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SAT考试作文素材分享18：I LIVE ENTIRELY IN MY MUSICBEETHOVEN Beethoven probably began to go deaf after what he called his terrible typhus of 1797, but he tried to keep it a secret, while consulting doctors and trying various remedies, such as the application of almond oil. He was extremely anxious about its possible effect on his career as a musician, and embarrassed by its effect on his social life. In the summer of 1801 he wrote to tow friends. To Franz Wegeler in Bonn he wrote that he was very busy, with more commissions than he could cope with，and publishers competing to get hold of his latest works, but he was worried about his health, and particularly about his gradual loss of hearing. He had been leading a miserable life for the previous two years because of his deafness, and had avoided human company because he found it hard to tell people that he was deaf. He would always say, I live entirely in my music. Two days later he wrote to Karl Amenda, a more recent friend. On the same lines, expressing the anxiety that his best years would pass without my being able to achieve all that my talent and my strength have commanded me to do. His fear that his deafness would prevent him from realizing his artistic potential led him to contemplate taking his own artistic life, but in the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, addressed to his brothers and found among his papers after his death, which he wrote in the depths of despair in October 1802, he said that he had rejected suicide, and was resigned to his condition. He explained that his deafness was the reason why he had been withdrawing from peoples company, because he found it so humiliating not being able to hear, but he did not want to tell people about it. Although tempted to kill himself, the only thing that held me back was my art. For indeed it seemed to me impossible to leave this world before I had produced all the works that I felt the urge to compose. | 
