1.Another School Year—What For?(1261)

Passage One

John Ciardi was a famous poet and writer. He is most remembered for his English translation of Dante's "Inferno." He once gave a speech at Rutgers University, where he was an English professor. This speech was published in the Rutgers Alumni Monthly magazine in November 1954.

约翰·恰尔迪是一位著名的诗人和作家。他最著名的作品是翻译了但丁的《地狱篇》。他曾在罗格斯大学做过演讲，当时他是那里的英语教授。这篇演讲发表在1954年11月的《罗格斯校友月刊》上。

Another School Year—What For?

John Ciardi

【1】Let me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher. It was January of 1940, and I was fresh out of graduate school, starting my first semester at the University of Kansas City. Part of the student body was a beanpole with hair on top who came into my class, sat down, folded his arms, and looked at me as if to say, "All right, teach me something."

【2】Two weeks later, we started Hamlet. Three weeks later, he came into my office with his hands on his hips. "Look," he said, "I came here to be a pharmacist. Why do I have to read this stuff?" And not having a book of his own to point to, he pointed to mine, which was lying on the desk.

【3】New as I was to the faculty, I could have told this specimen a number of things. I could have pointed out that he had enrolled not in a drugstore-mechanics school but in a college, and that at the end of his course, he meant to reach for a scroll that would read Bachelor of Science. It would not read: Qualified Pill-Grinding Technician. It would certify that he had specialized in pharmacy, but it would further certify that he had been exposed to some of the ideas mankind has generated within its history.

【4】That is to say, he had not entered a technical training school but a university, and in universities, students enroll for both training and education. I could have told him all this, but it was fairly obvious he wasn't going to be around long enough for it to matter.

【5】Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense of duty, and I tried to put it this way: "For the rest of your life," I said, "your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours. They will be a little shorter when you are in love, and a little longer when you are out of love, but the average will tend to hold. For eight of these hours, more or less, you will be asleep."

【6】"Then for about eight hours of each working day, you will, I hope, be usefully employed. Assume you have gone through pharmacy school—or engineering, or law school, or whatever—during those eight hours, you will be using your professional skills. You will see to it that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesn't jump the fence, or that your client doesn't go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence. These are all useful pursuits. They involve skills every man must respect, and they can all bring you basic satisfactions. Along with everything else, they will probably be what puts food on your table, supports your wife, and rears your children. They will be your income, and may it always suffice."

【7】"But having finished the day's work, what do you do with those other eight hours? Let's say you go home to your family. What sort of family are you raising? Will the children ever be exposed to a reasonably penetrating idea at home? Will you be presiding over a family that maintains some contact with the great democratic intellect? Will there be a book in the house? Will there be a painting a reasonably sensitive man can look at without shuddering? Will the kids ever get to hear Bach?"

【8】That is about what I said, but this particular pest was not interested. "Look," he said, "you professors raise your kids your way, I'll take care of my own. Me, I'm out to make money."

"I hope you make a lot of it," I told him, "because you're going to be badly stuck for something to do when you're not signing checks."

【9】Fourteen years later, I am still teaching, and I am here to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have thought. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basic look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of man's development we call history—then you have no business being in college. You are on your way to being that new species of mechanized savage, the push-button Neanderthal. Our colleges inevitably graduate a number of such life forms, but it cannot be said that they went to college; rather, the college went through them—without making contact.

【10】No one gets to be a human being unaided. There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human. Assume, for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls of, say, M.I.T., and there cut into the stone are the names of the scientists. The chances are that few if any of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones. Yet any of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics, knows more about physics than did many of those great scholars of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew, because you can start from what the past learned for you.

【11】And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankind's spiritual resources. Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books are man's peculiar accomplishment. When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience. Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer's mind. Through books, you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare—the list is endless. For a great book is necessarily a gift; it offers you a life you have not the time to live yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time. A civilized mind is, in essence, one that contains many such lives and many such worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer, or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a democracy.

【12】I think it was La Rochefoucauld who said that most people would never fall in love if they hadn't read about it. He might have said that no one would ever manage to become human if they hadn't read about it.

【13】I speak, I'm sure, for the faculty of the liberal arts college and for the faculties of the specialized schools as well, when I say that a university has no real existence and no real purpose except as it succeeds in putting you in touch, both as specialists and as humans, with those human minds your human mind needs to include. The faculty, by its very existence, says implicitly: "We have been aided by many people, and by many books, in our attempt to make ourselves some sort of storehouse of human experience. We are here to make available to you, as best we can, that expertise."

第一课

又一个学年，为什么?

约翰·恰尔迪

【1】让我告诉你我教师生涯早期的一次灾难。那是1940年1月，我刚从研究生院毕业，在堪萨斯城大学开始了我的第一学期。有个学生长得像个头顶有毛的瘦子，他走进我的教室，坐了下来，交叉着双臂，看着我，好像在说:“好吧，教我点东西。”

【2】两个星期后，我们开始演《哈姆雷特》。三周后，他双手叉腰走进我的办公室。“听着，”他说，“我来这里是想成为一名药剂师。我为什么要读这些东西?”他没有自己的书可以指，就指了指放在书桌上的我的书。

【3】虽然我是新来的，但我本可以告诉这个家伙一些事情。我本可以指出，他上的不是一所药店技工学校，而是一所大学，在他的课程结束时，他打算拿到一份写有理学学士学位的证书。它不会是:合格的药丸研磨技术员。它将证明他专攻过药剂学，但它将进一步证明他曾接触过人类历史上产生的一些思想。

【4】也就是说，他进入的不是一所技术培训学校，而是一所大学，而在大学里，学生既要接受培训，也要接受教育。我本可以把这一切都告诉他，但很明显，他不会在我身边呆太长时间，所以这些都不重要。

【5】尽管如此，当时的我还很年轻，而且有很强的责任感。我试着这样说:“在你的余生中，”我说，“你的平均每天大约是24小时。当你恋爱的时候，它们会短一点，当你失恋的时候，它们会长一点，但平均值往往会保持不变。其中大约有8个小时你是在睡觉的。”

【6】“然后，在每个工作日的八小时左右，我希望你能做些有用的工作。假设你已经上过药学院，或者工程学院，或者法学院，或者别的什么,在这八小时里，你将使用你的专业技能。你要确保氰化物不进入阿司匹林，确保公牛不跳过栅栏，或者确保你的委托人不会因为你的无能而坐上电椅。这些都是有用的追求。它们涉及到每个人都必须尊重的技能，它们都能给你带来基本的满足。除了其他一切，他们很可能是你餐桌上的食物，供养你的妻子，抚养你的孩子。它们将成为你的收入来源，但愿你永远够用。”

【7】“但是完成一天的工作后，剩下的八小时你做什么呢?”假设你回家和家人在一起。你养育的是什么样的家庭?孩子们会在家里接触到合理而深刻的思想吗?你会主持一个与伟大的民主知识分子保持联系的家庭吗?房子里会有一本书吗?会有一幅画让一个相当敏感的人看了不会不寒而栗吗?孩子们能听到巴赫的音乐吗?”

【8】我差不多就是这么说的，但这个讨厌鬼不感兴趣。“听着，”他说，“你们教授用你们的方式抚养孩子，我要照顾我自己的孩子。而我，我要去赚钱。”

“我希望你能赚很多钱，”我告诉他，“因为你在不签支票的时候就会找不到事情做。”

【9】十四年后，我仍在教书。我在这里要告诉你们，大学的职责不仅是培养你们，而且要让你们接触到人类最优秀的思想。如果你没时间读莎士比亚，没时间看基本的哲学，没时间学习美术的延续，没时间学习我们称之为历史的人类发展的课程，那么你就没必要上大学。你正在成为那种机械化的野蛮人，那种按下按钮的尼安德特人。我们的大学不可避免地培养出许多这样的生命形式，但不能说他们上过大学;相反，学院没有与他们联系，而是通过了他们。

【10】没有人能在没有帮助的情况下成为人。人的一生没有足够的时间为自己发明成为一个文明人所需要知道的一切。例如，假设你想成为一名物理学家。比如，你经过麻省理工学院宏伟的石头大厅，石头上刻着科学家的名字。很有可能你们中很少有人会把自己的名字刻在那些石头上。然而，你们中任何一个在高中物理课程中保持清醒的人，对物理的了解都比过去许多伟大的学者要多。你知道的更多，因为他们把他们知道的留给了你，因为你可以从过去为你学到的东西开始。

【11】人类的技术是如此，人类的精神资源也是如此。这些资源，无论是技术上的还是精神上的，大部分都储存在书中。书籍是人类特有的成就。当你读了一本书，你增加了你的人类经验。读荷马，你的头脑中就包含了荷马思想的一部分。通过书籍，你至少可以获得维吉尔、但丁、莎士比亚的思想和经验的片段,这个名单是无穷无尽的。因为一本好书必然是一种礼物;它为你提供了一种你没有时间亲自体验的生活，它带你进入一个你没有时间在现实生活中旅行的世界。从本质上讲，一个文明的心灵包含了许多这样的生命和许多这样的世界。如果你过于匆忙，或者对自己的局限性过于傲慢，而不愿接受亚里士多德、乔叟或爱因斯坦的一些思想作为你人性的礼物，那么你既不是一个发达的人，也不是一个有用的民主公民。

【12】我想拉罗什富科说过，如果没有读过关于爱情的书，大多数人就不会坠入爱河。他可能会说，如果没有读过这方面的书，没有人能成为人类。

【13】我敢肯定，我是在代表文理学院的全体教员和专门学院的全体教员说，一所大学没有真正的存在，没有真正的目的，除非它能成功地使你们,无论是作为专家还是作为普通人,接触到你们的人类思想所需要包括的那些人类思想。教师，就其存在而言，含蓄地说:“在我们试图使自己成为某种人类经验的仓库的过程中，我们得到了许多人和许多书籍的帮助。”我们在这里是要尽我们所能，向你们提供这种专业知识。”