Walter Pater, MonaLisa, my translation

The presence that rose thus so strangely beside the waters, is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years men had come to desire.

Hers is the head upon which all “the ends of the world are come,“ and the eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and fantastic reveries and exquisite passions.

Set it for a moment beside one of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its maladies has passed! All the thoughts and experience of the world have etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of Rome, the mysticism of the middle age with its spiritual ambition and imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the Borgias.

She is older than the rocks among which she; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave ; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants: and, as Leda, was the mother of Helen of Troy, and. As Saint Anne, the mother of Mary; and all this has been to her but as the sound of lyres and flutes, and lives only in the delicacy with it has moulded the changing lineaments, and tinged the eyelids and the hands.

The fancy of a perpetual life, sweeping together ten thousand experiences, is an old one; and modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life. Certainly, the symbol of the modern idea.

那自水邊升起的特異的身影，幾乎便是千年來人們所想望的一切。

這是那位於「世界盡頭」的面容，眼皮還有點沉重；這是一個從血肉、礦脈中精製而成，用奇思異想與絕妙的熱情雕琢而出的美人。

若將她暫置在那些蒼白的希臘女神或是古典的美女雕像旁邊的話，她們在看進那個靈魂中的種種殘缺時，將多麼地焦慮不安？世上所有的思緒和遭遇皆銘刻於此，尚且能自我淨化並加以顯現：從希臘的獸性，羅馬的縱欲，到中世紀充滿出世的野心與無知的愛的神秘主義；從異教信仰的回歸，到罪惡的波吉亞家族。

她比那些環繞著她的岩石年代更久遠，如吸血鬼一般，她已熟知死亡的秘密；她亦曾潛入深海，環抱深淵；與東方商人交易怪異的織品。她正如莉達一般孕育了特洛伊的海倫，也像聖安妮一樣為世人帶來聖母。這些種種都是她，正如七弦琴與笛子的樂音，或是被歲月刻畫了面容、在眼際與手背暈塗了色彩的生命。

綜合了無數的生命經驗的，關於永恆生命的美妙，是古老的誘惑；而現代哲學中關於人性的典型皆建基於此，歸結於此——所有關於生命與思想的一切。因此，她便象徵了現代性。