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Although there is no cure for grief, we cannot help looking for one, to ease the pain and to make us forget our tears. We seek refuge in other relationships, we keep ourselves busy with work, we try to immerse(
淹没
) ourselves in our hobbies. Perhaps we start to drink more than we should to
“
drown our sorrows,
”
or we follow the conventional advice and join a club or society. But these things only relieve the symptoms of the illness; they cannot cure it. Moreover, we are always in a hurry to get rid of our grief. It is as if we were ashamed of it. We feel that we should be able to
“
pull ourselves together.
”
We try to convince ourselves, as we bite on the pillow, that we are much too old to be crying. Some people bury their grief deep inside themselves, so that nobody will guess what hey are going through. Others seek relief by pouring their hearts out to their friends, or to anyone else who can offer a sympathetic shoulder to cry on. But
after a while, even our friends start to show their impatience, and suggest with their reproachful glances that it is about time we stopped crying. They, too, are in a hurry for the thing to be over.
It is not easy to explain why we adopt this attitude to emotional pain, when we would never expect anyone to overcome physical pain simply by an effort of will power. Part of the answer must lie in the nature of grief itself. When the love affair dies, you cannot believe that you will ever find another person to replace the one who has gone so completely out of your life. Even after many, many months, when you think that you have begun to learn to live without your lost love, something
—
a familiar place, a piece of music, a whiff of perfume
—
will suddenly bring the bitter-sweet memories flooding back. You choke back the tears and desperate, almost angry, feeling that you are no better now than the day the affair ended.
And yet, grief is like an illness that must run its course. Memories do fade eventually, a healing skin does start to grow over the wound, the intervals between sudden glimpses of the love you have lost do get longer. Bit by bit, life resumes its normal flow. Such is the complexity of human nature that we can even start to feel guilty as these things start to happen, as if it were an insult to our lost love that we can begin to forget at all.
56. Relationships often come to an end because
A. human feelings are changeable.
B. people do not stay the same.
C. people want to develop new relationships.
D. few people realize the pain of ending a relationship.
57. In paragraph 2,
“
drown our sorrows
”
means
A. taking our lives by drowning.
B. enduring our pain by swimming.
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