:A Ball to Roll Around 滚球
A Ball to Roll Around
滚球
by Robert G Allman
罗伯特·G·奥尔曼
I lost my sight when I was four years old by falling off a box car in a freight yard in Atlantic City and landing on my head. Now I am thirty-two. I can vaguely remember the brightness of sunshine and what colour red is. It would be wonderful to see again, but a calamity can do strange things to people.
4岁那年在大西洋城，我从货场一辆火车上摔下来，头先着地，于是双目失明。现在我已经32岁了。我还模糊地记得阳光是多么灿烂，红色是多么鲜艳。能恢复视觉固然好，但灾难也能对人产生奇妙的作用。
It occurred to me the other day that I might not have come to love life as I do if I hadn' t been blind. I believe in life now. I am not so sure that I would have believed in it so deeply, otherwise. I don' t mean that I would prefer to go without my eyes. I simply mean that the loss of them made me appreciate the more what I had left.
有一天我突然想到，倘若我不是盲人，我或许不会变得像现在这样热爱生活。现在我相信生活，但我不能肯定如果自己是明眼人，会不会像现在这样深深地相信生活。这并不意味着我宁愿成为盲人，而只是意味着失去视力使我更加珍惜自己其他的能力。
Life, I believe, asks a continuous series of adjustments to reality. The more readily a person is able to make these adjustments, the more meaningful his own private world becomes. The adjustment is never easy. I was bewildered and afraid. But I was lucky. My parents and my teachers saw something in me ——a potential to live, you might call it ——which I didn’t see, and they made me want to fight it out with blindness.
我认为，生活要求人不断地自我调整以适应现实。人愈能及时地进行调整，他的个人世界便愈有意义。调整决非易事。我曾感到茫然害怕，但我很幸运，父母和老师在我身上发现了某种东西——可以称之为活下去的潜力吧——而我自己却没有发现。他们激励我誓与失明拼搏到底。 The hardest lesson I had to learn was to believe in myself. That was basic. If I hadn't been able to do that, I would have collapsed and become a chair rocker on the front porch for the rest of my life . When I say belief in myself I am not talking about simply the kind of self-confidence that helps me down an unfamiliar staircase alone. That is part of it. But I mean something bigger than that: an assurance that I am, despite imperfections, a real, positive person that somewhere in the sweeping, intricate pattern of people there is a special place where I can make myself fit.
我必须学会的最艰难的一课就是相信自己，这是基本条件。如做不到这一点，我的精神就会崩溃，只能坐在前门廊的摇椅中度过余生。相信自己并不仅仅指支持我独自走下陌生的楼梯的那种自信，那是一部分。我指的是大事：是坚信自己虽然有缺陷，却是一个真正的有进取心的人；坚信在芸芸众生错综复杂的格局当中，自有我可以安身立命的一席之地。
It took me years to discover and strengthen this assurance. It had to start with the most elementary things. Onc e a man gave me an indoor baseball. I thought he was mocking me and I was hurt . "I can' t use this," I said. "Take it with you," he urged me," and roll it around. "The words stuck in my head." Roll it around!" By rolling the ball I could hear where it went. This gave me an idea how to achieve a goal I had thought impossible: playing baseball. At Philadelphia' s Overbrook School for the Blind I invented a successful variation of baseball. We called it ground ball.
我花了很长时间才树立并不断加强这一信念。这要从最简单的事做起。有一次一个人给我一个室内玩的棒球，我以为他在嘲笑我，心里很难受。“我不能使这个。”我说。“你拿去，”他竭力劝我，“在地上滚。”他的话在我脑子里生了根。“在地上滚！” 滚球使我听见它朝哪儿滚动。我马上想到一个我曾认为不可能达到的目标：打棒球。在费城的奥弗布鲁克盲人学校，我发明了一种很受人欢迎的棒球游戏，我们称它为地面球。
All my life I have set ahead of me a series of goals and then tried to reach them, one at a time. I had to learn my limitations. It was no good to try for something I knew at the start was wildly out of reach because that only invited the bitterness of failure. I would fail sometimes anyway but on the average I made progress.
我这一辈子给自己树立了一系列目标，然后努力去达到，一次一个。我必须了解自己能力有限，若开始就知道某个目标根本达不到却硬要去实现，那不会有任何好处，因为那只会带来失败的苦果。我有时也失败过，但一般来说总有进步。
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