經典美文：給丹尼爾的信
以下是小編整理的情感類英語美文欣賞：給丹尼爾的信， 希望對你有所感觸。
Letter to Daniel 給丹尼爾的信
Daniel Patrick Keane was born on 4 February, 1996.
My dear son, it is six o'clock in the morning on theisland of Hong Kong. You are asleep cradled in myleft arm and I am learning the art of one-handedtyping. Your mother, more tired yet more happythan I've ever known her, is sound asleep in theroom next door and there is soft quiet in ourapartment.
Since you arrived, days have melted into night andback again and we are learning a new grammar, a long sentence whose punctuation marks arefeeding and winding and nappy changing and these occasional moments of quiet.
When you're older we'll tell you that you were born in Britain's last Asian colony in the lunaryear of the pig and that when we brought you home, the staff of our apartment block gatheredto wish you well. "It's a boy, so lucky, so lucky. We Chinese love boys," they told us. One mansaid you were the first baby to be born in the block in the year of the pig. This, he told us, wasgood Feng Shui, in other words a positive sign for the building and everyone who lived there.
Naturally your mother and I were only too happy to believe that. We had wanted you andwaited for you, imagined you and dreamed about you and now that you are here no dream cando justice to you. Outside the window, below us on the harbor, the ferries are ploughing backand forth to Kowloon. Millions are already up and moving about and the sun is slanting throughthe tower blocks and out on to the flat silver waters of the South China Sea. I can see thecontrail of a jet over Lamma Island and somewhere out there, the last stars flickering towardsthe other side of the world.
We have called you Daniel Patrick but I've been told by my Chinese friends that you should havea Chinese name as well and this glorious dawn sky makes me think we'll call you Son of theEastern Star. So that later, when you and I are far from Asia, perhaps standing on a beachsome evening, I can point at the sky and tell you of the Orient and the times and the people weknew there in the last years of the twentieth century.
Your coming has turned me upside down and inside out. So much that seemed essential to mehas, in the past few days, taken on a different color. Like many foreign correspondents I know,I have lived a life that, on occasion, has veered close to the edge: war zones, natural disasters,darkness in all its shapes and forms.
In a world of insecurity and ambition and ego, it's easy to be drawn in, to take chances withour lives, to believe that what we do and what people say about us is reason enough togamble with death. Now, looking at your sleeping face, inches away from me, listening to youroccasional sigh and gurgle, I wonder how I could have ever thought glory and prizes and praisewere sweeter than life.
And it's also true that I am pained, perhaps haunted is a better word, by the memory, suddenlyso vivid now, of each suffering child I have come across on my journeys. To tell you the truth,it's nearly too much to bear at this moment to even think of children being hurt and abused andkilled. And yet looking at you, the images come flooding back. Ten-year-old Andi Mikail dyingfrom 11)napalm burns on a hillside in Eritrea, how his voice cried out, growing ever more faintwhen the wind blew dust on to his wounds. The two brothers, Domingo and Juste, inMenongue, southern Angola. Juste, two years old and blind, dying from malnutrition, beingcarried on seven-year-old Domingo's back, and there is Domingo's words to me, "He was nicebefore, but now he has the hunger."
Last October, in Afghanistan, when you were growing inside your mother, I met Sharja, agedtwelve. Motherless, fatherless, guiding me through the grey ruins of her home, everything wasgone, she told me. And I knew that, for all her tender years, she had learned more about lossthan I would likely understand in a lifetime.
There is one last memory. Of Rwanda, and the churchyard of the parish of Nyarabuye where, ina ransacked classroom, I found a mother and her three young children huddled together wherethey'd been beaten to death. The children had died holding on to their mother, that instinct weall learn form birth and in one way or another cling to until we die.
Daniel, these memories explain some of the fierce protectiveness I feel for you, the tendernessand the occasional moments of blind terror when I imagine anything happening to you. Butthere is something more, a story from long ago that I will tell you face to face, father to son,when you are older. It's a very personal story but it's part of the picture. It has to do with thelong lines of blood and family, about our lives and how we can get lost in them and, if we'relucky, find our way again into the sunlight.
It begins thirty-five years ago in a big city on a January morning with snow on the ground and awoman walking to hospital to have her first baby. She is in her early twenties and the city is stillstrange to her, bigger and noisier than the easy streets and gentle hills of her distant 's walking because there is no money and everything of value has been pawned to pay forthe alcohol to which her husband has become addicted.
On the way, a taxi driver notices her sitting, exhausted and cold, in the doorway of a shop andhe takes her to hospital for free. Later that day, she gives birth to a baby boy and, just as youare to me, he is the best thing she has ever seen. Her husband comes that night and weepswith joy when he sees his son. He is truly happy. Hungover, broke, but in his own way happy,for they were both young and in love with each other and their son.
But, Danie, time had some bad surprises in store for them. The cancer of alcoholism ate awayat the man and he lost his family. This was not something he meant to do or wanted to do, itjust was. When you are older, my son, you will learn about how complicated life becomes, howwe can lose our way and how people get hurt inside and out. By the time his son had grown up,the man lived away from the family, on his own in a one-roomed flat, living and dying for thebottle.
He died on the fifth of January, one day before the anniversary of his son's birth. But his sonwas too far away to hear his last words, his final breath, and all the things they might havewished to say to one another were left unspoken.
Yet now, Daniel, I must tell you that when you let out your first powerful cry in the deliveryroom of the Adventist Hospital and I became a father, I thought of your grandfather and,foolish though it may seem, hoped that in some way he could hear, across the infinity betweenthe living and the dead, your proud statement of arrival. For if he could hear, he wouldrecognize the distinct voice of family, the sound of hope and new beginnings that your and allyour innocence and freshness have brought to the world.
