每日英语学习阅读材料(A4打印版) - 180601(2)

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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.

14年后的今天，我仍然在教书，在此我要告诉你们，大学的职责并不只是在于培训你，它还要使你接触人类思想的精髓。如果你没时间看莎士比亚的作品，没时间看哲学入门，没时间欣赏艺术的存续，也没时间学习我们称之为历史的人类发展的课程——那么你就没有必要呆在大学里了。你正在变为那种新型的机械化的野蛮人，那种装有按钮的尼安德特人。我们大学的毕业生里不可避免有不少这样的行尸走肉；但是我们不能说他们上过大学，只能说大学曾存在于他们的生活——却没能留下任何痕迹。

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.

没有外界的帮助，谁也不会成长为一个文明人。要想成为一个文明人，必须获取文明社会所需的知识和文化，而人生苦短，不足以获取人类历史长河中的所有宝贵财产。

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.

比如说你想成为一个物理学家。你走过，比方说，麻省理工学院的宏伟的石头大厅，

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那里的石头上刻着科学家的名字。很可能将来，你们当中几乎没有人可以把名字留在那些石头上，如果有的话也是极少数。但是只要你们原来上高中物理课的时候不是从头睡到尾，你们当中任何一个人了解的物理学知识都要比许多那些历史上的伟大的学者多。你知道的多是因为他们将他们知道的传给了你，你可以从他们已了解的知识上起步。

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.

人类的技术发展是如此，人类精神财富的积累也是如此。这些技术和精神的大部分资料都储存在书中。书籍是人类独有的成就。你读完了一本书，你就丰富了你的人生经历。阅读荷马的作品，那么你的头脑里就有了荷马的思想。通过读书你起码能获得一些维吉尔、但丁、莎士比亚的思想和经历——名单是列不完的。因为一本好书必然是一份礼物；它为你呈现你没时间去亲自体验的生活，带你进入一个你在现实生活中没时间去亲自游览的世界。从本质上说，一个文明的人应该知道许多这样的生活和这样的世界。如果你太过匆忙，或是对自己的无知洋洋得意，以至于不能把一些亚里士多德，乔叟或爱因斯坦的思想当作你的品质的一件礼物来接受，那么

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