Imagine that you spent your whole life at a single house.

设想你在同一间房子里度过了一生。

Each day of the same hour you entered an artificially-lit room,undressed and took up the same positioning in front of a motion picture camera.It photographed one frame of you per day,every day of your life. On your seventy-second birthday,the reel of film was shown.You saw yourself growing and aging over seventy-two years in less than half an hour(27.4minutes at sixteen frames per second). Images of this sort ,though terrifying, are helpful in suggesting unfamiliar¹ but useful perspectives of time. They may ,for example ,symbolize² the telescoped ,almost momentary³ charater of the past as seen through the eyes of an anxious or disaffected⁴ individual. Or they may suggest the remarkable⁵ brevity of our lifes in the cosmic scale of time. If the estimated age of the cosmos⁶ were shorted to seventy-two years, a human life would take about ten seconds.

每天在同一时刻，你进入一间人工照明的房间，脱去衣服，在摄影机前摆同一姿势。在你一生所有的日子里，摄影机每天给你拍下一个镜头。在你72岁生日那天，放映这部影片。不到半个小时（每秒16个镜头，总共27.4分钟），你就看完了自己在72年里的“兴衰”。这样的图像尽管让人惧怕，却能向我们说明那陌生而有用的时间概念。比方说，它们可能象征着转瞬即逝的过去的缩影，如同在一个忧心忡忡或愤愤不平的人眼中所见的那样。或者它们可能说明了在宇宙的时间里，我们生命的异常短暂。如果将宇宙的估计年龄缩短到72年，人的一生可能只有10秒钟。

But look at time the other way. Each day is a minor⁷ eternity⁸ of over 86000 seconds. During each second, the number of distinct molecular⁹ functions going on within the human body is comparable to the mumber of seconds in the estimated age of the cosmos。

但是从另一个角度看时间，每天都有86, 000多秒的小永恒。每一秒钟，人体内所进行的不同的分子作用的次数可与宇宙估计年龄中的秒钟数相比。

A few seconds are long enough for a revolutionary idea, a startling communication, a baby's conception, a wounding insult, a sudden death. Depending on how we think of them, our lives can be infinitely¹⁰ long or infinitely short.

几秒钟的时间已足够酝酿一场革命、进行一次惊人的沟通、孕育一个婴孩、制造一次伤人的侮辱、造成一起突然死亡事件。我们的寿命可以是无限长久，也可以是权其短暂，这取决于我们怎么看待这一切。