精读5第二版课文翻译

Lesson 1 Who Are you and what are you doing here

Welcome and congratulations: Getting to the first day of college is a major achievement. You’re to be commended, and not just you, but the parents, grandparents, uncles, and aunts who helped get you here.

It’s been said that raising a child effectively takes a village: Well, as you may have noticed, our American village is not i n very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical re ligions, a slime-based popular culture, and some politicians who—a little restraint here—aren’t what they might be. To merely survive in this American village and to win a place in the entering class has taken a lot of grit on your part. So, yes, congratulations to all.

You now may think that you’ve about got it made. Amidst the impressive college buildings, in company with a high-powered faculty, surrounded by the best of your generation, all you need is to keep doing what you’ve done before:

Whttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlork hard, get good grades, listen to your teachers, get along with the people around you, and you’ll emerge in four years as an educated young man or woman. Ready for life.

Do not believe it. It is not true. If y ou want to get a real education in America you’re going to have to fight—and I don’t mean just fight against the drugs and the violence and against the slime-based culture that is still going to surround you. I mean something a little more disturbing. To g et an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution that you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it may be. (In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.) You can get a terrific education in America now—there are astonishing opportunities at almost every college—but the education will not be presented to you wrapped and bowed. To get it, you’ll need to struggle and strive, to be strong, an d occahttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlsionally even to piss off some admirable people.

I came to college with few resources, but one of them was an understanding, however crude, of how I might use my opportunities there. This I began to develop because of my father, who had never been to college—in fact, he’d barely gotten out of high school. One night after dinner, he and I were sitting in our kitchen at 58 Clewley Road in Medford, Massachusetts, hatching plans about the rest of my life. I

was about to go off to college, a feat no one in my family had accomplished in living memory. “I think I might want to be

pre-law,” I told my father. I had no idea what being pre-law was. My father compressed his brow and blew twin streams of smoke, dragon-like, from his magnificent nose. “Do you want to be a lawyer?” he asked. My father had some experience with lawyers, and with policemen, too; he was not well-disposed toward either. “I’m not really sure,” I told

hhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlim, “but lawyers make pretty good money, right?”

My father detonated. (That was not uncommon. My father detonated a lot.) He told me that I was going to go to college only once, and that while I was there I had better study what I wanted. He said that when rich kids went to school, they majored in the subjects that interested them, and that my younger brother Philip and I were as good as any rich kids. (We were rich kids minus the money.) Wasn’t I interested in literature? I confessed that I was. Then I had better study literature, un less I had inside information to the effect that reincarnation wasn’t just hype, and I’d be able to attend college thirty or forty times. If I had such info, pre-law would be fine, and maybe even a tour through invertebrate biology could also be tossed in. But until I had the reincarnation stuff from a solid source, I better get to work and pick out some English classes from the course

catalog.https://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html “How about the science requirements?”

“Take ’em later,” he said, “you never know.”

My father, Wright AukenheadEdmundson, Malden High School Class of 1948 (by a hair), knew the score. What he told me that evening at the Clewley Road kitchen table was true in itself, and it also contains the germ of an idea about what a university education should be. But apparently almost everyone else—students, teachers, and trustees and parents—sees the matter much differently. They have it wrong.

Education has one salient enemy in present-day America, and that enemy is education—university education in particular. To almost everyone, university education is a means to an end. For students, that end is a good job. Students want the credentials that will help them get ahead. They want the certificate that will give them access to Wall Street, or entrance into law or medical or business school. And how can we blame them?

https://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlAmerica values power and money, big players with big bucks. When we raise our children, we tell them in multiple ways that what we want most for

them is success—material success. To be poor in America is to be a failure—it’s to be without decent health care, without basic necessities, often without dignity. Then there are those back-breaking student loans—people leave school as servants, indentured to pay massive bills, so that first job better be a good one. Students come to college with the goal of a diploma in mind—what happens in between, especially in classrooms, is often of no deep and determining interest to them.

In college, life is elsewhere. Life is at parties, at clubs, in music, with friends, in sports. Life is what celebrities have. The idea that the courses you take should be the primary objective of going to college is tacitly considered absurd. In terms of their work, students live in the future andhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html not the present; they live with their prospects for success. If universities stopped issuing credentials, half of the clients would be gone by tomorrow morning, with the remainder following fast behind.

The faculty, too, is often absent: Their real lives are also elsewhere. Like most of their students, they aim to get on. The work they are compelled to do to advance—get tenure, promotion, raises, outside offers—is, broadly speaking, scholarly work. No matter what anyone says this work has precious little to do with the fundamentals of teaching. The proof is that virtually no undergraduate students can read and understand their professors’ schol arly publications. The public senses this disparity and so thinks of the professors’ work as being silly or beside the point. Some of it is. But the public also senses that because professors don’t pay full-bore attention to teaching they don’t have to wor k very hard—they’ve created

https://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmla massive feather bed for themselves and called it a university.

This is radically false. Ambitious professors, the ones who, like their students, want to get ahead in America, work furiously. Scholarship, even if pretentious and almost unreadable, is nonetheless labor-intense. One can slave for a year or two on a single article for publication in this or that refereed journal. These essays are honest: Their footnotes reflect real reading, real assimilation, and real dedication. Shoddy work—in which the author cheats, cuts corners, copies from others—is quickly detected. The people who do this work have highly developed intellectual powers, and they push themselves hard to reach a certain standard: That the results have almost no

practical relevance to the students, the public, or even, frequently, to other scholars is a central element in the tragicomedy that is often academia.

The students and the profeshttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlsors have made a deal: Neither of them has to throw himself heart and soul into what happens in the classroom. The students write their abstract,

over-intellectualized essays; the professors grade the students for their capacity to be abstract and over-intellectual—and

often genuinely smart. For their essays can be brilliant, in a chilly way; they can also be clipped off the Internet, and often are. Whatever the case, no one wants to invest too much in them—for life is elsewhere. The professor saves his energies for the profession, while the student saves his for friends, social life, volunteer work, making connections, and getting in position to clasp hands on the true grail, the first job.

No one in this picture is evil; no one is criminally irresponsible. It’s just that smart people are prone to look into matters to see how they might go about buttering their toast. Then they butter their toast.

As for the adminhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlistrators, their relation to the students often seems based not on love but fear. Administrators fear bad publicity, scandal, and dissatisfaction on the part of their customers. More than anything else, though, they fear lawsuits. Throwing a student out of college, for this or that piece of bad behavior, is very difficult, almost impossible. The student will sue your eyes out. One kid I knew (and rather liked) threatened on his blog to mince his dear and esteemed professor (me) with a samurai sword for the crime of having taught a boring class. (The class was a little boring—I had a damned cold—but the punishment seemed a bit severe.) The dean of students laughed lightly when I suggested that this behavior might be grounds for sending the student on a brief vacation. I was, you might say, discomfited, and showed up to class for a while with my cellphone jiggered to dial 911 with one touch.

Still, this was small potatoes. Cohttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmllleges are even leery of disciplining guys who have committed sexual assault, or assault plain and simple. Instead of being punished, these guys frequently stay around, strolling the quad and swilling the libations, an affront (and sometimes a terror) to their victims.

You’ll find that cheati ng is common as well. As far as I can discern, the student ethos goes like this: If the professor is so lazy that he gives the same test every year,

it’s okay to go ahead and take advantage—you’ve both got better things to do. The Internet is amok with se rvices selling term papers and those services exist, capitalism being what it is, because people purchase the papers—lots of them. Fraternity files bulge with old tests from a variety of courses.

Periodically the public gets exercised about this situation, and there are articles in the national news. But then interest dwindles and matters go back to normal.

Onhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmle of the reasons professors sometimes look the other way when they sense cheating is that it sends them into a world of sorrow. A friend of mine had the temerity to detect cheating on the part of a kid who was the nephew of a well-placed official in an Arab government complexly aligned with the U.S. Black limousines pulled up in front of his offic e and disgorged decorously suited negotiators. Did my pal fold? Nope, he’s not the type. But he did not enjoy the process.

What colleges generally want are well-rounded students, civic leaders, people who know what the system demands, how to keep matters light, not push too hard for an education or anything else; people who get their credentials and leave the professors alone to do their brilliant work, so they may rise and enhance the rankings of the university. Such students leave and become donors and s o, in their own turn, contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing.

Thttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlhey’ve done a fine job skating on surfaces in high school—the best way to get an across-the-board outstanding record—and now they’re on campus to cut a few more figure eights.

In a culture where the major and determining values are monetary, what else could you do? How else would you live if not by getting all you can, succeeding all you can, making all you can?

The idea that a university education really should have no substantial content, should not be about what John Keats was disposed to call Soul-making, is one that you might think professors and university presidents would be discreet about. Not so. This view informed an address that Richard Brodhead gave to the senior class at Yale before he departed to become president of Duke. Brodhead, an impressive, articulate man, seems to take as his educational touchstone the Duke of Wellington’s precept that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of

Etohttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmln. Brodhead suggests that the content of the courses isn’t really what matters. In five years (or five months,

or minutes), the student is likely to have forgotten how to do the problem sets and will only hazily recollect what happens in the ninth book of Paradise Lost. The legacy of their college years will be a legacy of difficulties overcome. When they face equally arduous tasks later in life, students will tap th eir old resources of determination, and they’ll win.

All right, there’s nothing wrong with this as far as it goes—after all, the student who writes a brilliant forty-page thesis in a hard week has learned more than a little about her inner resources. Maybe it will give her needed confidence in the future. But doesn’t the content of the courses matter at all?

On the evidence of this talk, no. Trying to figure out whether the stuff you’re reading is true or false and being open to ha ving your lifhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmle changed is a fraught, controversial activity. Doing so requires energy from the professor—which is better spent on other matters. This kind of perspective-altering teaching and learning can cause the things which administrators fear above all else: trouble, arguments, bad press, etc. After the

kid-samurai episode, the chair of my department not unsympathetically suggested that this was the sort of incident that could happen when you brought a certain intensity to teaching. At the time I found his remark a tad detached, but maybe he was right.

So, if you want an education, the odds aren’t with you: The professors are off doing what they call their own work; the other students, who’ve doped out the way the place ru ns, are busy leaving the professors alone and getting themselves in position for bright and shining futures; the student-services people are trying to keep everyone content, offering plenty of entertainment and buhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlilding another state-of-the-art workout facility every few months. The development office is already scanning you for future donations. The primary function of Yale University, it’s recently been said, is to create prosperous alumni so as to enrich Yale University.

So why make trouble? Why not just go along? Let the profs roam free in the realms of pure thought, let yourselves party in the realms of impure pleasure, and let the student-services gang assert fewer prohibitions and newer delights f or you. You’ll get a good job, you’ll have plenty of friends, you’ll have a driveway of your own.

You’ll also, if my father and I are right, be truly and righteously screwed. The reason for this is simple. The quest at the center of a liberal-arts educa tion is not a luxury quest; it’s a necessity quest. If you do not undertake it, you risk leading a life of desperation—maybe quiet, maybe, in time, very loud—and I https://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlam not exaggerating. For you risk trying to be someone other than who you are, which, in the long run, is killing.

By the time you come to college, you will have been told who you are numberless times. Your parents and friends, your teachers, your counselors, your priests and rabbis and minis ters and imams have all had their say. They’ve let you know how they size you up, and they’ve let you know what they think you should value. They’ve given you a sharp and protracted taste o f what they feel is good and bad, right and wrong. Much is on their side. They have confronted you with scriptures—holy books that, whatever their actual provenance, have given people what they feel to be wisdom for thousands of years. They’ve given you family traditions—you’ve learned the ways of your tribe and your community. And, too, you’ve been tested, probed, looked at up and down and through. The coach knows what your athletic prospects are,

thhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmle guidance office has a sheaf of test scores that relegate you to this or that ability quadrant, and your teachers have got you pegged. You are, as Foucault might say, the intersection of many evaluative and potentially determining discourses: you boy, you girl, have been made.

And—contra Foucault—that’s not so bad. Embedde d in all of the major religions are profound truths. Schopenhauer, who despised belief in transcendent things, nonetheless thought Christianity to be of inexpressible worth. He couldn’t believe in the divinity of Jesus, or in the afterlife, but to Schopenhauer, a deep pessimist, a religion that had as its central emblem the figure of a man being tortured on a cross couldn’t be entirely misleading. To the Christian, Schopenhauer said, pain was at the center of the understanding of life, and that was just as it should be.

One does not need to be as harsh as Schopenhauer to understand the use of

relhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmligion, even if one does not believe in an otherworldly god. And all of those teachers and counselors and friends—and the prognosticating uncles, the dithering aunts, the fathers and mothers with their hopes for your fulfillment—or their

fulfillment in you—should not necessarily be cast aside or ignored. Families have their wisdom. The question “Who do they

t hink you are at home?” is never an idle one.

The major conservative thinkers have always been very serious about what goes by the name of common sense. Edmund Burke saw common sense as a loosely made, but often profound, collective work, in which humanity has deposited its

hard-earned wisdom—the precipitate of joy and tears—over time. You have been raised in proximity to common sense, if you’ve been raised at all, and common sense is something to respect, though not quite—peace unto the formidable Burke—to revere.

You may be all that the good people whohttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html raised you say you are; you may want all they have shown you is worth wanting; you may be someone who is truly your father’s son or your mother’s daughter. But then again, you may not be.

For the power that is in you, as Emerson suggested, may be new in nature. You may not be the person that your parents take you to be. And—this thought is both more exciting and more dangerous—you may not be the person that you take yourself to be, either. You may not have read yourself aright, and college is the place where you can find out whether you have or not. The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass others). The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you withhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html an “alienated majesty.” Reading the great

writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself. For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.

This was my own experience reading the two writers who have influenced me the most, Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself. They shone a light onto the world and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too. From Emerson I learned to trust my own thoughts, to trust them even when every voice seems to be on the other side. I need the wherewithal, as Emerson did, to say what’s on my mind and to take the

inevitable hits. Much more I learned from the sage—about character, about loss, about joy, about writing and its secret sources, but Emerson most centrally preaches the gospel of self-reliance and that

ishttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html what I have tried most to take from him. I continue to hold in mind one of Emerson’s most memorable passages: “Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.”

Emerson’s greatness lies not only in showing you how powerful n ames and customs can be, but also in demonstrating how exhilarating it is to buck them. When he came to Harvard to talk about religion, he shocked the professors and students by challenging the divinity of Jesus and the truth of his miracles. He wasn’t inv ited back for decades.

From Freud I found a great deal to ponder as well. I don’t mean Freud the aspiring scientist, but the Freud who was a speculative essayist and interpreter of the human chttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlondition like Emerson. Freud challenges nearly every significant human ideal. He goes after religion. He says that it comes down to the longing for the father. He goes after love. He calls it “the overestimation of the erotic object.” He attacks our desire for

char ismatic popular leaders. We’re drawn to them because we hunger for absolute authority. He declares that dreams don’t predict the future and that there’s nothing benevolent about them. They’re disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.

Freud has something challenging and provoking to say about virtually every human aspiration. I learned that if I wanted to affirm any consequential ideal, I had to talk my way past Freud. He was—and is—a perpetual challenge and goad.

Never has there been a more shrewd and imaginative cartographer of the psyche. His separation of the self into three parts, and his sense of the fraught, anxious, but often negotiable

relationshttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.html among them (negotiable when you come to the game with a Freudian knowledge), does a great deal to help one navigate experience. (Though sometimes—and this I owe to Emerson—it seems right to let the psyche fall into civil war, accepting barrages of anxiety and grief for this or that good reason.)

The ba ttle is to make such writers one’s own, to winnow them out and to find their essential truths. We need to see where they fall short and where they exceed the mark, and then to develop them a little, as the ideas themselves, one comes to see, actually developed others. (Both Emerson and Freud live out of Shakespeare—but only a giant can be truly influenced by Shakespeare.) In reading, I continue to look for one thing—to be influenced, to learn something new, to be thrown off my course and onto another, better way.

My father knew that he was dissatisfied with life. He knew that none of the descriptions people had for

hhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlim quite fit. He understood that he was always out-of-joint with

life as it was. He had t alent: My brother and I each got about half the raw ability he possessed and that’s taken us through life well enough. But what to do with that talent—there was the rub for my father. He used to stroll through the house intoning his favorite line from Groucho Marx’s ditty “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” (I recently asked my son, now twenty-one, if he thought I was mistaken in teaching him this particular song when he was six years old. “No!” he said, filling the air with an invisib le forest of exclamation points.) But what my father never managed to get was a sense of who he might become. He never had a world of possibilities spread before him, never made sustained contact with the best that had been thought and said. He didn’t get to revise his understand ing of himself, figure out what he’d do best that might give the world some profit.

://https://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlarMy father was a gruff man, but also a generous one, so that night at the kitchen table at 58 Clewley Road he made an effort to let me have the chance that had been denied to him by both fate and character. He gave me the chance to see what I was all about, and if it proved to be different from him, proved even to be something he didn’t like or entirely comprehend, then he’d deal with it.

Right now, if you’re going to get a real education, you may have to be aggressive and assertive.

Your professors will give you some fine books to read, and they’ll probably help you understand them. What they won’t do, for reasons that perplex me, is to ask you if the books contain truths you could live your lives by. When you read Plato, you’ll probably learn about his metaphysics and his politics and his way of conceiving the

soul. But no one will ask you if his ideas are good enough to believe in. No one will ask

yohttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmlu, in the words of Emerson’s disciple William James, what their “cash value” might be. No one will suggest that you might use Plato as your bible for a week or a year or longer. No one, in short, will ask you to use Plato to help you change your life.

That will be up to you. You must put the question of Plato to yourself. You must ask whether reason should always rule the passions, philosophers should always rule the state, and poets should inevitably be banished from a just commonwealth. You have to ask yourself if wildly expressive music (rock and rap and the rest) deranges the soul in ways that are destructive to its health. You must inquire of yourself if balanced calm is the most desirable human state.

Occasionally—for you will need some help in fleshing-out the answers—you may have to prod your professors to see if they take the text at hand—in this case the divine and disturbing Plato—to be true. And you

wilhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmll have to be tough if the professor mocks you for uttering a sincere question instead of keeping matters easy for all concerned by staying detached and analytical. (Detached analysis has a place—but, in the en d, you’ve got to speak from the heart and pose the question of truth.) You’ll be the one who pesters his teachers. You’ll ask your history teacher about whether there is a design to our history, whether we’re progressing or declining, or whether, in the wo rds of a fine recent play, The History Boys, history’s “just one fuckin’ thing after another.” You’ll be the one who challenges your biology teacher about the intellectual conflict between evolution and creationist thinking. You’ll not only question the statistics teacher about what numbers can explain but what they can’t.

Because every subject you study is a language and since you may adopt one of these languages as your own, you’ll want to know how to speak it experhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmltly and also how it fails to deal with those concerns for which it has no adequate words. You’ll be looking into the reach of every metaphor that every discipline offers, and you’ll be trying to see around their corners.

The whole business is scary, of course. What if you arrive at college devoted to pre-med, sure that nothing will make you and your family happier than a life as a physician, only to discover that elementary-school teaching is where your heart is?

You might learn that you’re not meant to be a doctor at all. Of course, given your intellect and discipline, you can still probably be one. You can pound your round peg through the very square hole of medical school, then go off into the profession. And society will help you. Society has a cornucopia of resources to encourage you in doing what society needs done but that you don’t much like doing and are not cut out to do. To ease your grief, society

offerhttps://www.wendangku.net/doc/d017797736.html,/b436ae4d256db091cd1ac78ea.htmls alcohol, television, drugs, divorce, and buying, buying, buying what you don’t need. But all those too have their costs.

Education is about finding out what form of work for you is close to being play—work you do so easily that it restores you as you go. Randall Jarrell once said that if he were a rich man, he would pay money to teach poetry to students. (I would, too, for what it’s worth.) In saying that, he (like my father) hinted in the direction of a profound and true theory of learning.

Unit3 Good Move. People Move. Ideas Move. And Cultures Change.

Good Move. People Move. Ideas Move. And Cultures Change.

Today we are in the throes of a worldwide reformation of cultures, a tectonic shift of habits and dreams called, in the cur ious argot of social scientists, "globalization." It's an inexact term for a wild assortment of changes in politics, business, health , entertainment. "Modern industry has established the world market. All old-established national industries are dislodged by n ew industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrot e this 150 years ago in The Communist Manifesto. Their statement now describes an ordinary fact of life.

How people feel about this depends a great deal on where they live and how much money they have. Yet globalization, as one report stated, "is a reality, not a choice." Humans have been weaving commercial and cultural connections since befo re the first camel caravan ventured afield. In the 19th century the postal service, newspapers, transcontinental railroads, and great steam-powered ships wrought fundamental changes. Telegraph, telephone, radio, and television tied tighter and more i ntricate knots between individuals and the wider world. Now computers, the Internet, cellular phones, cable TV, and cheaper jet transportation have accelerated and complicated these connections.

Still, the basic dynamic remains the same: Goods move. People move. Ideas move. And cultures change. The differenc e now is the speed and scope of these changes. It took television 13 years to acquire 50 million users; the Internet took only f ive.

Not everyone is happy about this. Some Western social scientists and anthropologists, and not a few foreign politicians, believe that a sort of cultural cloning will result from what they regard as the "cultural assault" of McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Dis ney, Nike, MTV, and the English language itself—more than a fifth of all the people in the world now speak English to some d egree. Whatever their backgrounds or agendas, these critics are convinced that Western—often equated with American—infl uences will flatten every cultural crease, producing, as one observer terms it, one big "McWorld."

Popular factions sprout to exploit nationalist anxieties. In China, where xenophobia and economic ambition have often s truggled for the upper hand, a recent book called China can say no became the best-seller by attacking what it considers the Chinese willingness to believe blindly in foreign things, advising Chinese travelers to not fly on a Boeing 777 and suggesting t hat Hollywood be burned.

There are many Westerners among the denouncers of Western cultural influences, but James Watson, a Harvard anthr opologist, isn't one of them. "The lives of Chinese villagers I know are infinitely better now than they were 30 years ago," he s ays. "China has become more open partly because of the demands of ordinary people. They want to become part of the worl d—I would say globalism is the major force for democracy in China. People want refrigerators, stereos, CD players. I feel it's

a moral obligation not to say: …Those people out there should continue to live in a museum while we will have showers that w ork.'"

Westernization, I discovered over months of study and travel, is a phenomenon shot through with inconsistencies and p opulated by very strange bedfellows. Critics of Western culture blast Coke and Hollywood but not organ transplants and com puters. Boosters of Western culture can point to increased efforts to preserve and protect the environment. Yet they make no mention of some less salubrious aspects of Western culture, such as cigarettes and automobiles, which, even as they are be ing eagerly adopted in the developing world, are having disastrous effects. Apparently westernization is not a straight road to hell, or to paradise either.

But I also discovered that cultures are as resourceful, resilient, and unpredictable as the people who compose them. In Los Angeles, the ostensible fountainhead of world cultural degradation, I saw more diversity than I could ever have supposed —at Hollywood High School the student body represents 32 different languages. In Shanghai I found that the television show Sesame Street has been redesigned by Chinese educators to teach Chinese values and traditions. "We borrowed an Americ an box," one told me, "and put Chinese content into it." In India, where there are more than 400 languages and several very s trict religions, McDonald's serves mutton instead of beef and offers a vegetarian menu acceptable to even the most orthodox Hindu.

The critical mass of teenagers—800 million in the world, the most there have ever been—with time and money to spend is one of the powerful engines of merging global cultures. Kids travel, they hang out, and above all they buy stuff. I'm sorry to say I failed to discover who was the first teenager to put his baseball cap on backward. Or the first one to copy him. But I do know that rap music, which sprang from the inner-city ghettos, began making big money only when rebellious white teenager s started buying it. But how can anyone predict what kids are going to want? Companies urgently need to know, so consultan ts have sprung up to forecast trends. They're called "cool hunters," and Amanda Freeman took me in hand one morning to ex plain how it works.

Amanda, who is 22, works for a New York-based company called Youth Intelligence and has come to Los Angeles to c onduct one of three annual surveys, whose results go to such clients as Sprint and MTV. She has shoulder-length brown hair and is wearing a knee-length brocade skirt and simple black wrap top. Amanda looks very cool to me, but she says no. "The funny thing about my work is that you don't have to be cool to do it," she says. "You just have to have the eye."

We go to a smallish …50s-style diner in Los Feliz, a slightly seedy pocket east of Hollywood that has just become trendy. Then we wander through a few of the thrift shops. "If it's not going to be affordable," Amanda remarks, "it's never going to cat ch on."

What trends does she see forming now? " the home is becoming more of a social place again. And travel's huge right n ow—you go to a place and bring stuff back."

Amanda, who is 22, works for a New York-based company called Youth Intelligence and has come to Los Angeles to c onduct one of three annual surveys, whose results go to such clients as Sprint and MTV. She has shoulder-length brown hair and is wearing a knee-length brocade skirt and simple black wrap top. Amanda looks very cool to me, but she says no. "The funny thing about my work is that you don't have to be cool to do it," she says. "You just have to have the eye."

We go to a smallish …50s-style diner in Los Feliz, a slightly seedy pocket east of Hollywood that has just become trendy. Then we wander through a few of the thrift shops. "If it's not going to be affordable," Amanda remarks, "it's never going to cat ch on."

What trends does she see forming now? " the home is becoming more of a social place again. And travel's huge right n ow—you go to a place and bring stuff back."

"It's really hard to be original these days, so the easiest way to come up with new stuff is to mix things that already exist . Fusion is going to be the huge term that everybody's going to use," she concludes. "There's going to be more blending, like Spanish music and punk—things that are so unrelated."

Los Angeles is fusion central, where cultures mix and morph. Take Tom Sloper and mah-jongg. Tom is a computer gee k who is also a mah-jongg fanatic. This being America, he has found a way to marry these two passions and sell the result. H e has designed a software program, Shanghai: Dynasty, that enables you to play mah-jongg on the Internet. This ancient Chi nese game involves both strategy and luck, and it is still played all over Asia in small rooms that are full of smoke and the cea seless click of the chunky plastic tiles and the fierce concentration of the players. It is also played by rich society women at co untry clubs in Beverly Hills and in apartments on Manhattan's Upper West Side. But Tom, 50, was playing it at his desk in Lo s Angeles one evening in the silence of a nearly empty office building.

Actually, he only appeared to be alone. His glowing computer screen showed a game already in progress with several h abitual partners: "Blue Whale," a man from Germany,; Russ, from Ohio; Freddyboy, a Chinese-American who lives in Edina, Minnesota. Tom played effortlessly as we talked.

"I've learned about 11 different styles of mah-jongg," he told me with that detached friendliness of those whose true con nection is with machines. "There are a couple of different ways of playing it in America. We usually play Chinese mah-jongg."

I watched the little tiles, like cards, bounce around the screen. As Tom played, he and his partners conversed by typing short comments to each other.

Does he ever play with real people? “Oh yeah,” Tom replied. “ Once a week at the office in the evening, and Thursday a t lunch.” A new name appeared on the screen. “There?s Fred?s mother. Can?t be, they? re in Vegas. Oh, it must be his sister. TJ?s online too, she?s the one from Wales-a real night owl. She?s getting married soon, and she lived with her fiance, and so metimes he gets up and says … Get off that damn computer!?”

Tom played on into the night. At least it was night where I was. He , an american playing a Chinese game with people i n Germany, Wales, Ohio, and Minnesota, was up in the cybersphere far above the level of time zones. It is a realm populated by individuals he?s never met who may be more real to him than the people who live next door.

If it seems that life in the West has become a fast-forward blur, consider China. In just 20 years, since market forces we re unleashed by economic reforms begun in 1978, life for many urban Chinese has changed drastically. A recent survey of 1 2 major cities showed that 97 percent of the respondents had televisions, and 88 percent had refrigerators and washing mac hines. Another study revealed that farmersare eating 48 percent more meat each year and 400 percent more fruit. Cosmopoli tan magazine, plunging necklines and all, is read by 260,000 Chinese women every month.

I went to Shanghai to see how the cultural trends show up in the largest city in the world's most populous nation. It is als o a city that has long been open to the West. General Motors, for example, set up its first Buick sales outlet in Shanghai in 19 29; today GM has invested 1.5 billion dollars in a new plant there, the biggest Sino-American venture in China.

Once a city of elegant villas and imposing beaux arts office buildings facing the river with shoulders squared, Shanghai i s currently ripping itself to ribbons. In a decade scores of gleaming new skyscrapers have shot up to crowd and jostle the skyl ine, cramp the narrow winding streets, and choke the parks and open spaces with their sheer soaring presence (most are 80 percent vacant). Traffic crawls, even on the new multilane overpasses. But on the streets the women are dressed in bright co lors, and many carry several shopping bags, especially on the Nanjing Road, which is lined with boutiques and malls. In its fir st two weeks of business the Gucci store took in a surprising $100,000.

"Maybe young women today don't know what it was like," says Wu Ying, editor in chief of the Chinese edition of the Fre nch fashion magazine Elle. "But ten years ago I wouldn't have imagined myself

wearing this blouse." It was red, with white polka dots. "When people bought clothes, they thought …How long will it last? ' A housewife knew that most of the monthly salary would be spent on food, and now it's just a small part, so she can think ab out what to wear or where to travel. And now with refrigerators, we don't have to buy food every day."

As for the cultural dislocation this might bring: "People in Shanghai don't see it as a problem," said a young German bus inessman. "The Chinese are very good at dealing with ambiguity. It's accepted—…It's very different, but it's OK, so, so what?'"

Potential: This is largely a Western concept. Set aside the makeup and skyscrapers, and it's clear that the truly great le ap forward [in Shanghai] is at the level of ideas. To really grasp this, I had only to witness the local performance of Shakespe are's Macbeth by the Hiu Kok Drama Association from Macau.

There we were at the Shanghai Theatre Academy, some 30 professors and students of literature and drama from all ov er china and I, on folding chairs around a space ont alike half of a basketball court. “I?m not going to be much help,” murmur ed Zhang Fang, my interpreter. “I don?t understand the Cantonese language, the most of these people don't either.”

I thought I knew what to watch for, but the only characters I recognized were the three witches. Otherwise the small grou p spent most of an hour running in circles, leaping, and threatening to beat each other with long sticks. The lighting was heav y on shadows, with frequent strobelike flashes. Language wasn't a problem, as the actors mainly snarled and shrieked. Then they turned their backs to the audience and a few shouted something in Cantonese. The lights went out, and for a moment th e only sound in the darkness was the whirring of an expensive camera on auto-rewind.

This is China? It could have been a college campus anywhere in the West: the anguished students, the dubious adults, the political exploitation of the massacred classic. Until recently such a performance was unthinkable. It strained imagination t hat this could be the same country where a generation ago the three most desired luxury items were wristwatches, bicycles, and sewing machines.

Early on I realized that I was going to need some type of compass to guide me through the wilds of global culture. So w hen I was in Los Angeles, I sought out Alvin Toffler, whose book Future Shock was published in 1970. In the nearly three dec ades since, he has developed and refined a number of interesting ideas, explained in The Third Wave, written with his wife, Heidi.

What do we know about the future now, I asked, that we didn't know before? "We now know that order grows out of cha os," he answered immediately. "You cannot have significant change, especially on the scale of Russia or China, without confl ict. Not conflicts between East and West, or North and South, but …wave' conflicts between industrially dominant countries an d predominantly agrarian countries, or conflicts within countries making a transition from one to the other."

Waves, he explained, are major changes in civilization. The first wave came with the development of agriculture, the se cond with industry. Today we are in the midst of the third, which is based on information. In 1956 something new began to ha ppen, which amounts to the emergence of a new civilization. Toffler said. "It was in that year that U.S. service and knowledge workers outnumbered blue-collar factory workers. In 1957 Sputnik went up. Then jet aviation became commercial, television became universal, and computers began to be widely used. And with all these changes came changes in culture.

"What's happening now is the trisection of world power," he continued. "Agrarian nations on the bottom, smokestack co untries in between, and knowledge-based economies on top." There are a number of countries—Brazil, for example—where all three civilizations coexist and collide.

"Culturally we'll see big changes," Toffler said. "You're going to turn on your TV and get Nigerian TV and Fijian TV in yo ur own language." Also, some experts predict that the TV of the future, with 500 cable channels, may be used by smaller gro ups to foster their separate, distinctive cultures and languages.

"People ask, …Can we become third wave and still remain Chinese?' Yes," Toffler says. "You can have a unique culture made of your core culture. But you'll be the Chinese of the future, not of the past."

Linking: This is what the spread of global culture ultimately means. Goods will continue to move—from 1987 to 1995 loc al economies in California exported 200 percent more products, businesses in Idaho 375 percent more. People move: It is ch eaper for businesses to import talented employees than to train people at home. Ideas move: In Japan a generation of childr en raised with interactive computer games has sensed, at least at the cyber level, new possibilities. "The implicit message in all this,” wrote in Kenichi Ohmac, “is that it is possible to actively take control of one's situation or circumstances and, thereby , to change one's fate. For the Japanese, this is an entirely new way of thinking."

Change: It's a reality, not a choice. But what will be its true driving force? Cultures don't become more uniform; instead, both old and new tend to transform each other. The late philosopher Isaiah Berlin believed that, rather than aspire to some ut

opian ideal, a society should strive for something else: "not that we agree with each other," his biographer explained, "but tha t we can understand each other."

In Shanghai one October evening I joined a group gathered in a small, sterile hotel meeting room. It was the eve of Yo

m Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and there were diplomats, teachers, and businessmen from many Western countrie s. Elegant women with lively children, single men, young fathers. Shalom Greenberg, a young Jew from Israel married to an American, was presiding over his first High Holy Days as rabbi of the infant congregation.

"It's part of the Jewish history that Jews went all over the world," Rabbi Greenberg reflected. "They received a lot from l ocal cultures, but they also kept their own identity."

The solemn liturgy proceeded, unchanged over thousands of years and hundreds of alien cultures: "Create in me a clea n heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me," he intoned. I'm neither Jewish nor Chinese, but sitting there I didn't feel fo reign—I felt at home. The penitence may have been Jewish, but the aspiration was universal.

Global culture doesn't mean just more TV sets and Nike shoes. Linking is humanity's natural impulse, its common desti ny. But the ties that bind people around the world are not merely technological or commercial. They are the powerful cords of the heart.

第三课商品流通、人员流动、观念转变、文化变迁埃拉?兹温格尔

1．今天我们正经历着一种世界范围文化巨变的阵痛，一种习俗与追求的结构性变化,用社会学家奇特的词汇来称呼这种变化，就叫“全球化”。对于政治、商贸、保健及娱乐领域的巨大变化，这个词并不贴切。“现代工业已建立了世界市场。已建立的所有旧的国民工业被其产品不仅在国内而且在世界各地范围内销售的新兴工业所取代。人们用新的需求取代原有的需求，用外地的产品满足自己的需求。”卡尔.马克思和弗雷德里希?恩格斯早在150年前就在《共产党宣言》中写下了这些。他们那时的陈述描绘了现在生活中的普遍事实。

2．对此人们有何感受很大程度上取决于他们的生活所在地和所拥有的金钱数。然而，正如某篇报道所述，全球化“是一种事实，而不是一种选择”。早在第一批骆驼商队冒险出外经商前至今，人们一直在编织着商贸和文化相互间的交往。在19世纪，邮政服务、报纸、横跨大陆的铁路及巨大的蒸汽轮船带来了根本变化。电报、电话、收音机和电视把个人和外部世界更紧密地连在一起，这种联系更为复杂、不那么直接也不易察觉。现在，计算机、互联网、移动电话、有线电视和相对便宜的喷气式飞机空运加速了这种联系并使这种联系更加复杂。

3．然而，产生这种变化的动力是一致的：商品流通、人员流动、观念转变、文化变迁。不同的是这些变化的速度和范围。电视机拥有5,000万用户用了13年时间，互联网只用了5年时间。

4．对这种变化并不是人人满意。一些西方社会学家、人类学家和为数不少的外国政治家认为文化．克隆是他们所认为的麦当劳、可口可乐、迪斯尼、耐克和MTV“文化轰炸”的结果，也是英语语言本身的结果，因为现在全球多于五分之一人口都或多或少地讲英语。不管他们的背景和纲领如何, 这些对全球化持反对态度的人深信西方的影响…往往等同于美国的影响 ...会把文化上的差异—一压平。就像一位观察家所说的，最终产生一个麦当劳世界，一个充斥美国货和体现美国价值观的世界。

5．反映公众情绪(或得到公众支持)的派别不断滋生以便利用持此观点的国民的焦虑和不安。在闭关锁国和发展经济两种政策并存并争取其主控地位的中国，《中国可以说不》这本新书成为畅销书，这本书对中国人的盲目崇洋媚外心理进行了，批驳，建议中国游客不要乘坐波音777飞机，还建议烧掉进口的好莱坞大片。

6．对西方文化影响持斥责态度的人中有许多西方人．而哈佛人类学家詹姆斯?沃森并不是其中一员。他说：“我知道现在中国农村人的生活比30年前的好多了。中国越来越开放，部分原因是出于中国老百姓的要求。他们想成为世界的一部分---我要说全球观念在中国是民主的重要动力。人们需要冰箱、音响和CD机。‘远在中国的那些人应该继续过着落后的生活，而我们却可以使用淋浴器，过着舒适的现代生活’。我认为不说这种话是一种道义。”

7．经过几个多月的研究和旅行，我发现西方化是一种内部充满矛盾的现象，在特别怪异之人中占有一席之地。西方文化批评家斥责可乐和好莱坞，却不斥责器官移植和计算机。西方文化支持者指出继续努力保护环境，但他们不提西方文化中不那么健康的一面，譬如香烟和汽车，就在发展中国家急切地接纳这些东西时，它们已带来很坏的后果。显然，西方化既不会直达地狱，也不会直通天堂。

8．不过我也发现文化就如同构成文化的民族一样，善于随机应变，富有弹性而且不可预测。在洛杉矶，世界文化堕落明显的源头，我看到的差异要比我想像的多——在好莱坞高中学生说32种完全不同的语言。在上海，我发现“芝麻街”这一电视节目已被中国教育家重新改组，用以传授中国人的价值观和传统习惯。一位教育家对我说：“我们借用美国盒子，装进去的是中国内容。”在有400多种语言和几种纪律严明的宗教的印度，麦当劳供应的是羊肉汉堡而不是牛肉汉堡，还为那些最正统的印度人提供素食菜谱。

9．许多既有时间又有钱的青少年---全世界共有8亿---是融合全球文化的关键及主要力量之一。孩子们爱旅行、闲逛，重要的是他们买东西。很遗憾我没能发现哪个青少年第一个倒戴垒球帽，哪个青少年第一个模仿他，但是我确实知道最先出现在市内黑人区的说唱乐就是在有叛逆精神的白人青少年开始买票观看时才开始赚大钱的。然而，人们又会如何预测孩子们需要什么呢?许多公司迫切想要了解孩子们的需要，因此出现了顾问，他们预测将来的趋势，被称之为“猎酷者”。阿曼达?弗里德曼一天上午向我讲述了其中的奥秘。

10．阿曼达22岁，在其基地设在纽约的一家叫作“青年情报”的公司工作，她到洛杉矶进行调查，调查的结果要通报给公司很多重要的客户。她留着披肩的棕发，穿着一条长及膝盖的织锦短裙。在我看来，阿曼达打扮得很酷，但她自己并不这样认为。她说：“我的工作有趣之处就在于做此工作你不必扮酷，你得有眼光。”

11．我们去了一家小一点的、50年代式样的餐馆，这家餐馆位于好莱坞东面一个比较破落的区域，这个区域刚刚成为时尚聚集点。然后我们去逛了几家旧货店。阿曼达说：“如果人们买不起，那它就不会流行起来。”

12．现在她看到将要形成的流行趋势了吗?“家正在成为一个社交的地方，眼下旅行正热——人们到某地去，买回来许多东西。”

13．她最后说：“现今创新极为困难，因此最容易的办法就是把现存的东西捏在一起，拿出一个新玩意儿来。融合将会成为人人都要使用的大词，将来会有越来越多的毫不相关的东西融合在一起，如西班牙乐和蓬克乐。”

14．洛杉矶是融合中心，各种文化在这里交汇并有所改变。以汤姆?斯洛珀和麻将为例：汤姆是个计算机怪才，同时还是个麻将迷。由于这是美国，所以他找到了把这两种爱好结合在一起的方式并把自己的成果出售。他设计了一个人们可以在互联网上玩麻将的软件程序，这个程序叫做“上海：帝国”。玩这种老式中国麻将既需要技巧又需要运气。亚洲人仍然在小屋子里玩麻将，屋子里弥漫着烟雾，到处都能听到麻将牌相互撞击所发出的不绝于耳的喀哒声。玩家们精神高度集中。居住在比弗利山(美国加利福尼亚州西南部城市，好莱坞影星集居地)和曼哈顿上西城公寓里的有钱女人们也在俱乐部里玩麻将。然而，一天晚上，在洛杉矶，50岁的汤姆一个人坐在办公桌旁，在寂静、空旷的办公大楼里玩麻将。

15．事实上，他只是看上去是一个人。他那亮着的计算机屏幕表明麻将已经玩起来了，其他几个参与者都是老牌友。他们是德国人“蓝鲸”、俄亥俄州的拉斯和住在明尼苏达州的美籍华人弗雷迪。我们一边谈着话，汤姆一边毫不费力地在玩麻将。16．汤姆对我的态度很友好，但那是那种超然的友好，他的兴趣在连线的计算机上。他对我说：“我已掌握了11种麻将的玩法。在美国有几种不同麻将的玩法。我们常打中国式麻将。”

17．我看着小小麻将牌像纸牌一样在屏幕上弹来弹去。汤姆边玩边打字，和牌友简短交流牌局情况。

18．他和真人打过麻将吗?他回答说：“打过。一周一次，晚上在办公室，周四中午。”这时，屏幕上出现一个新名字。“是弗雷迪的母亲。不可能是，他们在维加斯。噢!一定是他姐姐。TJ也在线，她是威尔士人，一个真正的夜猫子。她快结婚了，现在与她未婚夫一起生活。有时她未婚夫起床对她说：‘离开那讨厌的电脑!’”

19．汤姆继续玩，一直到深夜。至少我所在的地方是深夜。他--- 一个美国人，和德国人、威尔士人、俄亥俄人还有明尼苏达人一起玩中国游戏，他在网络世界活动，这种活动超越时区。这是他从未谋面的那些人的王国，对他来说，那些人要远比他的左邻右舍更真实。

20．如果说西方的生活太超前了，已经看不清轮廓了。那么就看看中国。从1978年经济改革搞活市场至今的20年时间，许多中国城市居民的生活有了极大的改善。最近对12个主要城市进行了，调查，数据显示97％的调查对象拥有电视机，88％拥有电冰箱和洗衣机。另一项调查显示农民每年的食肉量增加了48％，水果增加了400％。26万中国妇女每个月都在阅读《时尚》杂志，那些开领袒胸的画页及其他内容。

21．我到上海去调查在世界人口最多国家的最大城市里文化趋势如何出现。上海也是对西方开放最久的城市，譬如通用汽车公司早在1929年就在上海设立。如今，通用汽车投资1.5亿美元在上海建立了中国最大的中美合资新厂。

22．上海曾是一座建有雅致的别墅和庄严的办公大楼的城市，但现在却是一座带状城市。10年中，几十座闪闪发亮的新的高层建筑拔地而起，挤压空间，使人张目不能远眺，使原本狭窄弯曲的街道更显压抑。而这些高耸大楼的存在也使公园和空地感到

憋闷。即使是在多车道的高架桥上，车辆也在爬行。然而，街上的妇女着装色彩艳丽，特别是在街道两边布满精品店和时装店的南京路上，许多妇女手里拎着多个购物袋。在刚开业的两周时间里，古奇专卖店的营业额为十万美元，令人惊讶不已。23．法国时装杂志Elle中国版的总编吴颖说：“也许现在的年轻女性不了解过去。10年前我决不会想到我会穿这样的衬衫(那是一件红白相间的紧身圆点花纹衬衫)。那时人们买衣服时考虑的是它能穿多久，家庭主妇把每月的工资主要用来买食品。而现在买食品只需一小部分工资，因此她会考虑着装和旅行。现在有冰箱，我们也不必天天买食品。”

24．至于由此可能带来的文化错位问题，一位年轻的德国商人说：“上海人认为这不是问题。中国人是很善于应对多种可能性的。人们接受了它。‘很难，但还可以。那有什么?”’

25．潜力：这主要是西方概念。不谈古奇专卖店和摩天大楼，真正的巨大飞跃体现在观念上。我只有在亲眼目睹了澳门的休考克戏剧协会在当地上演的莎土比亚戏剧《麦克白》时才真正领会了这一点。

26．在上海戏剧学院，我和来自全中国文学与戏剧专业的大约30名教授和学生一起坐在折叠椅上观看演出，演出场地大约有半个垒球场那么大。翻译张芳小声对我说：“我帮不了什么忙；我不懂广东话，这里许多人都不懂。”

27．我原以为自己能看个八九不离十，结果却只能辨认出三个女巫。这几个人用了近一个小时的时间转圈、跳来跳去、用长棍子相互威胁打来打去。灯光集中在鬼影上，常常夹着闪电。语言不是问题，因为演员主要是在咆哮和尖叫。后来他们背对观众，一些人用广东话叫喊着。灯光熄灭，有一阵子，黑暗中惟一的声音就是一部价格昂贵的照相机自动倒卷时所发出的声音。28．这是中国吗?这可以是西方的任何一所大学校园。这样的表演即使是现在也难以想像。令人难以想像的是就是在这个国家，20年前人们最想要的一种奢侈品是手表、自行车和缝纫机。

29．许久以来我认识到我需要某种指南针来指引我穿越全球文化的荒原。因此在洛杉矶时，我找到阿尔文?托夫勒．1970年他的《未来的冲击》一书出版。此后近30年，他提出并完善了一些有趣的想法，他在与夫人海蒂合著的《第三次浪潮》一书中详述了这些想法。

30．我问他人们对以前并不知道的将来现在又了解多少呢?他马上就做出了回答：“人们都知道秩序产生于混乱。没有冲突就不可能有大的改变。尤其是在俄罗斯或中国这样的国家。不是东方和西方的冲突，也不是南北之间的冲突。而是以1：业为主和以农业为主的国家间的冲突，或处在转型期的国家间的冲突。”

31．他进一步解释说，浪潮就是文明的重大变化。第一次浪潮指的是农业发展，第二次指_丁业。今天我们正处在第三次浪潮之中．主要指信息业。1956年开始产生新事物，就是出现了新文明。托夫勒说：“就是在那一年美国服务业和信息业的工人超过了蓝领工人。1957年苏联人造地球卫星升空。随后航空商业化、电视普及、计算机开始被广泛应用，随之而来的就是文化变迁。”

32．他继续说到：“现在世界权利正在发生三等分变化。农业国在底层，工业国在中间，发展知识经济的国家在上面。”在有些国家，如巴西，三种文明并存，相互冲撞。

33．托大勒说：“我们会看到文化上有很大变化。你一打开电视，就能收看用母语播放的尼日利亚和斐济电视节日。”一些专家还预测未来电视有500个有线频道，少数群体可以用这种电视发展自己独立的、与众不同的文化和语言。

34．托夫勒还说：“人们要问。我们会经历第三次浪潮而继续保持中国特色吗? 会的，会有由自己核心文化构成的独特文化，但那是未来的中国文化，而不是过去的中国文化。”

35．相互联系：全球文化传播最终就意味着相互联系。商品会继续流动从1987年剑1995年，加利福尼哑州经济部¨多出口了200％的产品，爱达荷商业部多出口了375％。人员流动：从国外引进商业雇员比在国内培训工人便宜。观念转变：在日本，玩互动电子游戏长大的一代至少在网络世界体验到了新的可能性。大前研一在一本书中写道：“玩这种游戏向人们传递着一个模糊的信息，就是人们有可能主动操纵自己的处境，因此就会改变自己的命运。对日本人来说．这完全是一种新的思维方式。”36．变化：变化是一个事实，而不是一种选择。那么真正的驱动力是什么呢?各种文化并没有更加一致；相反。新趋势和旧趋势相互转变。已故的哲学家以赛亚?柏林认为一个社会应该追求一些别的东西，而不是某种乌托邦式的理想。他在自传中写道：“不是我们持一致意见，而是我们相互理解。”

37．10月的某个晚L。在上海，我和一群人在一间又小又闷的宾馆会议室里相聚。那是犹太赎罪日前夜。参加聚会的有许多西方国家的外交官、教师和商人，还有携带可爱孩子的漂亮女士、单身男士和年轻的父亲。夏勒姆?格林伯格是位年轻的以色列犹太人，娶了个美国太太。他是第一次作为拉比(犹太教巾负责执行教规、律法并主持宗教仪式的人)主持这种刚刚开始定期举行的新年宗教集会。

38．格林伯格拉比说：“犹太人遍布世界各地，这是犹太历史的一部分。他们从当地文化吸收了不少东西，但仍然保持了自己的本色。”

39．庄严的礼拜仪式在继续，经过几千年和上百种外同文化的影响都未曾改变。他吟诵：“啊，上帝啊!给我一颗纯净的心，恢复我健康的心灵!”我既不是犹太人也不是中国人，但坐在这里我一点都不觉得陌生．感觉就像在家里一样。忏悔可能具有犹太特色，但是渴望得到上帝的原谅却是普遍的。

40．全球文化并不仅仅意味着拥有更多的电视机和耐克鞋。相互联系是人类自然的欲望，是其共同的命运。但是连接全球人类的纽带并不只是技术或商业，这种连接靠的是强有力的心灵的纽带。

Unit4 Professions for Women 女人的职业

Born in England, Virginia Woolf was the daughter of Leslie Stephen, a well-known scholar. She was educated primarily at home and attributed her love of reading to the early and complete access she was given to her father’s library. With her husband, Leonard Woolf, she founded the Hogarth Press and became known as member of the Bloomsbury group of intellectuals, which included economist John Maynard Keynes, biographer Lytton Strachey, novelist E. M. Forster, and art historian Clive Bell. Although she was a central figure in London literary life, Woolf often saw herself as isolated from the mains stream because she was a woman. Woolf is best known for her experimental, modernist novels, including Mrs. Dalloway(1925) and To the Lighthouse(1927) which are widely appreciated for her breakthrough into a new mode and technique--the stream of consciousness. In her diary and critical essays she has much to say about women and fiction. Her 1929 book A Room of One’s Own documents her desire for women to take their right ful place in literary history and as an essayist she has occupied a high place in 20th century literature. The common Reader (1925 first series; 1932 second series) has acquired classic status. She also wrote short stories and biographies. “Professions for Women” taken from The collected Essays Vol 2. is originally a paper Woolf read to the Women’s Service League, an organization for professional women in London.

When your secretary invited me to come here, she told me that your Society is concerned with the employment of women and she suggested that I might tell you something about my own professional experiences. It is true that I am a woman; it is true I am employed; but what professional experiences have I had? It is difficult to say. My profession is literature; and in that profession there are fewer experiences for women than in any other, with the exception of the stage--fewer, I mean, that are peculiar to women. For the road was cut many years ago---by Fanny Burney, by AphraBehn, by Harriet Martineau, by Jane Austen, by George Eliot —many famous women, and many more unknown and forgotten, have been before me, making the path smooth, and regulating my steps. Thus, when I came to write, there were very few material obstacles in my way. Writing was a reputable and harmless occupation. The family peace was not broken by the scratching of a pen. No demand was made upon the family purse. For ten and sixpence one can buy paper enough to write all the plays of Shakespeare--if one has a mind that way. Pianos and models, Paris, Vienna, and Berlin, masters and mistresses, are not needed by a writer. The cheapness of writing paper is, of course, the reason why women have succeeded as writers before they have succeeded in the other professions.

But to tell you my story--it is a simple one. You have only got to figure to yourselves a girl in a bedroom with a pen in her hand. She had only to move that pen from left to right--from ten o’clock to one. Then it occurred to her to do what is simple and cheap enough after all--to slip a few of those pages into an envelope, fix a penny stamp in the corner, and drop the envelope into the red box at the corner. It was thus that I became a journalist; and my effort was rewarded on the first day of the following month--a very glorious day it was for me--by a letter from an editor containing a check for one pound ten shillings and sixpence. But to show you how little I deserve to be called a professional woman, how little I know of the struggles and difficulties of such lives, I have to admit that instead of spending that sum upon bread and butter, rent, shoes and stockings, or butcher’s bills, I went out and bought a cat--a beautiful cat, a Persian cat, which very soon involved me in bitter disputes with my neighbors.

What could be easier than to write articles and to buy Persian cats with the profits? But wait a moment. Articles have to be about something. Mine, I seem to remember, was about a novel by a famous man. And while I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me an my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come off a younger and happier generation may not have heard of

her--you may not know what I mean by The Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draft she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all--I need not say it--she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty--her blushes, her great grace. In those days--the last of Queen Victoria--every house had its Angel. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page; I heard the rustling of her skirts in the room. Directly, that is to say, I took my pen in my hand to review that novel by a famous man, she slipped behind me and whispered:“My dear, you a re a young woman. You are writing about a book that has been written by a man. Be sympathetic; be tender; flatter; deceive; use all the art and wiles of our sex. Never let anybody guess that you have a mind of our own. Above all, be pure.” And she made as if to guide my pen. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself, though the credit rightly belongs to some excellent ancestors of mine who left me a certain sum of money--shall we say five hundred pounds a year? --so that it was not necessary for me to depend solely on charm for my living. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, If I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defense. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex. And all these questions, according to the Angel of the House, cannot be dealt with freely and openly by women; they must charm, they must conciliate, they must—to put it bluntly-—tell lies if they are to succeed. Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had dispatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; It was an experience that was bound befall all women writers at that time. Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.

But to continue my story. The Angel was dead; what then remained? You may say that what remained was a simple and common object--a young woman in a bedroom with an inkpot. In other words, now that she had rid herself of falsehood, that young woman had only to be herself. Ah, but what is “herself”? I mean, what is a woman? I assure you, I do not know. I do not believe that you know. I do not believe that anybody can know until she has expressed herself in all the arts and professions open to human skill. That indeed is one of the reasons why I have come here--out of respect for you, who are in process of showing us by your experiments what a woman is, who are in process of providing us, by your failures and succeeded, with that extremely important piece of information.

But to continue the story of my professional experiences. I made one pound ten and six by my first review; and I bought a Persian cat with the proceeds. Then I grew ambitious. A Persian cat is all very well, I said; but a Persian cat is not enough. I must have a motorcar. And it was thus that I became a novelist--for it is a very strange thing that people will give you a motorcar if you will tell them a story. It is a still stranger thing that there is nothing so delightful in the world as telling stories. It

is far pleasanter than writing reviews of famous novels. And yet, if I am to obey your secretary and tell you my professional experiences as a novelist, I must tell you about a very strange experience that befell me as a novelist. And to understand it you must try first to imagine a novelist’s state of mind. I hope I am not giving away professional secrets if I say that a novelist’s chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living--so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings round, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination. I suspect that this state is the same both for men and women. Be that as it may, I want you to imagine me writing a novel in a state of trance. I want you to figure to yourselves a girl sitting with a pen in her hand, which for minutes, and indeed for hours, she never dips into the inkpot. The image that comes to my mind when I think of this girl is the image of a fisherman lying sunk in dreams on the verge of a deep lake with a rod held out over the water. She was letting her imagination sweep unchecked round every rock and cranny of the world that lies submerged in the depths of our unconscious being. Now came the experience that I believe to be far commoner with women writers than with men. The line raced through the girl’s fingers. Her imagination had rushed away. It had sought the pools, the depths, the dark places where the largest fish slumber. And then there was a smash. There was an explosion. There was foam and confusion. The imagination had dashed itself against something hard. The girl was roused from her dream. She was indeed in a state of the most acute and difficult distress. To speak without figure, she had thought of something, something about the body, about the passions which it was unfitting for her as a woman to say. Men, her reason told her, would be shocked. The consciousness of what men will say of a woman who speaks the truth about her passions had roused her from her artist’s state of unconsciousness. She could write no more. The trace was over. Her imagination could work no longer. This I believe to be a very common experience with women writers--they are impeded by the extreme conventionality of the other sex. For though men sensibly allow themselves great freedom in these respects, I doubt that they realize or can control the extreme severity with which they condemn such freedom in women.

These then were two very genuine experiences of my own. These were two of the adventures of my professional life. The first--killing the Angel in the House--I think I solved. She died. But the second, telling the truth about my own experiences as a body, I do not think I solved. I doubt that any woman has solved it yet. The obstacles against her are still immensely powerful--and yet they are very difficult to define. Outwardly, what is simpler than to write books? Outwardly, what obstacles are there for a woman rather than for a man? Inwardly, I think, the case is very different; she has still many ghosts to fight, many prejudices to overcome. Indeed it will be a long time still, I think, before a woman can sit down to write a book without finding a phantom to be slain, a rock to be dashed against. And if this is so in literature, the freest of all professions for women, how is it in the new professions which you are now for the first time entering?

四、女性的职业弗吉尼亚?伍尔夫

l.你们的秘书邀请我时对我说你们妇女服务团关注的是女性就业问题，她提议我讲一讲我就业的亲身体验。我是女性，这是事实；我有工作，这也是事实。但我又有什么职业体验呢?这很难讲。我从事的是文学职业，与其他职业相比，当然不包括戏剧行业，在文学职业里几乎没有什么女性体验，我的意思是几乎没有女性特有的体验。多年前，路已开辟出来。许多知名的女性---范妮?伯尼、阿芙拉.贝恩、哈丽雅特?马蒂诺、简?奥斯汀、乔治?艾略特---和许多不知名以及已被人忘记的女性在我之前铺平了道路并指导我向前走。因此，在我从事写作时，几乎没有物质障碍。写作这个职业既受人尊敬又没有危险。写字的沙沙声不会打破家庭的和平，写作也不需要什么家庭开销。花16便士买的纸足够用来写莎士比亚的所有戏剧---要是你有那样的才智的话。作家不需要钢琴和模特，不用去巴黎、维也纳和柏林，也不需要家庭教师。当然，廉价的写作用纸是女性作为作家成功而先于其他职业的原因。

2．我讲讲我的故事，那只是个平常的故事。你们自己设想一个姑娘，手里握着一支笔坐在卧室里。从十点钟到一点钟她只是不停地由左向右写，然后她想到做一件既省钱又省力的事---把那些纸张放进信封，在信封的一角贴上一张一便士的邮票，把信封投进拐角的一个红色邮筒。我就是这样成了一名撰稿人。我的努力在下个月的第一天得到了回报---_那是我一生中非常快乐的一

天。我收到了编辑寄来的一封信，里面装有一张一英镑十先令六便士的支票。为了让你们了解我不值得被称作职业女性，对人生的艰难和奋斗知之甚少，我得承认我没用那笔钱买食物、付房租、买袜子和肉，而是出去买了一只猫，一只漂亮的波斯猫，这只猫不久就引起了我和邻居间的激烈争端。

3．什么会比写文章并用赚得的钱买波斯猫来得更容易?但再想一想，文章得有内容。我好像记得我的文章是评论一部名人写的小说。在写那篇评论时，我发现要想写书评我就必须和某个鬼怪做斗争。这个鬼怪是个女子，在我逐渐对她有进一步了解后，我用一个有名的诗歌里的女主人公的名字“家里的天使”来称呼她。就是她，在我写评论时，总是在我和我的写作之间制造麻烦。就是她总是打扰我，浪费我的时间，如此地折磨我，最终我杀死了她。你们年轻快乐的这一代人可能没听说过她---你们可能不知道我说的“家里的天使”是什么意思。我要简单地讲一讲。她有极强的同情心，非常有魅力，一点都不自私，做高难度的家务非常出色，天天作自我牺牲。如果有只鸡，她就吃鸡腿，如果屋里通风，她就坐在风口。总之，她就是这样的人，没有自己的想法和期望，总是准备为他人的想法和期望作出牺牲。首要的是---我不需要这么说--- 她纯洁。纯洁被认为是她的最美之处---她爱脸红，典雅大方。在那时，维多利亚时代后期，每个家庭都有天使。我刚一提笔写字就会遇见她。她那翅膀的影子映在纸上，在屋子里我能听到她裙子沙沙作响。也就是说，我一拿起笔写那位名人的书评，她就会悄悄地溜到我身后悄声对我说：“亲爱的，你是个年轻姑娘，你在给男人写的书写评论。要有同情心，要温柔，要奉承，要说假话，要使用女性全部的小伎俩。不要让任何人看出你有自己的见解。首要的是要纯洁。”她就这样引导我的写作。下面我要说说多少是我自己决定做的一件事情，当然做此事的功劳主要还应归功于我那了不起的祖先，是他们给我留下了一笔财产---比如说每年500英镑吧---这样我就不必完全靠女人的魅力去谋生了。我对她发起突然进攻，扼住她的喉咙。我尽最大努力杀死她。要是因此被带上法庭的话，我的辩护词就是我是自卫，如果我不杀死她，她就会杀死我，她会拔掉我进行写作的心。因为我发现在写作时，要是没有自己的见解，不能真实表达人与人之间的关系、道德和性的话，你一本小说的评论都写不出来。依照“家里的天使”，所有这些问题女性都不能公开和自由地讨论。她们必须使用魅力，必须作出让步，更直接地说，她们想要成功就必须说假话。因此，无论何时在纸上感到有她的翅膀或光晕的影子，我就会拿起墨水瓶，向她砸去。她不容易死去，她那非真实的特性对她是极大的帮助。杀死鬼怪要比杀死真实的人艰难多了。在我认为我已杀死她时，她就会悄悄地溜回来。尽管我自己确信我最终杀死了她，但搏斗得很激烈，消耗的时间要比学希腊语语法或周游世界体验冒险经历的时间多多了。但是，这是真实的体验，这种经历在那时会降临到所有女作家的头上。杀死“家里的天使”是女作家职业中的一部分。

4．继续讲我的故事。天使死后，还有什么东西留下来了呢?你们会说留下的是一个简单又普通的物体--- 一个年轻姑娘坐在有墨水瓶的卧室里。换句话说，既然她已经摆脱掉说假话的错误观念，那么这个年轻姑娘可以做回自己了。噢，什么是“她自己”呢?我的意思是什么是妇女。我向你们保证我不知道，我相信你们也不知道。我相信，只有妇女在人类知识所涉及的全部文艺艺术和专业领域中用创造形式表达自己的情感后，她们才知道什么是妇女。这就是我来这里的原因之一，出于对你们的敬重。你们通过实验在向我们展示什么是妇女；你们通过自己的成功与失败在为我们提供重要的信息。

5．下面接着讲我的职业体验。我的第一篇评论赚了一英镑十先令六便土，我用那笔钱买了一只波斯猫。接下来我雄心勃勃，我说，波斯猫不错，但还不够，我一定要有一辆汽车。我就这样成为一名小说家---要是你给人们讲故事他们就会给你一辆汽车，这可是很奇怪的事情。更奇怪的事情是世界上没有比讲故事更令人快乐的事情了，讲故事远比写评论有趣。然而，如果听从秘书的建议，讲述我作为小说家的职业体验的话，我必须告诉你们我的一个很奇怪的经历。要想明白这一点，你们必须想像小说家的意识状态。如果我说小说家的重要愿望是尽量处于无意识状态，我希望我没有泄露行业秘密。他得使自己处于持久的昏睡状态，他想要过一种最安静、最有规律的生活。他希望在他写作时，每天见的人、读的书、做的事都是相同的，这样任何事物都不会打破他生活的幻想，也不会扰乱他的四处探求以及对那令人难以捉摸的东西即想像力的突然发现。我认为这种状态对于男人和女人是一样的。尽管如此，我请你们想像我在迷睡的状态中写小说。请你们想像一个女孩坐在桌旁，手里握着笔，几分钟甚至几小时都未曾动过墨水瓶。当我想到这女孩时，脑海里浮现出一个形象：一个深深的湖边有一位钓鱼者，他手握鱼竿，沉浸在梦境中。她在让想像力自由自在地在位于无意识的最深层的世界的各个角落畅游。现在这种体验来了，我认为这种体验发生在女人身上要比发生在男人身上平常得多。鱼竿在女孩的手指间快速地转动，她的想像力被冲跑了。想像力搜寻了池塘、池塘的最深处以及最大的鱼生活的暗处。就在这时传来了猛烈撞击声、爆炸声，出现了水花，一片混乱。想像力撞到了坚硬的东西。那个女孩从睡梦中惊醒，她陷入了一种最深刻、最艰难的痛苦状态。不用修辞手段、直截了当地说，她想到了一件事情，一件不适合女人讲的有关身体和激情的事情。她的理智告诉她，男人会感到震惊的。她意识到男人们会如何议论一个敢讲有关激情真话的女人，这使她从艺术家的无意识状态中惊醒了。她再也写不下去了，迷睡结束了，想像力也不再起作用。我认为这

是女作家非常普遍的切身体验---另一性别非常传统的观念阻碍着她们。尽管男人们理智上在这些方面给自己极大的自由，我认为他们未必会认识或控制他们谴责女人这种自由时的猛烈程度。

6．这些就是我自己的两种真实体验，我职业生涯中的两个异乎寻常的经历。第一个---杀死“家里的天使”，我认为我已经解决了，她死了。但第二个---真实地讲述我的身体和激情，我认为还没有解决。我认为任何女性都还没有解决这个问题。不利于她的那些障碍还有很强大的力量，也很难给它们下定义。从外表看，什么比写书更容易呢?从外表看，有什么障碍会阻碍女人而不是男人呢?从内心精神方面看，情况颇为不同。妇女还要与许多鬼怪展开斗争。还有许多偏见需要克服。当然，我认为，女人不用杀死鬼怪，不用击碎岩石就能够坐下来专心写书还需要很长时间。如果在文学领域---女性最自由的职业里情况如此的话，那么在你们第一次从事的新职业里情况又会如何呢?

7．如果有时间，这些就是我要问你们的问题。当然，如果我重点强调我的职业体验的话，那是因为我相信，尽管方式不同，它们也是你们的体验。即使道路名义上是宽阔的--- 没有任何事情可以阻碍妇女成为医生、律师和公务员，但我相信前面仍有许多鬼怪和障碍若隐若现。讨论和界定这些障碍是十分重要的。因为只有如此我们才能共同努力克服困难。除此之外。还有必要讨论我们为之奋斗，为之与难以克服的障碍作斗争的目的。那些目的是什么，对这个问题我们不能想当然，而要不断地提出疑问和进行审视。在我看来，在这里，在这个被有史以来第一次从事这么多种不同职业的妇女所包围的大厅里，整个状况都非常耐人寻味，而且还有重要意义。在这个迄今为止专门由男人控制的房子里，你们已经赢得了自己的房间。尽管不可能不付出很大的劳动和努力，你们能够自己付房租了，能够每年挣自己的500英镑。但是，这种自由才刚刚开始，房间是你的，但里面空无一物。房间还需要置办家具，需要装饰物，需要有人与你分享。你准备置办什么样的家具，准备进行什么样的装修，准备和谁一起合用这个房间，有什么条件?我认为这些问题非常重要，非常耐人寻味，因为有史以来你们第一次提出这些问题，第一次自己能够决定这些问题的答案。我非常愿意留下来和你们一起讨论这些问题并找到答案。但今晚不行，我的时间到了，就讲到这里吧。

(国永荣译．边娜审校)

5.Love is a Fallacy Max Shulman

1 Charles Lamb, as merry and enterprising a fellow as you will meet in a month of Sundays, unfettered the informal essay with his memorable Old China and Dream's Children. There follows an informal essay that ventures even beyond Lamb's frontier, indeed, "informal" may not be quite the right word to describe this essay; "limp" or " flaccid" or possibly "spongy" are perhaps more appropriate.

2 Vague though its category, it is without doubt an essay. It develops an argument; it cites instances; it reaches a conclusion. Could Carlyle do more? Could Ruskin ?

3 Read, then, the following essay which undertakes to demonstrate that logic, far from being a dry, pedantic discipline, is

a living, breathing thing, full of beauty, passion, and trauma --Author's Note

4 Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious , acute and astute--I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, as precise as a chemist's scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And--think of it! --I was only eighteen.

5 It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Butch, my roommate at the University of Minnesota. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough young fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type.Unstable.Impressionable.Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that come, s along, to, surrender y, , , , , , ourself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it--this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey.

6 One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. "Don't move," I said. "Don't take a laxative. I'll get a doctor."

7 "Raccoon," he mumbled thickly.

8 "Raccoon?" I said, pausing in my flight.

9 "I want a raccoon coat," he wailed.

10 I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. "Why do you want a raccoon coat?"

11 "I should have known it," he cried, pounding his temples. "I should have , , , , , known they'd come back when the Charleston came back. Like a fool I spent all my money for textbooks, and now I can't get a raccoon coat."

12 "Can you mean." I said incredulously, "that people are actually wearing raccoon coats again?"

13 "All the Big Men on Campus are wearing them. Where've you been?"

14 "In the library," I said, naming a place not frequented by Big Men on Campus

15 He leaped from the bed and paced the room, "I've got to have a raccoon coat," he said passionately. "I've got to!"

16 "Petey, why? Look at it rationally. Raccoon coats are unsanitary. They shed. They smell bad. They weight too much. They're unsightly. They--"

17 " You don't understand," he interrupted impatiently. "It's the thing to do. Don't you want to be in the swim?"

18 "No," I said truthfully.

19 "Well, I do," he declared. "I'd give anything for a raccoon coat. Anything!"

20 My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear. "Anything?" I asked, looking at him narrowly.

21 "Anything," he affirmed in ringing tones.

22 I stroked my chin thoughtfully. It so happened that I knew where to set my hands on a raccoon coat. My father had had one in his undergraduate days; it lay now in a trunk in the attic back home. It also happened that Petey had something I wanted. He didn't have it exactly, but at least he had first rights on it. I refer to his girl, Polly Espy.

23 I had long coveted Polly Espy. Let me emphasize that my desire for this young woman was not emotional in nature. She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions but I was not one to let my heart rule my head. I wanted Polly for a shrewdly calculated, entirely cerebral reason.

24 I was a freshman in law school. In a few years I would be out in practice. I was well aware of the importance of the right kind of wife in furthering a lawyer's career. The successful lawyers I had observed were, almost without exception, married to beautiful, gracious, intelligent women. With one omission, Polly fitted these specifications perfectly.

25 Beautiful she was. She was not yet of pin-up proportions but I felt sure that time would supply the lack She already had the makings.

26 Gracious she was. By gracious I mean full of graces. She had an erectness of carriage, an ease of bearing, a poise that clearly indicated the best of breeding, At table her manners were exquisite. I had seen her at the KozyKampusKorner eating the specialty of the house--a sandwich that contained scraps of pot roast, gravy, chopped nuts, and a dipper of sauerkraut--without even getting her fingers moist.

27 Intelligent she was not. in fact, she veered in the opposite direction. But I believed that under my guidance she would smarten up. At any rate, it was worth a try. It is, after all, easier to make a beautiful dumb girl smart than to make an ugly smart girl beautiful.

28 "Petey," I said, "are you in love with Polly Espy?"

29 "I think she's a keen kid," he replied, "but I don't know if you'd call it love. Why?"

30 "Do you," I asked, "have any kind of formal arrangement with her? I mean are you going steady or anything like that?"

31 "No. We see each other quite a bit, but we both have other dates. Why?"

32 "Is there," I asked, "any other man for whom she has a particular fondness?"

33 "Not that I know of. Why?"

34 I nodded with satisfaction. "In other words, if you were out of the picture, the field would be open. Is that right?"

35 "I guess so. What are you getting at?"

36 "Nothing, nothing," I said innocently, and took my suitcase out of the closet.

37 "Where are you going?" asked Petey.

38 "Home for the weekend." I threw a few things into the bag.

39 "Listen," he said, clutching my arm eagerly, "while you're home, you couldn't get some money from your old man, could you, and lend it to me so I can buy a raccoon coat?"