老人节是几月几号-学雷锋寄语

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Book5 catalogues
Lesson 1
Who Are you and what are you doing here ……………………………………………1
Lesson 2 Two kinds……………………………………………………………………………………..10
Lesson 3 Goods move. People move. Ideas move. And cultures change…………………….21
Lesson 4 Professions foe women ……………………………………………………………………29
Lesson 5 Love is a fallacy……………………………………………………………………………...34
Lesson 6 The way to rainy mountain………………………………………………………………….47
Lesson 7 Rewriting American history………………………………………………………………..53
Lesson 8 The Merely very good……………………………………………………………………….73
Lesson 9 Al gore’s Nobel peace prize acceptance speech ………………………………………82
Lesson10 The Bluest Eye……………………………………………………………………………….89
Lesson 11 How News becomes opinion off- limits…………………………………………………101
Lesson 12 The Indispensable opposition……………………………………………………………105


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 in very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, 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: Whttp:k 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 you 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 get 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, and occahttp:onally 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

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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
hhttp:, “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, unless 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 :
“How about the science requirements?”

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

My father, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, 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? http:erica 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.


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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
andhttp: 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’ scholarly 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 work very hard—they’ve created
http: 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 profeshttp:rs 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 adminhttp:trators, 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.

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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. Cohttp:eges 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 cheating 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
services 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.

Onhttp: 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 office 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 so, in their own turn,
contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing.
Thttp:y’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

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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
Etohttp:. 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 their 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 having your lifhttp: 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 runs, 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
buhttp:ding 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 for 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 education 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

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http: 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 ministers 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 of 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,
thhttp: 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. Embedded 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
relhttp:ion, 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 think 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 whohttp:
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

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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 withhttp: 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
ishttp: 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 names 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 invited 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
chttp:dition 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 charismatic 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
relationshttp: among them (negotiable when you

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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 battle 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
hhttp: quite fit. He understood that he was
always out-of-joint with life as it was. He had talent: 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 invisible
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 understanding of himself, figure out what
he’d do best that might give the world some profit.
:My 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
yohttp:, 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

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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 wilhttp: 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 end, 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 words 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
experhttp:y 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 offerhttp:
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.








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Unit2 Two Kinds ——Amy Tan

My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant.
You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no
money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.
“Of course, you can be a prodigy1, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best anything.
What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.”
America was where all my mother’s hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing
everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby
girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.
We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese
Shirley Temple2. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother
would poke my arm and say, “Ni watch.” And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a
sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying “Oh, my goodness.”
“Ni kan,” my mother said, as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. “You already know how. Don’t need
talent for crying!”
Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the
Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking.
Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz3. My mother dragged
me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair.
“You look like a Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose.
The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off4 these soggy clumps to make my hair even
again. “Peter Pan5 is very popular these days” the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the
length of a boy’s, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut,
and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.
In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy
part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing
by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ
child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella6 stepping from her
pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.
In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father
would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for
anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of
here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And then you’ll always be nothing.”
Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica7 topped kitchen table. She would
present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley’s Believe
It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in
our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she
cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all,
searching for stories about remarkable children.
The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states
and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could
also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. “What’s the capital of Finland?” my mother
asked me, looking at the story.

12

All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento8 was the name of the street we lived on in
Chinatown9. “Nairobi10!” I quessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if
that might be one way to pronounce “Helsinki11” before showing me the answer.
The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards,
trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los angeles,
New York, and London.
One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could
remember. “Now Jehoshaphat had riches12 and honor in abundance and that’s all I remember, Ma,” I
said.
And after seeing, once again, my mother’s disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated
the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror
above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back ---and understood that it would always be
this ordinary face ---I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal,
trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.
And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me---a face I had never seen before. I looked at
my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful.
She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won’ts.
I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not.
So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I
pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on
the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the
cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would
give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted ony one bellow, maybe two at most. At
last she was beginning to give up hope.
Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother
was watching the Ed Sullivan Show13 on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every
time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and
Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up, the TV
broke into loud piano music. She sat down, silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was
like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on
the sound dial.
She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which
alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones.
“Ni kan,” my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. “Look here.”
I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl,
about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was
proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy
skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation.
In spite of these warning signs, I wasn’t worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn’t afford to buy
one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when
my mother badmouthed14 the little girl on TV.
“Play note right, but doesn’t sound good!” my mother complained “No singing sound.”
“What are you picking on her for?” I said carelessly. “She’s pretty good. Maybe she’s not the best, but
she’s trying hard.” I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that.

13

“Just like you,” she said. “Not the best. Because you not trying.” She gave a little huff as she let go of
the sound dial and sat down on the sofa.
The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of “Anitra’s Tanz,” by Grieg15. I remember the
song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.
Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano
lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment
building. was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for
weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.
When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I wished and then kicked my foot a
little when I couldn”t stand it anymore.
“Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius! I can’t play the piano. And even if I could, I
wouldn’t go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!” I cried.
My mother slapped me. “Who ask you be genius.”she shouted. “Only ask you be your best. For you sake.
You think I want you be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!”
“So ungrateful,”I heard her mutter in chinese. “If she had as much talent as she had temper, she would
be famous now.”
Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the
silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the hair on top of
his head and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always thought, since he lived with his mother and
was not yet married.
I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done
something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person’s, like an old peach I once found in the back
of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up.
I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. “Like Beethoven!” he
shouted to me “We’re both listening only in our head!” And he would start to conduct his frantic silent
sonatas16.
Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their
purpose: “Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!”
And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old
unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the
music was really something quite grand.
I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that
sounded like a cat running up and down on top of garbage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud
and say “Very good! Bt now ou must learn to keep time!”
So that’s how I discovered that Old Chong’s eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I
was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and
pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I
would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios17. He had me curve my hand around an
apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger
dance up and down, staccato18 like an obedient little soldier.
He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with
mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn’t practiced enough, I never corrected
myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie.19

14

So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might
have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody
different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns.
Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother
and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with
stiff white petticoats. Auntie Linds daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the
wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters,
squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she
was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as “Chinatown’s Littlest Chinese Chess
Champion.”
“She bring home too many trophy.” Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. “All day she play chess. All
day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings.” She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who
pretended not to see her.
“You lucky you don’t have this problem,” Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother.
And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged “our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei
wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It’s like you can’t stop this natural talent.”
And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.
A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be
held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a
black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room.
For the talent show I was to play a piece called “Pleading Child” from Schumann’s Scenes From
Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to
memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see
what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere
else, about being someone else.
The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a
pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile.
My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle
Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with
children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery
rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops20 in pink ballet tutus21, and
when they bowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, “Awww,” and then clap enthusiastically.
When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew,
without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I
remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother’s blank face, my
father’s yawn, Auntie Lindo’s stiff- lipped smile, Waverly’s sulky expression. I had on a white dress,
layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people
jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV.
And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I
wasn’t worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit
another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn’t stop
playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back,
like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes
staying with me all the way.

15

When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the
audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at
all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except
fot Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting “Bravo! Bravo! Well done!” By then I saw my mother’s
face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face
quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. “That was awful,” and
mother whispered “Well, she certainly tried.”

And now I realized how many people were in the audience, the whole world, it seemed. I was aware
of eyes burning into my back. I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest
of the show.
We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have
anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen- year-old boy with a fake
moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl
with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly22 and got an honorable mention. And the
eleven-year- old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee.
After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my
mother and father.
“Lots of talented kids,” Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. “That was something else,” my
father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even
remembered what I had done.
Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “You aren’t a genius like me,” she said
matter-of-factly. And if I hadn’t felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach.
But my mother’s expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost
everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene
of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father
was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we
got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother
walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt
disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame
her for all my misery.
I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two
days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV.
“Four clock,” she reminded me, as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were
asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV.
“Turn off TV,” she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn’t budge. And then I decided, I
didn’t have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China. I had listened to her
before, and look what happened she was the stupid one.
She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. “Four clock,” she
said once again, louder.
“I’m not going to play anymore,” I said nonchalantly23. “Why should I? I’m not a genius.”
She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.
“No!” I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been
inside me all along.

16

“No! I won’t!” I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor.
She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs
under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her
chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was
crying.
“You want me to be something that I’m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me
to be!”
“Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who
follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!”
“Then I wish I weren’t your daughter, I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted. As I said these things
I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good,
that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.
“Too late to change this,” my mother said shrilly.
And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that’s when I
remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. “Then I wish I’d never
been born!” I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.”
It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went
slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin,
brittle, lifeless.
It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many
times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As24. I didn’t
become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college.
Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me.
And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible delarations
afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now
unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure
was inevitable.
And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?
For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped The lid
to the piano was closed shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.
So she surprised me. A few years ago she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I
had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed.
“Are you sure?” I asked shyly. “I mean, won’t you and Dad miss it?” “No, this your piano,” she said firmly.
“Always your piano. You only one can play.”
“Well, I probably can’t play anymore,” I said. “It’s been years.” “You pick up fast,” my mother said, as
if she knew this was certain. “You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“You just not trying,” my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing a
fact that could never be disproved. “Take it,” she said.
But I didn’t at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, everytime I saw it in my
parents’living room, standing in front of the bay window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy
that I had won back.
Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent’s apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely
sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been bgetting things in order for

17

my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put in mothproof
boxes. I found some old chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk
against my skin, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me.
After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I
remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes with
handwritten scales, the same sedcondhand music books with their covers held together with yellow tape.
I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piecce I had played at the recital. It was on the left-hand
page, “Pleading Child” It looked more difficult than I remembered. I played a few bars, surprised at how
easily the notes came back to me.
And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side, It was called “Perfectly
Contented” I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with the same flowing rhythm and
turned out to be quite easy. “Pleading Child” was shorter but slower; “Perfectly Contented” was longer but
faster. And after I had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
第二课Two Kinds
1.妈相信，在美国，任何梦想都能成为事实。你可以做一切你想做的：开家餐馆， 或者在政府部门工
作，以期得到很高的退休待遇。你可以不用付一个子儿的现金， 就可以买到一幢房子。你有可能发财，也
有可能出人头地，反正，到处是机会。
2.在我九岁时，妈就对我说： “你也能成为天才。你会样样事都应付得很出色的。 琳达姨算什么？
她那女儿，只不过心眼多一点而已。 ”
3.妈将一切未遂的心愿、希望，都寄托在美国这片土地上。她是在 1949 年来到美 国的。在中国，她
丧失了一切：双亲，家园，她的前夫和一对孪生女儿。但她对过 去的一切，从不用悲恸的目光去回顾，眼
前，她有太多的打算，以便将生活安排得 更好。
二 4.至于我将成为哪方面的天才，妈并不急于立时拍板定案。起初，她认为我完全 可以成为个中国
的秀兰?邓波儿。我们不放过电视里的秀兰?邓波儿的旧片子，每 每这时，妈便会抬起我的手臂往屏幕频频
挥动： “你——看， ”这用的是汉语。而 我，也确实看见秀兰摆出轻盈的舞姿，或演唱一支水手歌，有
时，则将嘴唇撅成个 圆圆的“０”字，说一声“哦，我的上帝” 。
5.当屏幕上的秀兰双目满噙着晶莹的泪珠时，妈又说了： “你看，你早就会哭了。 哭不需要什么天
才！ ”
6.立时，妈有了培养目标了。她把我带去我们附近一家美容培训班开办的理发店， 把我交到一个学员
手里。这个学生，甚至连剪刀都拿不像，经她一番折腾，我的头 发，成了一堆稀浓不均的鬈曲的乱草堆。
妈伤心地说： “你看着，像个中国黑人了。 ” 美容培训班的指导老师不得不亲自出马，再操起剪刀来修
理我头上那湿漉漉的 一团。
7.“彼得?潘的式样，近日是非常时行的。 ”那位指导老师向妈吹嘘着。 我的头发，已剪成个男孩子
样，前面留着浓密的、直至眉毛的刘海。我挺喜欢 这次理发，它令我确信，我将前途无量。
8.确实刚开始，我跟妈一样兴奋，或许要更兴奋。我憧憬着自己种种各不相同的 天才形象，犹如一位
已在天幕侧摆好优美姿势的芭蕾舞演员，只等着音乐的腾起， 即踮起足尖翩然起舞。我就像降生在马槽里
的圣婴，是从南瓜马车上下来的灰姑娘……
9.反正我觉得，我立时会变得十分完美：父母会称赞我，我再不会挨骂，我会应 有尽有，不用为着没
有能得到某样心想的东西而赌气不快。
10.然而看来，天才本身对我，颇有点不耐烦了： “你再不成才，我就走了，再也 不来光顾你了， ”
它警告着， “这一来，你就什么也没有了。 ”
11.每天晚饭后，我和妈就坐在厨房桌边，她每天给我作一些智力测试，这些测试 题目，是她从《信
不信由你》《好管家》《读者文摘》等杂志里收罗来的。在 、 、 家里洗澡间里，我们有一大堆这样的旧

18

杂志，那是妈从她做清洁工的那些住户家里 要来的。每周，她为好几户住户做清洁工。因此这里有各式各
样的旧杂志，她从中 搜寻着各种有关天才孩子的智力培养和他们成才的过程。
12.开始这种测试的当晚，她就给我讲了一个三岁神童的故事，他能诸熟地背出各 州的首府，甚至大
部分欧洲国家的名字。另一位教师证明，这小男孩能正确无误地 拼出外国城市的名字。
13.“芬兰的首都是哪？”于是，母亲当场对我开始测试了。
14.天呀，我只知道加州的首府！因为我们在唐人街上住的街名，就叫萨克拉曼多。 “乃洛比！ ”我
冒出一个莫名其妙的，所能想象得出的最奇特的外国字。
15.测试的题目越来越复杂了：心算乘法，在一叠扑克牌里抽出红心皇后，做倒立 动作，预测洛杉矶、
纽约和伦敦的气温。
16.还有一次，妈让我读三分钟《圣经》 ，然后说出我所读过的内容。 “现在，耶 和华非有丰富的
财富和荣誉……妈，我只记得这一句。 ”
17.再次看到妈失望的眼神之后，我内心对成才的激动和向往，也消遁了。我开始 憎恨这样的测试，
每一次都是以满怀希望开始，以失望而告终。那晚上床之前，我 站在浴室的洗脸盆镜子前，看到一张普普
通通，毫无出众之处的哭丧着的脸——我 哭了。我尖叫着，跺脚，就像一只发怒的小兽，拼命去抓镜中那
个丑女孩的脸。
18.随后，忽然我似乎这才发现了真正的天才的自己，镜中的女孩，闪眨着聪明强 硬的目光看着我，
一个新的念头从我心里升起：我就是我，我不愿让她来任意改变 我。我向自己起誓，我要永远保持原来的
我。
19.所以后来，每当妈再要我做什么测试时，我便做出一副无精打采的样子，将手 肘撑在桌上，头懒
懒地倚在上面，装出一副心不在焉的样子。事实上，我也实在无 法专心。当妈又开始她的测试课时，我便
开始专心倾听迷雾茫茫的海湾处的浪涛声， 那沉闷的声响，颇似一条在气喘吁吁奔跑的母牛。几次下来，
妈放弃了对我的测试。
20.两三个月安然无事地过去了，其间，再没提一个有关“天才”的字眼了。一天， 妈在看电视，那
是艾德?索利凡的专题节目，一个小女孩正在表演钢琴独奏。这是 台很旧的电视机，发出的声音时响时轻，
有时甚至还会停顿。每每它哑巴的时候， 妈就要起身去调整它，待她还没走到电视机前，电视机又讲话了，
于是就像故意要 作弄她一番似的，反正她一离沙发，电视就出声了，她一坐下，艾德就变哑巴。最 后，
妈索性守在电视机边，将手按在键盘上。
21.电视里的琴声似令她着迷了，只见演奏者既有力，又柔和地敲着琴键，突地， 一阵密切铿锵的琶
音倾泻而下，犹如决堤的洪水，翻江倒海地奔腾起来，只见她手 腕一抬，那激动急骤的旋律顿时烟消云散
了，那含有诗意、温存的音符，从她手指 尖下飘逸出来。
22.“你——看！ ”我妈说着，急促地把我叫到电视机前。
23.我马上领会了，妈为什么这样深深地被琴声迷住。原来，那个正在向观众行屈 膝礼的演奏者，不
过只八九岁的光景。而且同样是一个留着彼得?潘发式的中国女 孩子。她穿着蓬松的白色短裙，就像一朵
含苞欲放的康乃馨。在她优雅地行礼时， 既有秀兰?邓波儿的活泼，又持典型的中国式的谦和。
24.我们家反正没有钢琴，也没有钱买钢琴，所以，当妈一再将这个小钢琴家作话 题时，我竟失却了
警惕，大咧咧地说起大话了。 “弹倒弹得不错，就是怎么她自己不跟着唱。 ”我妈对我批评着那个女孩
子。
25.“你要求太高了， ”我一不小心说溜了嘴！ “她弹得蛮不错了。虽然说不上最 好，但至少，她
已很下过一番苦功了。 ”话一出口我就后悔了。
26.果然，妈抓住我小辫子了。 “所以呀， ”她说， “可你，连一点苦功都不肯下。 ” 她有点愠
怒地拉长着脸，又回到沙发上去。
27.电视里的那个中国女孩子，也重番坐下再弹了一曲《安尼托拉的舞蹈》 ，是由 格林卡作曲的。我
之所以印象这么深，是因为后来，我花了很大功夫去学习弹奏它。

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28.三天后，妈给我制定了一张钢琴课和练琴的课程表。原来，她已跟我们公寓里 一楼的一位退休钢
琴教师商量妥，妈免费为他做清洁工，作为互惠，他则免费为我 教授钢琴，而且每天下午的四点到六点，
将他的琴供我练习。
29.当妈把她的计划告诉我时，我即感头皮发麻，有一种被送进炼狱的感觉。
30.“我现在这样不是很好嘛！我本来就不是神童，我永远也成不了天才！我不会 弹钢琴，学也学不
会。哪怕你给我一百万元，我也永远上不了电视！ ”我哭着嚷着， 跺着脚。
31.妈当即给了我一个巴掌。 “谁要你做什么天才， ”她厉声叱责着我， “只要你 尽力就行了。还
不都是为了要你好！难道是我要你做什么天才的？你成了天才，我 有什么好处！哼，我这样操心，到底是
为的什么呀！ ”
32.“没有良心！ ”我听见她用汉语狠狠地嘟哝了一句， “要是她的天分有她脾气 这般大就好了，
她早就可以出人头地了！ ”
33.那个钟先生，我私下称他为老钟，是个很古怪的老头。他似已很老很老了，头 顶秃得光光的，戴
着副啤酒瓶底一样厚的眼镜，在层层叠叠的圈圈里，一双眼睛整 日像昏昏欲睡的样子。他常常会悠然地对
着一支看不见的乐队，指挥着听不见的音 乐。但我想，他一定没我想象的那般老朽，因为他还有个妈妈。
而且，他还没有结 婚吧。 那钟老太，可真让我够受了。她身上带有一股怪味，那种……尿骚味。她的手 指
看着就像是烂桃子的感觉。一次我在冰箱后边摸到过一只这样的烂桃子，当我捡 起它时，那层皮，就滑漉
漉地脱落了下来。
34.我很快就明白了，老钟为什么只好退休。原来他是个聋子。 “像贝多芬一样， ” 他常常喜欢扯
大嗓门说话， “我们俩都是只用心来倾听！ ”他如此自诩着，说毕， 依旧陶醉在对无人无声乐队的指挥
中，如痴如醉地挥动着他的手臂。
35.我们的课程是这样进行的。他先打开琴谱，指着各种不同的标记，向我解释着 它们各自代表的意
义： “这是高音谱号！低音谱号！没有升号和降号的，就是 C 调。 喏，跟着我。 ”
36.随后他弹了几个 C 调音阶，一组简单的和弦，然后似受一种无法抑制的渴望所激 动，他的手指在
琴键上按了更多的和弦，仿佛是感情的迸发和泛滥，他弹出了令人 神魂震荡、形销骨立的颤音，接着又加
进了低音，整个气氛，颇有一种豪迈的，雷 霆万钧的浑厚气概。
37.我就跟着他，先是简单的音阶和和弦，接着，就有点胡闹了，只是些杂乱的噪 声，那声音，活像
一只猫在垃圾洞顶上窜蹦不停。老钟却大声叫好： “好！非常好， 但要学会掌握弹奏的速度。 ”
38.他这一说，倒让我发现了，他的目力也不行了，来不及对照谱子来核准我有无 按出正确的音符。
他的目光要比我弹奏的速度慢半拍。他在教我弹奏琶音时，便在 我手腕处放上几个硬币，以此训练我的手
腕保持平衡。在弹奏和弦时，则要求我的 手握成个空圆弧状，有如手心里握着一只苹果。然后，他又示范
给我看，如何令每 一个手指，都像一个独立的小兵似的，服从大脑的指挥。
39.在他教会我这一整套技巧时，我也学会了如何偷懒，并掩盖自己的失误。如果 我按错了一个琴键，
我从来不去纠正，只是坦然地接着往下弹。而老钟，则自顾往 下指挥着他自己的无声的音乐。
40.或许，我确实没有好好地下过功夫，否则，我想我极有可能在这方面有所作为 的；或许我真的会
成为一个少年钢琴家。就我这样学钢琴，也很快地掌握了基本的 要领和技巧。可我实在太执拗，那么顽固
地拒绝与众不同，所以我只学会弹震耳欲 聋的前奏曲和最最不和谐的赞美诗。
41.我就这样我行我素地学了一年。一天礼拜结束后，听到妈和琳达姨正在互相用 一种炫耀的口气吹
嘘着各自的女儿。 “ 薇弗莱与我同年。我俩从小一起玩耍，就像姐妹一样，我们也吵架，也争夺过 彩色
蜡笔和洋娃娃。换句话说，我们并不太友好。我认为她太傲慢了。薇弗莱的名 气很大，有“唐人街最小的
棋圣”之称。
42.哎，薇弗莱捧回来的奖品实在太多了， ”琳达姨以一种似是抱怨，实在是夸 耀的口吻说， “她
自己整天只顾着下棋，我可忙坏了。每天，就光擦拭她捧回的那 些奖品，就够我忙的了。 ”
43.琳达姨得意地抱怨了一番后，长长地嘘了一口气，对妈说： “你真福气，你可 没这种烦心事。”

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44.“谁说呀， ”妈妈高高地耸起了双肩，以一种得意的无奈说， “我可比你还要 烦心呢。我们的
精美，满耳只有音乐，叫她洗盆子，你叫哑了嗓子她也听不见。有 啥办法，她天生这样一副对音乐失魂落
魄的模样！ ”
45.就是这时，我萌生出个报复的念头，以制止她这种令人可笑的攀比。
46.几星期后，老钟和我妈试图要我在一次联谊会上登一次台，这次联谊会将在教 堂大厅里举行。那
阵，父母已储足钱为我买了架旧钢琴，那是一架黑色的乌立兹牌， 连带一张有疤痕的琴凳。它也是我们起
居室的摆设。
47.在那次联谊会上，我将演奏舒曼的《请愿的孩童》 。这是一首忧郁的弹奏技巧 简单的曲子，但听
起来还是像很有点难度的。我得把它背出来，然后在重复部分连 弹两次，以令它听起来可以显得长一点。
可我在弹的时候，经常偷工减料，跳过好 几节。我从不仔细听一听自己弹出的那些音符，弹琴时，我总有
点心不在焉。
48.我最愿意练习的，要算那个屈膝礼，我已可以把它行得十分漂亮了。
49.爸妈兴致勃勃地将喜福会的朋友全部请来为我捧场，连薇弗莱和她两个哥哥也 来了。表演者以年
龄为序，由小至大上台表演。有朗诵诗歌的，跳芭蕾舞的，还有， 在儿童小提琴上奏出鸭叫一样的声音。
每一个表演的结束，都得到热烈的掌声。
50.待轮到我上阵时，我很兴奋。那纯粹是一种孩子气的自信，我还不懂得害怕和 紧张。记得当时，
我心里一个劲这样想：就这么回事，就这么回事！我往观众席瞥 了一眼，看到妈那张茫然的脸，爸在打呵
欠，琳达姨的有如刻上去的微笑，薇弗莱 的拉长的脸。我穿着一条缀着层层花边的白短裙，在彼得?潘式
的头发上，扎着一 只粉色的大蝴蝶结。当我在钢琴边坐下时，我想象着，艾德?索利凡正把我介绍给 电视
机屏幕前的每一位观众，而台下的听众，都激动得连连跺脚。
51.我的手触到了琴键。多好呀，我看上去那么可爱！对于我手下按出的音阶将是 怎样，我却毫不担
心。因此，当我按错了第一个音阶时，我自己都有点吃惊，我以 为我会弹得十分出色。不对了，又是一个
错的，怎么搞的？我头顶开始冒凉气了， 然后慢慢弥散开来。但我不能停下不弹呀。我的手指似着了魔，
有点自说自话，尽 管我一心想将它们重新调整一番，好比将火车重新拨回到正确的轨道上，可手指就 是
不听指挥。反正从头到尾，就是这么杂乱刺耳的一堆！
52.待我终于从凳子上站起身时，我发现自己两腿直打哆嗦，大概是太紧张了。四 周一片默然，唯有
老钟笑着大声叫好。在人群中，我看到妈一张铁青的脸。观众们 稀稀拉拉地拍了几下手。回到自己座位上，
我整个脸抽搐了，我尽力克制自己不哭 出声。这时，一个小男孩轻声对他妈说： “她弹得糟透了！ ”他
母亲忙轻声阻止他： “嘘！可她已经尽最大努力了。 ”
53.一下子我觉得，似乎全世界的人都坐在观众席上。我只觉得千万双眼睛在后边 盯着我，热辣辣的。
我甚至感觉到那直挺挺地硬支撑着看节目的父母，他们那份难 堪和丢脸。
54.其实我们可以趁幕间休息时溜走，但出于虚荣和自尊，爸妈硬是坐到节目全部 结束。
55.表演结束后，喜福会的许家、龚家和圣克莱尔家的人都来到父母跟前：
56.“不错呀，多有本事的小朋友！ ”琳达姨只是含糊地敷衍着，显出一抹刻上去 般的微笑。
57.“当然。文章是自己的好，孩子是人家的好。 ”父亲苦笑着说。
58.薇弗莱则看着我，再耸耸肩，干脆地说： “你不行呀，还不及我呢！ ”要不是 我有自知之明，
确实觉得自己表演得实在不怎样，我准会上去扯她辫子的。
59.但最令我惊然的，是妈。她满脸的冷漠和晦败，那就是说，她已灰心丧气了。 我也觉得灰心丧气
了。现在大家都这么团团地围着我们，似车祸中看热闹的人一样， 一心要看看那倒霉的压在车轮底下的家
伙，到底压成个什么样子！直到我们乘上公 共汽车回家时，妈一路上还是一言不发。我心想妈只须一踏进
家门，就会冲着我大 大发作一场。然而当爸打开家门时，妈便径自走进卧室，还是没有一声叱责，一声 埋
怨。我很失望。否则，我正好可以借机大哭一场，以宣泄郁积的那份窝囊气。
60.我原以为，这次的惨败，从此可以让我从钢琴边解脱出来，我不用再练琴了。 岂料两天后，当妈
从厨房里出来，见我已在笃悠悠地看电视时，便又催我去练琴：

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61.“四点啦。 ”她如往常一样提醒我。我一震，好像她这是在叫我再去经历一番 那场联谊会上的出
丑似的。我牢牢地把住椅子背。
62.“关掉电视！ ”五分钟后，她从厨房里伸出头警告我。
63.我不吭声。但我打定主意，我再也不听她摆布了。我不是她的奴隶，这里不是 中国。我以前一味
由她摆布着，结果呢？她这样做太笨了！
64.她噎噎地从厨房走出来，站在起居室门口的过道上。 “四点啦！ ”她再一次重 复了一遍，音量
提高了几度。
65.“我再也不弹琴了， ”我平静地说， “为什么我非要弹琴呢？我又没这天分。 ”
66.她移步到电视机前站住，气得胸部一起一伏，像台抽水机似的。
67.“不。 ”我觉得更坚决了，觉得终于敢表示自己真正的意愿。
68.“不！ ”我尖声叫着。
69.妈拎着我双臂，啪一声关了电视，把我悬空拎到钢琴前，她的力气大得吓人， 我拼命踢着脚下的
地毯，挣扎着、呜咽着、痛苦地望着她。她的胸部起伏得更剧烈 了，咧着嘴，失却理智般地痴笑着，仿佛
我的嚎哭令她很高兴。
70.“我成不了你希望的那样， ”我呜咽着说， “我成不了你希望的那样的女儿。 ”
71.“世上从来只有两种女儿， ”她用中国话高声说， “听话的和不听话的。在我 家里，只允许听
话的女儿住进来！ ”
72.“那末，我希望不做你的女儿，你也不是我的母亲！ ”我哭着，当这些话从我 嘴里吐出来时，我
只觉得，癞蛤蟆、蜥蜴和蝎子这种令人作恶的东西，也从我胸里 吐了出来。这样也好，令我看到了自己那
可怕的一面。
73.“可是，要改变既成的事实，你来不及了！ ”妈激怒地喊着。
74.我感觉到，她的怒火已升至极限了，我要看着它爆炸。我一下子想到了她的失 散在中国的那对双
胞胎。关于她们，我们谈话中，从来不提及的。这次，我却大声 地对着她嚷嚷着： “那么，我希望我没
有出世，希望我已经死了，就跟桂林的那对 双胞胎一样！ ”
75.好像我念了什么咒似的，顿时，她呆住了，她放开了手，一言不发地，蹒跚着 回到自己房里，就
像秋天一片落叶，又薄又脆弱，没有一点生命的活力。
三76.这并不是唯一的一次使母亲对我失望。多年来，我让她失望了好多次。为着我 的执拗，我对自
己权利的维护，我的分数达不到 A 级，我当不上班长，我进不了斯坦 福大学，我后来的辍学……
77.跟妈相反，我从不相信，我能成为任何我想成为的人。我只可能是我自己。
78.以后的那么些年，我们再也不谈及那场倒霉的联谊会上的灾难，及后来在钢琴 前我那番可怕的抗
争。所有这一切，我们都再也不提及，就像对一件已作了结论的 谋反案一样。因此，我也老找不到话题问
她，为什么，她会对我怀这么大的希望。
80.还有，我也从未问过她，那令我最最百思不得其解的，为什么，她终于又放弃 了那份希望？
81.自那次为了练琴争执后，她就此再也不叫我练琴了。再也没有钢琴课。琴盖上 了锁，紧紧地合闭
着，唉，我的灾难，她的梦想！
82.几年前，她又做了一件让我吃惊的事。在我三十岁生日时，她将这架钢琴送给 了我。多年来，我
碰都没碰过那架钢琴。现在，她却把它作为我的生日礼物。我想， 这是一种原谅的表示，那长年压着我的
负疚感，终于释然。
83.“噢，你真把它送给我了？”我讪讪地说， “你和爸舍得吗？”
84.“不，这本来就是你的钢琴，”她毫不含糊地说， “从来就是你的。只有你会 弹琴。 ”
85.“哦，我怕我大概已不会弹了， ”我说， “那么多年了！ ”
86.“你会很快又记起来的， ”妈说，非常肯定地， “你在这方面很有天分，其实 如果你肯下点功
夫，本来你真可以在这方面有所作为的。 ”
87.“不，不可能。 ”

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88.“你就是不肯试一下。 ”妈继续说着，既不生气，也不懊丧，那口气，似只是 在讲述一件永远无
法得到核准的事实。 “拿去吧！ ”她说。
89.但是，起先我并没马上把琴拉走。它依旧静静地置在妈妈家起居室里，那个回 窗框前。打这以后
每次看到它，总使我有一种自豪感，好像它是我曾经赢得的一个 荣誉的奖品。
90.上星期，我请了个调音师到我父母公寓去，那纯粹是出于一种感情寄托。数月 前，妈去世了。爸
交给我一些她的遗物，我每去一次，便带回去一点。我把首饰放 在一只缎锦荷包里，还有，她自己编织的
毛衣：有黄的、粉红的、橘黄的——恰恰 都是我最不喜欢的颜色。我一一把它们置放在防蛀的箱子里。我
还发现几件旧的绸 旗袍，那种边上镶滚条两边开高叉的。我把它们挨到脸颊上轻轻摩挲着，心中有一 阵
温暖的触动，然后用软纸把它们小心包起来带回家去。
91.钢琴调校好，那音色比我记忆中的，还要圆润清丽，这实在是一架上乘的钢琴。 琴凳里，我的练
习记录本和手写的音阶还在。一本封皮已脱落的旧琴谱，被小心地 用黄缎带扎捆着。
92.我将琴谱翻到舒曼的那曲《请愿的孩童》，就是那次联谊会上让我丢丑的。它 似比我记忆中更有
难度。我摸索着琴键弹了几小节，很惊讶自己竟这么快就记起了乐谱，应付自如。
93.似是第一次，我刚刚发现这首曲子的右边，是一曲《臻美》 ，它的旋律更活泼 轻快，但风格和《请
愿的孩童》很相近，这首曲子里，美好的意境得到更广阔无垠 的展现，充满慰藉与信心，流畅谐美，很容
易弹上手。 《请愿的孩童》比它要短一 点，但节奏要缓慢一点。 《臻美》要长一点，节奏轻快一点。在
我分别将这两首曲 子弹了多次后，忽然悟出，这两首曲子，其实是出于同一主题的两个变奏。

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 drea
ms called, in the curious argot of social scientists,
nt of changes in politics, business, health, entertainment.
arket. All old-established national industries are dislodged by new industries whose products are consu
med, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants we find new wants, re
quiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
ote this 150 years ago in The Communist Manifesto. Their statement now describes an ordinary fact of li
fe.
How people feel about this depends a great deal on where they live and how much money they hav
e. Yet globalization, as one report stated,
ercial and cultural connections since before the first camel caravan ventured afield. In the 19th century t
he postal service, newspapers, transcontinental railroads, and great steam- powered ships wrought fund
amental changes. Telegraph, telephone, radio, and television tied tighter and more intricate knots betwe
en 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 c
hange. The difference now is the speed and scope of these changes. It took television 13 years to acqui
re 50 million users; the Internet took only five.
Not everyone is happy about this. Some Western social scientists and anthropologists, and not a fe
w foreign politicians, believe that a sort of cultural cloning will result from what they regard as the
al assault—more than a
fifth of all the people in the world now speak English to some degree. Whatever their backgrounds or ag
endas, these critics are convinced that Western—often equated with American—influences will flatten e
very cultural crease, producing, as one observer terms it, one big

23

Popular factions sprout to exploit nationalist anxieties. In China, where xenophobia and economic a
mbition have often struggled for the upper hand, a recent book called China can say no became the bes
t-seller by attacking what it considers the Chinese willingness to believe blindly in foreign things, advisin
g Chinese travelers to not fly on a Boeing 777 and suggesting that Hollywood be burned.
There are many Westerners among the denouncers of Western cultural influences, but James Wats
on, a Harvard anthropologist, isn't one of them.
now than they were 30 years ago,
nds of ordinary people. They want to become part of the world—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 wor
k.'
Westernization, I discovered over months of study and travel, is a phenomenon shot through with in
consistencies and populated by very strange bedfellows. Critics of Western culture blast Coke and Holly
wood but not organ transplants and computers. Boosters of Western culture can point to increased effort
s to preserve and protect the environment. Yet they make no mention of some less salubrious aspects o
f Western culture, such as cigarettes and automobiles, which, even as they are being eagerly adopted in
the developing world, are having disastrous effects. Apparently westernization is not a straight road to h
ell, or to paradise either.
But I also discovered that cultures are as resourceful, resilient, and unpredictable as the people wh
o 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 di
fferent languages. In Shanghai I found that the television show Sesame Street has been redesigned by
Chinese educators to teach Chinese values and traditions.
e,
strict religions, McDonald's serves mutton instead of beef and offers a vegetarian menu acceptable to e
ven 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 ou
t, and above all they buy stuff. I'm sorry to say I failed to discover who was the first teenager to put his b
aseball cap on backward. Or the first one to copy him. But I do know that rap music, which sprang from t
he inner-city ghettos, began making big money only when rebellious white teenagers started buying it. B
ut how can anyone predict what kids are going to want? Companies urgently need to know, so consulta
nts have sprung up to forecast trends. They're called
and one morning to explain how it works.
Amanda, who is 22, works for a New York-based company called Youth Intelligence and has come
to Los Angeles to conduct one of three annual surveys, whose results go to such clients as Sprint and M
TV. She has shoulder- length brown hair and is wearing a knee-length brocade skirt and simple black wr
ap top. Amanda looks very cool to me, but she says no.
have to be cool to do it,
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.
Amanda remarks,
What trends does she see forming now?
travel's huge right now—you go to a place and bring stuff back.

24

Amanda, who is 22, works for a New York-based company called Youth Intelligence and has come
to Los Angeles to conduct one of three annual surveys, whose results go to such clients as Sprint and M
TV. She has shoulder-length brown hair and is wearing a knee- length brocade skirt and simple black wr
ap top. Amanda looks very cool to me, but she says no.
have to be cool to do it,
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.
Amanda remarks,
What trends does she see forming now?
travel's huge right now—you go to a place and bring stuff back.

gs that already exist. Fusion is going to be the huge term that everybody's going to use,
—things that are so unrelated.
Los Angeles is fusion central, where cultures mix and morph. Take Tom Sloper and mah-jongg. To
m is a computer geek who is also a mah-jongg fanatic. This being America, he has found a way to marry
these two passions and sell the result. He has designed a software program, Shanghai: Dynasty, that e
nables you to play mah-jongg on the Internet. This ancient Chinese game involves both strategy and luc
k, and it is still played all over Asia in small rooms that are full of smoke and the ceaseless click of the ch
unky plastic tiles and the fierce concentration of the players. It is also played by rich society women at c
ountry clubs in Beverly Hills and in apartments on Manhattan's Upper West Side. But Tom, 50, was playi
ng it at his desk in Los 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 pro
gress with several habitual partners:
a Chinese-American who lives in Edina, Minnesota. Tom played effortlessly as we talked.

ose whose true connection is with machines.
ca. We usually play Chinese mah-jongg.
I watched the little tiles, like cards, bounce around the screen. As Tom played, he and his partners c
onversed 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 even
ing, and Thursday at lunch.” A new name appeared on the screen. “There‟s Fred‟s mother. Can‟t be, th
ey‟ re in Vegas. Oh, it must be his sister. TJ‟s online too, she‟s the one from Wales-a real night owl. Sh
e‟s getting married soon, and she lived with her fiance, and sometimes he gets up and says „ Get off tha
t 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 in Germany, Wales, Ohio, and Minnesota, was up in the cybersphere far above the le
vel of time zones. It is a realm populated by individuals he‟s never met who may be more real to him tha
n 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, sin
ce market forces were unleashed by economic reforms begun in 1978, life for many urban Chinese has
changed drastically. A recent survey of 12 major cities showed that 97 percent of the respondents had t
elevisions, and 88 percent had refrigerators and washing machines. Another study revealed that farmers

are eating 48 percent more meat each year and 400 percent more fruit. Cosmopolitan magazine, plungi
ng necklines and all, is read by 260,000 Chinese women every month.

25

I went to Shanghai to see how the cultural trends show up in the largest city in the world's most pop
ulous nation. It is also a city that has long been open to the West. General Motors, for example, set up it
s first Buick sales outlet in Shanghai in 1929; today GM has invested 1.5 billion dollars in a new plant th
ere, 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 is currently ripping itself to ribbons. In a decade scores of gleaming new skyscrapers
have shot up to crowd and jostle the skyline, cramp the narrow winding streets, and choke the parks an
d open spaces with their sheer soaring presence (most are 80 percent vacant). Traffic crawls, even on t
he new multilane overpasses. But on the streets the women are dressed in bright colors, and many carr
y several shopping bags, especially on the Nanjing Road, which is lined with boutiques and malls. In its f
irst two weeks of business the Gucci store took in a surprising $$100,000.

se edition of the French fashion magazine Elle.
wearing this blouse.„
How long will it last?' A housewife knew that most of the monthly salary would be spent on food, and no
w it's just a small part, so she can think about what to wear or where to travel. And now with refrigerator
s, we don't have to buy food every day.
As for the cultural dislocation this might bring:
a young German businessman. —„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 t
hat the truly great leap forward [in Shanghai] is at the level of ideas. To really grasp this, I had only to wit
ness the local performance of Shakespeare'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 an
d drama from all over china and I, on folding chairs around a space ont alike half of a basketball court. “
I‟m not going to be much help,” murmured Zhang Fang, my interpreter. “I don‟t understand the Cantone
se 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. Oth
erwise the small group spent most of an hour running in circles, leaping, and threatening to beat each ot
her with long sticks. The lighting was heavy on shadows, with frequent strobelike flashes. Language was
n't a problem, as the actors mainly snarled and shrieked. Then they turned their backs to the audience a
nd a few shouted something in Cantonese. The lights went out, and for a moment the 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 that 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 when I was in Los Angeles, I sought out Alvin Toffler, whose book Future Shock was
published in 1970. In the nearly three decades since, he has developed and refined a number of interest
ing 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?
der grows out of chaos,
he scale of Russia or China, without conflict. Not conflicts between East and West, or North and South,

26

but „wave' conflicts between industrially dominant countries and predominantly agrarian countries, or co
nflicts 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 o
f agriculture, the second with industry. Today we are in the midst of the third, which is based on informati
on. In 1956 something new began to happen, which amounts to the emergence of a new civilization. Tof
fler said.
orkers. In 1957 Sputnik went up. Then jet aviation became commercial, television became universal, an
d computers began to be widely used. And with all these changes came changes in culture.

om, smokestack countries in between, and knowledge-based economies on top.
countries—Brazil, for example—where all three civilizations coexist and collide.

and Fijian TV in your own language.
e channels, may be used by smaller groups to foster their separate, distinctive cultures and languages.
„Can we become third wave and still remain Chinese?' Yes,
ve 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—fr
om 1987 to 1995 local economies in California exported 200 percent more products, businesses in Idah
o 375 percent more. People move: It is cheaper for businesses to import talented employees than to trai
n people at home. Ideas move: In Japan a generation of children raised with interactive computer game
s has sensed, at least at the cyber level, new possibilities. this,” wrote in Ke
nichi Ohmac, “is that it is possible to actively take control of one's situation or circumstances and, thereb
y, 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 mo
re uniform; instead, both old and new tend to transform each other. The late philosopher Isaiah Berlin be
lieved that, rather than aspire to some utopian ideal, a society should strive for something else:
we agree with each other,
In Shanghai one October evening I joined a group gathered in a small, sterile hotel meeting room. It
was the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and there were diplomats, teachers, and bus
inessmen from many Western countries. 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 H
oly Days as rabbi of the infant congregation.

eceived a lot from local cultures, but they also kept their own identity.
The solemn liturgy proceeded, unchanged over thousands of years and hundreds of alien cultures:

or Chinese, but sitting there I didn't feel foreign—I felt at home. The penitence may have been Jewish, b
ut the aspiration was universal.
Global culture doesn't mean just more TV sets and Nike shoes. Linking is humanity's natural impuls
e, its common destiny. But the ties that bind people around the world are not merely technological or co
mmercial. 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

27

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< br>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< br>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< br>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，

28

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< br>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

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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。”
3 2．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19 95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。

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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 rightful 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 Aphra Behn, 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

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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 are 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.


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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,

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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?

Virginia Woolf

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1 6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

34

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、< br>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< br>
35

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)

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,
word to describe this essay;
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.
7
8
9
10 I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental.
11
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
13
14
15 He leaped from the bed and paced the room,
passionately.

36

16
They weight too much. They're unsightly. They--
17
the swim?
18
19
20 My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear.
narrowly.
21
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 Kozy Kampus Korner 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
29
30
anything like that?
31
32
33
34 I nodded with satisfaction.
Is that right?
35
36
37
38
39
from your old man, could you, and lend it to me so I can buy a raccoon coat?

37

40
41
the huge, hairy, gamy object that my father had worn in his Stutz Bearcat in 1925.
42
face.
43
44
do you want for it?
45
46
47
48 He flung the coat from him.
49 I shrugged.
50 I sat down in a chair and pretended to read a book, but out of the corner of my eye I kept watching
Petey. He was a torn man. First he looked at the coat with the expression of a waif at a bakery window.
Then he turned away and set his jaw resolutely. Then he looked back at the coat, with even more longing
in his face. Then he turned away, but with not so much resolution this time. Back and forth his head
swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning . Finally he didn't turn away at all; he just stood and stared
with mad lust at the coat.
51
52
53
54
55
56
57 He complied. The coat bunched high over his ears and dropped all the way down to his shoe tops.
He looked like a mound of dead raccoons.
58 I rose from my chair.
59 He swallowed.
60 I had my first date with Polly the following evening. This was in the nature of a survey; I wanted to
find out just how much work I had to do to get her mind up to the standard I required. I took her first to
dinner. （=delicious） dinner,
to a movie.
her home.
61 I went back to my room with a heavy heart. I had gravely underestimated the size of my task. This
girl's lack of information was terrifying. Nor would it be enough merely to supply her with information First
she had to be taught to think. This loomed as a project of no small dimensions, and at first I was tempted
to give her back to Petey. But then I got to thinking about her abundant physical charms and about the
way she entered a room and the way she handled a knife and fork, and I decided to make an effort.
62 I went about it, as in all things, systematically. I gave her a course in logic. It happened that I, as a
law student, was taking a course in logic myself, so I had all the facts at my finger tips.
her when I picked her up on our next date,
63
so agreeable

38

“s
64 We went to the Knoll, the campus trysting place, and we sat down under an old oak, and she
looked at me expectantly.
65
66 She thought this over for a minute and decided she liked it.
67
must first learn to recognize the common fallacies of logic. These we will take up tonight.
68
69 I winced, but went bravely on.
70
71,
Exercise is good. Therefore everybody should exercise.
72
everything.
73
For instance, if you have heart disease, exercise is bad, not good. Many people are ordered by their
doctors not to exercise. You must qualify the generalization. You must say exercise is usually good, or
exercise is good for most people. Otherwise you have committed a Dicto Simplioiter. Do you see?
74
75

speak French. Petey Burch can't speak French. I must therefore conclude that nobody at the University
of Minnesota can speak French.
76
77 I hid my exasperation.
too few instances to support such a conclusion.
78
79 I fought off a wave of despair. I was getting nowhere with this girl absolutely nowhere. Still, I am
nothing if not persistent. I continued.
80
with us, it rains.
81
never falls. Every single time we take her on a picnic--
82
with the rain. You are guilty of Post Hoc if you blame Eula Becker.
83
84 I sighed deeply.
85
86
87
88 I frowned, but plunged ahead.
anything, can He make a stone so heavy that He won't be able to lift it?
89
90

39

91
92
93 She scratched her pretty, empty head.
94
be no argument. If there is an irresistible force, there can be no immovable object. If there is an
immovable object, there can be no irresistible force. Get it?
95
96 I cousulted my watch.
all the things you've learned. We'll have another session tomorrow night.
97 I deposited her at the girls' dormitory, where she assured me that she had had a perfectly terrif
evening, and I went glumly to my room. Petey lay snoring in his bed, the raccoon coat huddled like a
great hairy beast at his feet. For a moment I considered waking him and telling him that he could have his
girl back. It seemed clear that my project was doomed to failure. The girl simply had a logic-proof head.
98 But then I reconsidered. I had wasted one evening: I might as well waste another. Who knew?
Maybe somewhere in the extinct crater of her mind, a few embers still smoldered. Maybe somehow I
could fan them into flame. Admittedly it was not a prospect fraught with hope, but I decided to give it one
more try.
99 Seated under the oak the next evening I said,
Misericordiam.
100 She quivered with delight.
101
are, he replies that he has a wife and six children at home, the wife is a helpless cripple, the children
have nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, no shoes on their feet, there are no beds in the house, no coal in
the cellar, and winter is coming.
102 A tear rolled down each of Polly's pink cheeks.
103
about his qualifications. Instead he appealed to the boss's sympathy. He committed the fallacy of Ad
Misericordiam. Do you understand?
104
105 I handed her a handkerchief and tried to keep from screaming while she wiped her eyes.
I said in a carefully controlled tone,
be allowed to look at their textbooks during examinations. After all, surgeons have X-rays to guide them
during an operation, lawyers have briefs to guide them during a trial, carpenters have blueprints to guide
them when they are building a house. Why, then, shouldn't students be allowed to look at their textbooks
during an examination?
106
107
test to see how much they have learned, but students are. The situations are altogether different, and
you can't make an analogy between them.
108
109
110
111
chunk of pitchblende (n.沥青油矿), the world today would not know about radium .

40

112
That Walter Pidgeon is so dreamy. I mean he fractures me.
113
statement is a fallacy. Maybe Madame Curie would have discovered radium at some later date. Maybe
somebody else would have discovered it. Maybe any number of things would have happened. You can't
start with a hypothesis that is not true and then draw any supportable conclusions from it.
114
more.
115 One more chance, I decided. But just one more. There is a limit to what flesh and blood can bear.

116
117 ‘My opponent is a notorious liar.
You can't believe a word that he is going to say. '... Now, Polly, think. Think hard. What's wrong?
118 I watched her closely as she knit her creamy brow in concentration. Suddenly, a g1immer of
intelligence—the first I had seen-- came into her eyes.
fair. What chance has the second man got if the first man calls him a liar before he even begins talking?
119
the well before anybody could drink from it. He has hamstrung his opponent before he could even
start. … Polly, I’m proud of you.
120
121
Think--examine—evaluate. Come now, let's review everything we have learned.”
122
123 Heartened by the knowledge that Polly was not altogether a cretin , I began a long, patient
review of all I had told her. Over and over and over again I cited instances pointed out flaws, kept
hammering away without let-up. It was like digging a tunnel. At first everything was work, sweat, and
darkness. I had no idea when I would reach the light, or even if I would. But I persisted. I pounded and
clawed and scraped, and finally I was rewarded. I saw a chink of light. And then the chink got bigger and
the sun came pouring in and all was bright.
124 Five grueling nights this took, but it was worth it. I had made a logician out of Polly; I had taught
her to think. My job was done. She was worthy of me at last. She was a fit wife for me, a proper hostess
for my many mansions, a suitable mother for my well-heeled children.
125 It must not be thought that I was without love for this girl. Quite the contrary, Just as Pygmalion
loved the perfect woman he had fashioned, so I loved mine. I determined to acquaint her with my feeling
at our very next meeting. The time had come to change our relationship from academic to romantic.
126
127
128 “we have now spent five evenings together. We
have gotten along splendidly. It is clear that we are well matched.”
129 “Hasty Generalization,” said Polly brightly.
130 “I beg your pardon,” said I.
131 “Hasty Generalization,” she repeated. “How can you say that we are well matched on the
basis of only five dates?”

41

132 I chuckled with amusement. The dear child had learned her lessons well.
Patting her hand in a tolerant manner,
know it's good.
133 ”, said Polly promptly. ”
134 I chuckled with somewhat less amusement. The dear child had learned her lessons perhaps too
well. I decided to change tactics. Obviously the best approach was a simple, strong, direct declaration of
love. I paused for a moment while my massive brain chose the proper words. Then I began:
135
constellations of outer space. Please, my darling, say that you will go steady with me, for if you will not,
life will be meaningless. I will languish (vi.憔悴). I will refuse my meals. I will wander the face of the earth,
a shambling (摇摇晃晃地走), hollow-eyed hulk.
136 There, I thought, folding my arms, that ought to do it.
137 ” Said Polly.
138 I ground my teeth. I was not Pygmalion; I was Frankenstein, and my monster had me by the
throat. Frantically I fought back the tide of panic surging through me. At all costs I had to keep cool.
139
140 ’re darn right,
141
142
143
never would have learned about fallacies.
144
145 I dashed perspiration from my brow.
literally. I mean this is just classroom stuff. You know that the things you learn in school don't have
anything to do with life.
146
147 That did it. I leaped to my feet, bellowing like a bull.
148
149
150
151 I reeled back, overcome with the infamy of it. After he promised, after he made a deal, after he
shook my hand!
liar. He's a cheat. He's a rat.
152
153 With an immense effort of will, I modulated my voice.
look at this thing logically. How could you choose Petey Burch over me? Look at me--a brilliant student, a
tremendous intellectual, a man with an assured future. Look at Petey--a knothead, a jitterbug, a guy
who'll never know where his next meal is coming from. Can you give me one logical reason why you
should go stead with Petey Burch?
154 ”
(from Rhetoric in a Modern Modeby James K. Bell and Adrian A. Cohn)

课文5译文 爱情就是谬误 马克斯•舒尔曼

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1．查尔斯.兰姆是个世所罕见的性情欢快、富有 进取心的人，他笔下的散文《古瓷器》和《梦中的孩
子》无拘无束、自由奔放，实在令人难忘。下面这篇 文章比兰姆的作品更加自由奔放。事实上，用“自由
奔放”的字眼来形容这篇文章并不十分贴切，或许用 “柔软”、“轻松”或“轻软而富有弹性”更为恰当。
2．尽管很难说清这篇文章属于哪一类 ，但可以肯定它是一篇散文小品文。它提出了论点，引用了许多
例证，并得出了结论。卡里尔能写得更好 吗?拉斯金呢?
3．这篇文章意在论证逻辑学非但不枯燥乏味，而且活泼、清新，富于美感和 激情，并给人以启迪。诸
位不妨一读。 ---作者注
4．我这个人头脑冷静，逻辑思维能力强。敏锐、慎重、深刻、机智----这 些就是我的特点。我的大脑
像发电机一样发达，像化学家的天平一样精确，像手术刀一样锋利。---你 知道吗?我才18岁。
5．年纪这么轻而智力又如此非凡的人并不常有。就拿在明尼苏达大学 和我同住一个房间的皮蒂.伯奇
来说吧，他和我年龄相仿，经历一样，可他笨得像头驴。小伙子长得年轻 漂亮，可惜脑子里却空空如也。
他易于激动，情绪反复无常，容易受别人的影响。最糟糕的是他爱赶时髦 。在我看来，赶时髦就是最缺乏
理智的表现。见到一种新鲜的东西就跟着学，以为别人都在这么干，自己 也就卷进去傻干---我认为这简直
是愚蠢至极，但皮蒂却不以为然。
6．一天下午 ，我看见皮蒂躺在床上，脸上露出一副痛苦不堪的表情，我立刻断定他是得了阑尾炎。“别
动，”我说， “别吃泻药，我就请医生来。”
7．“浣熊．”他咕哝着。
8．“浣熊?”我停下来问道。
9．“我要一件浣熊皮大衣，”他痛苦地哭叫着。
10．我明白了，他不是身体不舒服，而是精神上的问题。“你为什么要浣熊皮大衣?”
11 ．“我早该知道，”他哭叫着，用拳头捶打着太阳穴，“我早该知道查尔斯登舞再度流行时．浣熊
皮大衣 也会时兴起来的。我真傻，钱都买了课本，弄得现在不能买浣熊皮大衣了。”
12．我带着怀疑的眼神问道：“你是说人们真的又要穿浣熊皮大衣了吗?”
13．“校园里有身份的人哪个不穿?你刚从哪儿来?”
14．“图书馆，”我说了一个有身份的人不常去的地方。
15．他从床上一跃而起，在房间 里踱来踱去。“我一定要弄到一件浣熊皮大衣，”他激动地说，“非
弄到不可!”
1 6．“皮蒂，你怎么啦?冷静地想一想吧。浣熊皮大衣不卫生、掉毛、味道难闻、既笨重又不好看，
而且 ……”
17．“你不懂，”他不耐烦地打断我的话，“这就叫时髦。难道你不想赶时髦吗?”
18．“不想，”我坦率地回答。
19．“好啦，我可想着呢!”他肯定地说，“弄到浣熊皮大衣让我干什么都行。”
20．我的大脑---这件精密的仪器 ---立刻运转起来。我紧盯着他，问道：“什么都行?”
21．“什么都行!”他斩钉截铁地说。
22．我若有所思地抚着下巴。好极了，我知道哪儿 能弄到浣熊皮大衣。我父亲在大学读书期间就穿过
一件，现在还放在家里顶楼的箱子里。恰好皮蒂也有我 需要的东两。尽管他还没有弄到手，但至少他有优
先权。我说的是他的女朋友波莉.埃斯皮。
23．我早已钟情于波莉•埃斯皮了。我要特别说明的是我想得到这妙龄少女并不是由于感情的驱使。她
的确是个易于使人动情的姑娘。可我不是那种让感情统治理智的人，我想得到波莉是经过慎重考虑的，完
全是出于理智上的原因。
24．我是法学院一年级的学生，过不了几年就要挂牌当律师了。我 很清楚，一个合适的妻子对于一个
律师来说是非常重要的。我发现大凡有成就的律师几乎都是和美丽、文 雅、聪明的女子结婚的。波莉只差
一条就完全符合这些条件了。

43

25．她漂亮。尽管她的身材还没有挂在墙上的照片 上的美女那么苗条，但我相信时间会弥补这个不足。
她已经大致不差了。
26．她温文尔稚 ---我这里是指她很有风度。她亭亭玉立、落落大方、举手投足都尽显她出身高贵。她进餐时，动作是那样的优美。我曾看见过她在“舒适的校园一角”吃名点--- 一块夹有几片带汁的炖肉和碎
核桃仁的三明治，还有一小杯泡菜 ---手指居然一点儿也没有沾湿。
27．她不聪明，实际上恰恰相反。但我相信在我的指导下，她会变聪明的。无论如何可以试一试，使一 个
漂亮的笨姑娘变得聪明比使一个聪明的丑姑娘变得漂亮毕竟要容易些。
28．“波莉,”我说．“你在跟波莉•埃斯皮谈恋爱吧?”
29．“我觉得她是一个讨人喜 欢的姑娘，”他回答说，“但我不知道这是不是就叫做爱情。你问这个干什
么?”
30．“你和她有什么正式的安排吗?我是说你们是不是经常约会，或者有诸如此类的事情?，我问。
31．“没有，我们常常见面。但我们俩各自有别的约会。你问这个干什么?”
32．“还有没有别人令她特别喜欢呢?”我问道。
33．“那我可不知道。怎么了?”
34．我满意地点点头说：“这就是说，如果你不在，场地就是空着的。你说是吧?”
35．“我想是这样的。你这话是什么意思?”
36．“没什么，没什么，”我若无其事地说，接着把手提皮箱从壁橱里拿了出来。
37．“你去哪儿?”皮蒂问。
38．“回家过周末。”我把几件衣服扔进了皮箱。
39．“听着，”他焦急地抓住我的胳膊说，“你回家后，从你父亲那儿弄点钱来借给我买一件浣熊皮大衣，< br>好吗?”
40．“也许还不只是这样呢，”我神秘地眨着眼睛说，随后关上皮箱就走了。 41．星期一上午我回到学校时对皮蒂说：“你瞧!”我猛地打开皮箱，那件肥大、毛茸茸、散发着怪味的东
西露了出来，这就是我父亲1925年在施图茨比尔凯特汽车里穿过的那一件浣熊皮大衣。
4 2．“太好了!”皮蒂恭敬地说。他把两只手插进那件皮大衣，然后把头也埋了进去。“太好了!”他不断
地重复了一二十遍。
43．“你喜欢吗?”我问道。
44.“哦，喜欢!”他高声叫着， 把那满是油腻的毛皮紧紧地搂在怀里。接着他眼里露出机警的神色，说，
“你要换什么?”
45．“你的女朋友，”我毫不讳言地说。
46．“波莉?”他吃惊了，结结巴巴地说，“你要波莉?”
47．“是的。”
48．他把皮大衣往旁边一扔，毫不妥协地说：“那可不行。”
49．我耸了耸肩膀说：“那好吧，如果你不想赶时髦，那就随你的便吧。，，
50.我在一 把椅子上坐了下来，假装看书，暗暗地瞟着皮蒂。他神情不安，用面包店窗前的流浪儿那种馋涎
欲滴的神 情望着那件皮大衣，接着扭过头去，坚定地咬紧牙关。过了一会儿，他又回过头来把目光投向那
件皮大衣 ，脸上露出更加渴望的神情。等他再扭过头去，已经不那么坚决了。他看了又看，越看越喜欢，
慢慢决心 也就减弱了。最后他再也不扭过头去，只是站在那里，贪婪地盯着那件皮大衣。
51．“我和波莉好像 不是在谈恋爱，”他含含糊糊地说，“也说不上经常约会或有诸如此类的事情。
52．“好的，”我低声 说。
53．“波莉对我算得了什么?我对波莉又算得了什么?”
54．“根本算不了什么，”我说。
55．“只不过是一时高兴 ---不过是说说笑笑罢了，仅此而已。”
56．“试试大衣吧。”我说。

44

57．他照办了。衣领蒙住了他的耳朵，下摆一直拖到脚跟。 他看起来活像一具浣熊尸体。他高兴地说：“挺
合身的。”
58．我从椅子上站了起来。“成交了吗?”我说着，把手伸向他。
59.他轻易地接受了。“算数，”他说，并跟我握了握手。
60．第二天晚上，我 与波莉第一次约会了。这一次实际上是我对她的考查。我想弄清要做多大的努力
才能使她的头脑达到我的 要求。我首先请她去吃饭。“哈，这顿饭真够意思，”离开餐馆时她说。然后我
请她去看电影。“嘿，这 片子真好看。”走出电影院时她说。最后我送她回家。和我告别时她说：“嘿，
今晚玩得真痛快。”
61．我怀着不大痛快的心情回到了房间。我对这任务的艰巨性估计得太低了。这姑娘的知识少 得令人
吃惊。光教给她知识还不够。首先得教她学会思考。这可不是一件容易的事，当时我真想把她还给 皮蒂算
了。但我一想到她那充满魅力的身材、她进屋时的模样、她那拿刀叉的姿势，我还是决定再做一番 努力。
62．就像做其他事情一样，我开始有计划地干了起来。我开始给她上逻辑课。幸好我 是一个学法律的
学生，我自己也在学逻辑学，所以对要教的内容我都很熟悉。当我接她赴第二次约会的时 候，我对她说：
“今晚咱们去‘小山’谈谈吧。”
63．“啊，好极了，”她回答道。对这姑娘我要补充一句，像她这么好商量的人是不多见的。
64．我们去了“小山”，这是校园里人们幽会的地方。我们坐在一棵老橡树下，她用期待的目光看着
我 。“我们谈些什么呢?”她问。
65．“逻辑。”
66．她想了一会儿，觉得不错，便说：“好极了。”
67．“逻辑学，”我清了清嗓子，“ 就是思维的科学。在我们能正确地思维之前，首先必须学会判别
逻辑方面的常见谬误。我们今晚就要来谈 谈这些。”
68．“哇!”她叫了起来，高兴地拍着手。
69．我打了个寒噤，但还是鼓足勇气讲下去：“首先我们来考究一下被称为绝对判断的谬误。”
70．“好呀!”她眨了眨眼，催促着。
71．“绝对判断指的是根据一种无条件的前提推出 的论断。比如说，运动是有益的，因此人人都要运
动。”
72．“不错，”波莉认真地说，“运动是非常有益的。它能增强体质，好处太多了!”
73 ．“波莉，”我温和地说，“这种论点是谬误。运动有益是一种无条件的前提。比方说，假如你得
了心脏 病，运动不但无益，反而有害，有不少人医生就不准他们运动。你必须给这种前提加以限制。你应
该说， 一般来说运动是有益的。或者说，对大多数人是有益的。否则就是犯了绝对判断的错误，懂吗?”
74．“不懂，”她坦率地说，“这可太有意思了，讲吧，往下讲吧。”
75．“你最好别拉 我的袖子了，”我对她说。等她松了手，我继续讲，“下面我们讲一种被称为草率
结论的谬误。你仔细听 ：你不会讲法语，我不会讲法语，皮蒂•伯奇也不会讲法语。因此我就会断定在明尼
苏达大学谁也不会讲 法语。”
76．“真的?”波莉好奇地问道．“谁都不会吗?”
77．我压住火气。“波莉，这是一种谬误，这是一种草率的结论。能使这种结论成立的例证太少了。”
78．“你还知道其他的谬误吗?”她气喘吁吁地说：“这比跳舞还有意思啦!”
79．我极力地使自己不灰心。我真拿这姑娘没办法，确实是毫无办法。可是，如果我不坚持下去，我
就 太没用了。因此，我继续讲下去。
80．“现在听我讲讲被称为牵强附会的谬误。听着：我们 不要带比尔出去野餐。每次带他一起去，天
就下雨。”
81．“我就见过这样的人，”她感叹 地说，“我们家乡有个女孩，名叫尤拉•蓓克尔。从没有例外，每次我
们带她去野餐……”

45

82．“波莉，”我严厉地说，”这是一种谬误。下 雨并不是尤拉•蓓克尔造成的，下雨与她没有任何关
系。如果你责怿尤拉•蓓克尔，你就是犯了牵强附会 的错误。”
83．“我再也不这样了．”她懊悔地保证说，“你生我的气了吗?”
84．我深深地叹了一口气：“不，波莉，我没生气。”
85．“那么，给我再讲些谬误吧!”
86．“好，让我们来看看矛盾前提吧。”
87．“行。行，”她叽叽喳喳地叫着，两眼闪现出快乐的光芒。
88．我皱了皱眉头，但还 是接着讲下去。“这里有一个矛盾前提的例子：如果上帝是万能的，他能造
出一块连他自己也搬不动的大 石头吗?”
89．“当然能，”她毫不犹豫地回答。
90．“但是如果他是万能的，他就能搬动那块石头呀。”我提醒她说。
91．“是嘛!”她若有所思地说，“嗯，我想他造不出那样的石头。”
92．“但他是万能的啊，”我进一步提醒她。
93．她用手抓了抓她那漂亮而义空虚的脑袋。“我全搞糊涂了，”她承认说。
94．“你确 实糊涂了。因为如果一种论点的各个前提相互间是矛盾的，这种论点就不能成立，假如有
一种不可抗拒的 力量，就不可能有一种不可移动的物体；假如有一种不可移动的物体，就不可能有一种不
可抗拒的力量。 懂了吗?”
95．“再给我讲些这类新奇的玩意儿吧，”她恳切地说。
9 6．我看了看表，说，“我想今晚就谈到这里。现在我该送你回去了。你把所学的东西复习一遍．我
们明 晚再上一课吧。”
97．我把她送到了女生宿舍，在那里她向我保证说这个晚上她过得非常愉 快。我闷闷不乐地回到了我
的房间，皮带正鼾声如雷地睡在床上。那件浣熊皮大衣像一头多毛的野兽趴在 他的脚边。当时我真想把他
叫醒，告诉他可以把他的女朋友要回去。看来我的计划要落空了。这姑娘对逻 辑简直是一点儿部不开窍。
98．但是我回过头一想，既然已经浪费了一个晚上，不妨还是再 花一个晚上看看。天知道，说不定她
头脑里的死火山口中的什么地方，还有些火星会喷射出来呢。也许我 会有办法能把这些火星扇成熊熊烈焰。
当然，成功的希望是不大的，但我还是决定再试一次。
99．第二天晚上我们义坐在那棵橡树下，我说，“今晚我们要谈的第一种谬误叫做文不对题。”
100．她高兴得都发抖了。
101．“注意听，”我说，“有个人申请T作，当老饭问他所 具备的条件时，他回答说他家有妻子和
六个孩子。妻子完全残废了，孩子们没吃的没穿的，睡觉没有床， 生火没有煤，眼看冬天就要到了。”
102．两滴眼泪顺着波莉那粉红的面颊往下滚。“啊，这太可怕了!太可怕了!”她抽泣着说。
103．“是的，是太可怕了，”我赞同地说，“但这可不成其为申请工作的理由。那人根本没有回答
老 板提出的关于他所具备的条件的问题。反而乞求老板的同情。他犯了文不对题的错误。你懂吗?”
104．“你带手帕了没有?”她哭着说。 、
105．我把手帕递给她。当她擦眼泪 时，我极力控制自己的火气。“下面，”我小心地压低声音说，
“我们要讨论错误类比。这里有一个例子 ：应该允许学生考试时看课本。既然外科医生在做手术时可以看
x光片，律师在审查案件时可以看案情摘 要，木匠在盖房子时可以看图纸，为什么学生在考试时不能看课
本呢?”
106．“这个．”她满怀激情地说，“可是我多少年来听到的最好的主意。”
107．“波 莉，”我生气地说，“这个论点全错了。医生、律师和木匠并不是以参加考试的方式去测
验他们所学的东 西。学生们才是这样。情况完全不同，你不能在不同的情况之间进行类比。”
108．“我还是觉得这是个好主意，”波莉说。
109．“咳!”我嘀咕着，但我还是执意地往下讲，“接下去我们试试与事实相反的假设吧。”
110．波莉的反应是：“听起来不错。”

46

111．“你听着：如果居里夫人不是碰巧把一张照 片底片放在装有一块沥青铀矿石的抽屉里，那么世
人今天就不会知道镭。”
112． “对，对，”波莉点、头称是。“你看过那部影片吗?哦，真好看。沃尔特•皮金演得太好了，
我是说他 让我着迷了。”
113．“如果你能暂时忘记皮金先生，”我冷冷地说，“我会愿意指出这种 说法是错误的。也许居里
夫人以后会发现镭的，也许由别人去发现，也许还会发生其他的事情。你不能从 一个不实际的假设出发，
从中得出任何可以站得住脚的结论。”
114．“人们真应该让沃尔特•皮金多拍些照片，”波莉说，“我几乎再也看不到他了。”
115．我决定冉试一次，但只能一次。一个人的忍耐毕竟是有限度的。我说，“下一一个谬误叫做井
里 投毒。”
116．“多有趣啊!”她咯咯地笑了起来。
117．“有两个 人在进行一场辩论。第一个人站起来说：‘我的论敌是个劣迹昭彰的骗子，他所说的
每一句话都不可信。 ’……波莉，现在你想想，好好想一想，这句话错在哪里?”
118．她眉头紧锁，我凝视着她。突然，一道智慧的光芒 ---这是我从未看到过的 ---闪现在她的眼中 。
“这不公平，”她气愤地说，“一点都不公平。如果第一个人不等第二个人开口就说他是骗子，那么第 二
个人还有什么可说的呢?”
119．“对!”我高兴地叫了起来，“百分之百对， 是不公平。第一个人不等别人喝到井水，就在井里
投毒了。他还不等他的对手开口就已经伤害了他。…… 波莉，我真为你感到骄傲。”
120．她轻轻地“哼”了一声，高兴得脸都发红了。
121．“你看，亲爱的，这些问题并不深奥，只要精力集中，就能对付。思考 分析 判断。来，让
我们把所学过的东西再复习一遍。”
122．“来吧，”她说着，把手往上一晃。
123．看来波莉并不很傻，我的劲头上来了。 于是，我便开始把对她讲过的一切．长时间耐心地复习
了一遍。我给她一个一个地举例子，指出其中的错 误．不停地讲下去。就好比挖掘一条隧道，开始只有劳
累、汗水和黑暗，不知道什么时候能见到光亮，甚 至还不知道能否见到光亮。然而，我坚持着，凿啊，挖
啊，刮啊．终于得到了回报。我见到了一线光亮， 这光亮越来越大，终于阳光洒进来了，一切都豁然开朗
了。
124．我辛辛苦苦地花 了五个晚上，但总算还是没有白费。我使波莉变成一个逻辑学家了，我教她学
会了思考。我的任务完成了 ，她最终还是配得上我的。她会成为我贤惠的妻子。我那些豪华公馆里出色的
女主人，我那些有良好教养 的孩子们的合格母亲。
125．不要以为我不爱这个姑娘了，恰恰相反。正如皮格马利翁珍爱 他自己塑造的完美的少女像一样，
我也非常爱我的波莉。我决定下次会面时把自己的感情向她倾吐。该是 把我们师生关系转化为爱情的时候
了。
126．“波莉，”当我们又坐在我们那棵橡树下时，我说，“今晚我们不再讨论渗误了。”
127．“怎么啦?”她失望地问道。
128．“亲爱的，”我友好地对她笑了笑，“我们已经一起度 过了五个晚上，我们相处得很好。显然我们
俩是很相配的。”
129．“草率结论，”波莉伶俐地说。
130．“你是说 ---?”我问道。
131．“草率结论，”她重复了一遍。“你怎么能凭我们仅有的五次约会就说我们俩很相配呢?”
132．我咯咯一笑，觉得挺有意思。这可爱的小家伙功课学得可真不错。“亲爱的，”我耐心地拍打
着 她的手说，“五次约会就不少了，毕竟你不必把整个蛋糕吃下去才知道蛋糕的甜味。”
133．“错误类比，”波莉敏捷地说。“我可不是蛋糕，我是个女孩子。”

47

134．我微微一笑，但这次不感到那么有意思了。 这可爱的孩子功课或许是学得太好了。我决定改变
策略。显然，最好的办法就是态度明朗，直截了当地向 她示爱。我沉默了一会儿，用我特别发达的脑袋挑
选着合适的词语。然后我便开始：
135．“波莉，我爱你。对我来说，你就是整个世界，是月亮，是星星，是整个宇宙。亲爱的，请说
你 爱我吧。如果你不这样，我的生活就失去了意义。我将会萎靡不振，茶不饮，饭不思，到处游荡，成为
一 个步履蹒跚、双眼凹陷的躯壳。”
136．我双手交叉站在那里，心想这下子可打动她了。
137．“文不对题，”波莉说。
138．我咬咬牙。我不是皮格马利翁， 我是弗兰肯斯坦，我的喉咙似乎一下子让魔鬼卡住了。我极力
控制涌上心头的阵阵痛楚。无论如何，我也 要保持冷静。
139．“好了，波莉，”我强装着笑脸说，“这些谬误你的确已学到家了。”
140．“这可说得很对，”她使劲地点了点头说道。
14l_“可是波莉，这一切是谁教给你的?”
142．“你教的呀!”
143．“是的，那你得感谢我。是吧，亲爱的?要是我不和你在一起，你永远也不会学到这些谬误的。”
144．“与事实相反的假设，”波莉不假思索地说着。
145．我甩掉r前额 的汗珠。“波莉，”我用嘶哑的声音说道，“你不要死板地接受这些东两。我是说那
只是课堂上讲的东西 。你知道学校学的东西与现实生活毫不相干。”
146．“绝对判断，”她说道，嬉戏地向我摇摇指头。
147．这一下可使我恼火了。我猛地跳了起来，向公牛似的吼叫着，“你到底想不想和我谈恋爱?”
148．“我不想，”她答道。
149．“为什么不想?”我追问着。
150．“因为今天下午我答应了皮蒂•伯奇，我愿意和他相爱。”
151．我被皮蒂这一无 耻的行径气得一阵眩晕，情不自禁地向后退去。皮蒂答应了我，跟我成了交，
还跟我握了手呢!“这个可 耻的家伙!”我尖声大叫，把一块块草皮踢了起来。“你不能跟他在一起，波莉。
他是一个说谎的人、一 个骗子、一个可耻的家伙!”
152．“井里投毒，”波莉说，“别叫嚷了，我想大声地叫嚷就是一种谬误。”
153．我 以极大的意志力把语气缓和下来。“好吧，”我说个反复无常的人，一个吃了上顿不知下顿
的家伙。你能 给我一个合乎逻辑的理由来说明你为什么要跟皮蒂好吗?”
154．“当然能，”波莉肯定地 说，“他有一件浣熊皮大衣，“你是一个逻辑学家。那就让我们从逻
辑上来分析这件事吧。你怎么会看得 上皮蒂•伯奇，而看不起我呢?你看我--- 一个才华横溢的学生，一个了
不起的知识分子，一个前途无量的人；而皮蒂---一个笨蛋，一
。”
(崔林译，李丙奎审校)











48

Unit6 The Way to Rainy Mountain ——by N. Scott Momaday

A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the
Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the
world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is
an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts
along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in
July or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers
are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the
red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain
are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon
that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your
imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. My grandmother had died in the spring, and I wanted to be at her
grave. She had lived to be very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her when she died,
and I was told that in death her face was that of a child.
I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas were living the last great moment of their
history. For more than a hundred years they had controlled the open range from the Smoky Hill River to
the Red, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. In alliance with
the Comanches, they had ruled the whole of the southern Plains. War was their sacred business, and
they were among the finest horsemen the world has ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was
preeminently a matter of disposition rather than of survival, and they never understood the grim,
unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. When at last, divided and illprovisioned, they were driven onto
the Staked Plains in the cold rains of autumn, they fell into panic. In Palo Duro Canyon they abandoned
their crucial stores to pillage and had nothing then but their lives. In order to save themselves, they
surrendered to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in the old stone corral that now stands as a
military museum. My grandmother was spared the humiliation of those high gray walls by eight or ten
years, but she must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.
Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America. Her forebears came
down from the high country in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a mountain
people, a mysterious tribe of hunters whose language has never been positively classified in any major
group. In the late seventeenth century they began a long migration to the south and east. It was a journey
toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows,
who gave them the culture and religion of the Plains. They acquired horses, and their ancient nomadic
spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that
moment the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun. Not least, they
acquired the sense of destiny, therefore courage and pride. When they entered upon the southern Plains
they had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were a
lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun. According to their
origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow log. From one point of view, their migration was the
fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.
Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense
landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of the Crows, whom she

49

had never seen, and of the Black Hills, where she had never been. I wanted to see in reality what she
had seen more perfectly in the mind's eye, and traveled fifteen hundred miles to begin my pilgrimage.
Yellowstone, it seemed to me, was the top of the world, a region of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons
and waterfalls. But, beautiful as it is, one might have the sense of confinement there. The skyline in all
directions is close at hand, the high wall of the woods and deep cleavages of shade. There is a perfect
freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas
reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.
Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to the plain. In July the inland slope of the
Rockies is luxuriant with flax and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur. The earth unfolds and the limit of
the land recedes. Clusters of trees, and animals grazing far in the distance, cause the vision to reach
away and wonder to build upon the mind. The sun follows a longer course in the day, and the sky is
immense beyond all comparison. The great billowing clouds that sail upon it are shadows that move upon
the grain like water, dividing light. Farther down, in the land of the Crows and Blackfeet, the plain is
yellow. Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends upon itself to cover and seal the soil. There the
Kiowas paused on their way; they had come to the place where they must change their lives. The sun is
at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god. When the Kiowas
came to the land of the Crows, they could see the darklees of the hills at dawn across the Bighorn River,
the profusion of light on the grain shelves, the oldest deity ranging after the solstices. Not yet would they
veer southward to the caldron of the land that lay below; they must wean their blood from the northern
winter and hold the mountains a while longer in their view. They bore Tai-me in procession to the east.
A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. At the top of a ridge I caught sight of
Devil's Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken
through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an
awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil's Tower is one of them. Two centuries ago, because they could not
do otherwise, the Kiowas made a legend at the base of the rock. My grandmother said:
Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he
trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was
covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified; they ran,
and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them
climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just
beyond its reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven
sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.
From that moment, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas have kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever
they were in the mountains, they could be no more. However tenuous their well- being, however much
they had suffered and would suffer again, they had found a way out of the wilderness.
My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that now is all but gone out of mankind. There
was a wariness in her, and an ancient awe. She was a Christian in her later years, but she had come a
long way about, and she never forgot her birthright. As a child she had been to the Sun Dances; she had
taken part in those annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration of her people in the
presence of Tai-me. She was about seven when the last Kiowa Sun Dance was held in 1887 on the
Washita River above Rainy Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to consummate the ancient
sacrifice--to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the medicine tree--a delegation of old men journeyed
into Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. She was ten when the Kiowas
came together for the last time as a living Sun Dance culture. They could find no buffalo; they had to

50

精读5第二版课文翻译

———————————————————————————————— 作者：
———————————————————————————————— 日期：




2

Book5 catalogues
Lesson 1
Who Are you and what are you doing here ……………………………………………1
Lesson 2 Two kinds……………………………………………………………………………………..10
Lesson 3 Goods move. People move. Ideas move. And cultures change…………………….21
Lesson 4 Professions foe women ……………………………………………………………………29
Lesson 5 Love is a fallacy……………………………………………………………………………...34
Lesson 6 The way to rainy mountain………………………………………………………………….47
Lesson 7 Rewriting American history………………………………………………………………..53
Lesson 8 The Merely very good……………………………………………………………………….73
Lesson 9 Al gore’s Nobel peace prize acceptance speech ………………………………………82
Lesson10 The Bluest Eye……………………………………………………………………………….89
Lesson 11 How News becomes opinion off- limits…………………………………………………101
Lesson 12 The Indispensable opposition……………………………………………………………105


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 in very good shape. We’ve got guns, drugs, two wars, fanatical religions, 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: Whttp:k 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 you 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 get 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, and occahttp:onally 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

3

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
hhttp:, “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, unless 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 :
“How about the science requirements?”

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

My father, Wright Aukenhead Edmundson, 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? http:erica 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.


4

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
andhttp: 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’ scholarly 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 work very hard—they’ve created
http: 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 profeshttp:rs 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 adminhttp:trators, 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.

5

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. Cohttp:eges 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 cheating 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
services 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.

Onhttp: 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 office 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 so, in their own turn,
contribute immeasurably to the university’s standing.
Thttp:y’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

6

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
Etohttp:. 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 their 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 having your lifhttp: 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 runs, 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
buhttp:ding 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 for 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 education 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

7

http: 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 ministers 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 of 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,
thhttp: 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. Embedded 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
relhttp:ion, 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 think 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 whohttp:
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

8

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 withhttp: 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
ishttp: 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 names 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 invited 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
chttp:dition 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 charismatic 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
relationshttp: among them (negotiable when you

9

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 battle 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
hhttp: quite fit. He understood that he was
always out-of-joint with life as it was. He had talent: 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 invisible
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 understanding of himself, figure out what
he’d do best that might give the world some profit.
:My 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
yohttp:, 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

10

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 wilhttp: 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 end, 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 words 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
experhttp:y 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 offerhttp:
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.








11

Unit2 Two Kinds ——Amy Tan

My mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America. You could open a restaurant.
You could work for the government and get good retirement. You could buy a house with almost no
money down. You could become rich. You could become instantly famous.
“Of course, you can be a prodigy1, too,” my mother told me when I was nine. “You can be best anything.
What does Auntie Lindo know? Her daughter, she is only best tricky.”
America was where all my mother’s hopes lay. She had come to San Francisco in 1949 after losing
everything in China: her mother and father, her home, her first husband, and two daughters, twin baby
girls. But she never looked back with regret. Things could get better in so many ways.
We didn’t immediately pick the right kind of prodigy. At first my mother thought I could be a Chinese
Shirley Temple2. We’d watch Shirley’s old movies on TV as though they were training films. My mother
would poke my arm and say, “Ni watch.” And I would see Shirley tapping her feet, or singing a
sailor song, or pursing her lips into a very round O while saying “Oh, my goodness.”
“Ni kan,” my mother said, as Shirley’s eyes flooded with tears. “You already know how. Don’t need
talent for crying!”
Soon after my mother got this idea about Shirley Temple, she took me to the beauty training school in the
Mission District and put me in the hands of a student who could barely hold the scissors without shaking.
Instead of getting big fat curls, I emerged with an uneven mass of crinkly black fuzz3. My mother dragged
me off to the bathroom and tried to wet down my hair.
“You look like a Negro Chinese,” she lamented, as if I had done this on purpose.
The instructor of the beauty training school had to lop off4 these soggy clumps to make my hair even
again. “Peter Pan5 is very popular these days” the instructor assured my mother. I now had bad hair the
length of a boy’s, with curly bangs that hung at a slant two inches above my eyebrows. I liked the haircut,
and it made me actually look forward to my future fame.
In fact, in the beginning I was just as excited as my mother, maybe even more so. I pictured this prodigy
part of me as many different images, and I tried each one on for size. I was a dainty ballerina girl standing
by the curtain, waiting to hear the music that would send me floating on my tiptoes. I was like the Christ
child lifted out of the straw manger, crying with holy indignity. I was Cinderella6 stepping from her
pumpkin carriage with sparkly cartoon music filling the air.
In all of my imaginings I was filled with a sense that I would soon become perfect: My mother and father
would adore me. I would be beyond reproach. I would never feel the need to sulk, or to clamor for
anything. But sometimes the prodigy in me became impatient. “If you don’t hurry up and get me out of
here, I’m disappearing for good,” it warned. “And then you’ll always be nothing.”
Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica7 topped kitchen table. She would
present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children that she read in Ripley’s Believe
It or Not or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s digest, or any of a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in
our bathroom. My mother got these magazines from people whose houses she cleaned. And since she
cleaned many houses each week, we had a great assortment. She would look through them all,
searching for stories about remarkable children.
The first night she brought out a story about a three-year-old boy who knew the capitals of all the states
and even the most of the European countries. A teacher was quoted as saying that the little boy could
also pronounce the names of the foreign cities correctly. “What’s the capital of Finland?” my mother
asked me, looking at the story.

12

All I knew was the capital of California, because Sacramento8 was the name of the street we lived on in
Chinatown9. “Nairobi10!” I quessed, saying the most foreign word I could think of. She checked to see if
that might be one way to pronounce “Helsinki11” before showing me the answer.
The tests got harder - multiplying numbers in my head, finding the queen of hearts in a deck of cards,
trying to stand on my head without using my hands, predicting the daily temperatures in Los angeles,
New York, and London.
One night I had to look at a page from the Bible for three minutes and then report everything I could
remember. “Now Jehoshaphat had riches12 and honor in abundance and that’s all I remember, Ma,” I
said.
And after seeing, once again, my mother’s disappointed face, something inside me began to die. I hated
the tests, the raised hopes and failed expectations. Before going to bed that night I looked in the mirror
above the bathroom sink, and I saw only my face staring back ---and understood that it would always be
this ordinary face ---I began to cry. Such a sad, ugly girl! I made high-pitched noises like a crazed animal,
trying to scratch out the face in the mirror.
And then I saw what seemed to be the prodigy side of me---a face I had never seen before. I looked at
my reflection, blinking so that I could see more clearly. The girl staring back at me was angry, powerful.
She and I were the same. I had new thoughts, willful thoughts or rather, thoughts filled with lots of won’ts.
I won’t let her change me, I promised myself. I won’t be what I’m not.
So now when my mother presented her tests, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I
pretended to be bored. And I was. I got so bored that I started counting the bellows of the foghorns out on
the bay while my mother drilled me in other areas. The sound was comforting and reminded me of the
cow jumping over the moon. And the next day I played a game with myself, seeing if my mother would
give up on me before eight bellows. After a while I usually counted ony one bellow, maybe two at most. At
last she was beginning to give up hope.
Two or three months went by without any mention of my being a prodigy. And then one day my mother
was watching the Ed Sullivan Show13 on TV. The TV was old and the sound kept shorting out. Every
time my mother got halfway up from the sofa to adjust the set, the sound would come back on and
Sullivan would be talking. As soon as she sat down, Sullivan would go silent again. She got up, the TV
broke into loud piano music. She sat down, silence. Up and down, back and forth, quiet and loud. It was
like a stiff, embraceless dance between her and the TV set. Finally, she stood by the set with her hand on
the sound dial.
She seemed entranced by the music, a frenzied little piano piece with a mesmerizing quality, which
alternated between quick, playful passages and teasing, lilting ones.
“Ni kan,” my mother said, calling me over with hurried hand gestures. “Look here.”
I could see why my mother was fascinated by the music. It was being pounded out by a little Chinese girl,
about nine years old, with a Peter Pan haircut. The girl had the sauciness of a Shirley Temple. She was
proudly modest, like a proper Chinese Child. And she also did a fancy sweep of a curtsy, so that the fluffy
skirt of her white dress cascaded to the floor like petals of a large carnation.
In spite of these warning signs, I wasn’t worried. Our family had no piano and we couldn’t afford to buy
one, let alone reams of sheet music and piano lessons. So I could be generous in my comments when
my mother badmouthed14 the little girl on TV.
“Play note right, but doesn’t sound good!” my mother complained “No singing sound.”
“What are you picking on her for?” I said carelessly. “She’s pretty good. Maybe she’s not the best, but
she’s trying hard.” I knew almost immediately that I would be sorry I had said that.

13

“Just like you,” she said. “Not the best. Because you not trying.” She gave a little huff as she let go of
the sound dial and sat down on the sofa.
The little Chinese girl sat down also, to play an encore of “Anitra’s Tanz,” by Grieg15. I remember the
song, because later on I had to learn how to play it.
Three days after watching the Ed Sullivan Show my mother told me what my schedule would be for piano
lessons and piano practice. She had talked to Mr. Chong, who lived on the first floor of our apartment
building. was a retired piano teacher, and my mother had traded housecleaning services for
weekly lessons and a piano for me to practice on every day, two hours a day, from four until six.
When my mother told me this, I felt as though I had been sent to hell. I wished and then kicked my foot a
little when I couldn”t stand it anymore.
“Why don’t you like me the way I am? I’m not a genius! I can’t play the piano. And even if I could, I
wouldn’t go on TV if you paid me a million dollars!” I cried.
My mother slapped me. “Who ask you be genius.”she shouted. “Only ask you be your best. For you sake.
You think I want you be genius? Hnnh! What for! Who ask you!”
“So ungrateful,”I heard her mutter in chinese. “If she had as much talent as she had temper, she would
be famous now.”
Mr. Chong, whom I secretly nicknamed Old Chong, was very strange, always tapping his fingers to the
silent music of an invisible orchestra. He looked ancient in my eyes. He had lost most of the hair on top of
his head and he wore thick glasses and had eyes that always thought, since he lived with his mother and
was not yet married.
I met Old Lady Chong once, and that was enough. She had a peculiar smell, like a baby that had done
something in its pants, and her fingers felt like a dead person’s, like an old peach I once found in the back
of the refrigerator: its skin just slid off the flesh when I picked it up.
I soon found out why Old Chong had retired from teaching piano. He was deaf. “Like Beethoven!” he
shouted to me “We’re both listening only in our head!” And he would start to conduct his frantic silent
sonatas16.
Our lessons went like this. He would open the book and point to different things, explaining, their
purpose: “Key! Treble! Bass! No sharps or flats! So this is C major! Listen now and play after me!”
And then he would play the C scale a few times, a simple cord, and then, as if inspired by an old
unreachable itch, he would gradually add more notes and running trills and a pounding bass until the
music was really something quite grand.
I would play after him, the simple scale, the simple chord, and then just play some nonsense that
sounded like a cat running up and down on top of garbage cans. Old Chong would smile and applaud
and say “Very good! Bt now ou must learn to keep time!”
So that’s how I discovered that Old Chong’s eyes were too slow to keep up with the wrong notes I
was playing. He went through the motions in half time. To help me keep rhythm, he stood behind me and
pushed down on my right shoulder for every beat. He balanced pennies on top of my wrists so that I
would keep them still as I slowly played scales and arpeggios17. He had me curve my hand around an
apple and keep that shame when playing chords. He marched stiffly to show me how to make each finger
dance up and down, staccato18 like an obedient little soldier.
He taught me all these things, and that was how I also learned I could be lazy and get away with
mistakes, lots of mistakes. If I hit the wrong notes because I hadn’t practiced enough, I never corrected
myself, I just kept playing in rhythm. And Old Chong kept conducting his own private reverie.19

14

So maybe I never really gave myself a fair chance. I did pick up the basics pretty quickly, and I might
have become a good pianist at the young age. But I was so determined not to try, not to be anybody
different, and I learned to play only the most ear-splitting preludes, the most discordant hymns.
Over the next year I practiced like this, dutifully in my own way. And then one day I heard my mother
and her friend Lindo Jong both after church, and I was leaning against a brick wall, wearing a dress with
stiff white petticoats. Auntie Linds daughter, Waverly, who was my age, was standing farther down the
wall, about five feet away. We had grown up together and shared all the closeness of two sisters,
squabbling over crayons and dolls. In other words, for the most part, we hated each other. I thought she
was snotty. Waverly Jong had gained a certain amount of fame as “Chinatown’s Littlest Chinese Chess
Champion.”
“She bring home too many trophy.” Auntie Lindo lamented that Sunday. “All day she play chess. All
day I have no time do nothing but dust off her winnings.” She threw a scolding look at Waverly, who
pretended not to see her.
“You lucky you don’t have this problem,” Auntie Lindo said with a sigh to my mother.
And my mother squared her shoulders and bragged “our problem worser than yours. If we ask Jing-mei
wash dish, she hear nothing but music. It’s like you can’t stop this natural talent.”
And right then I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride.
A few weeks later Old Chong and my mother conspired to have me play in a talent show that was to be
held in the church hall. But then my parents had saved up enough to buy me a secondhand piano, a
black Wurlitzer spinet with a scarred bench. It was the showpiece of our living room.
For the talent show I was to play a piece called “Pleading Child” from Schumann’s Scenes From
Childhood. It was a simple, moody piece that sounded more difficult than it was. I was supposed to
memorize the whole thing. But I dawdled over it, playing a few bars and then cheating, looking up to see
what notes followed. I never really listed to what I was playing. I daydreamed about being somewhere
else, about being someone else.
The part I liked to practice best was the fancy curtsy: right foot out, touch the rose on the carpet with a
pointed foot, sweep to the side, bend left leg, look up, and smile.
My parents invited all the couples from their social club to witness my debut. Auntie Lindo and Uncle
Tin were there. Waverly and her two older brothers had also come. The first two rows were filled with
children either younger or older than I was. The littlest ones got to go first. They recited simple nursery
rhymes, squawked out tunes on miniature violins, and twirled hula hoops20 in pink ballet tutus21, and
when they bowed or curtsied, the audience would sigh in unison, “Awww,” and then clap enthusiastically.
When my turn came, I was very confident. I remember my childish excitement. It was as if I knew,
without a doubt, that the prodigy side of me really did exist. I had no fear whatsoever, no nervousness. I
remember thinking, This is it! This is it! I looked out over the audience, at my mother’s blank face, my
father’s yawn, Auntie Lindo’s stiff- lipped smile, Waverly’s sulky expression. I had on a white dress,
layered with sheets of lace, and a pink bow in my Peter Pan haircut. As I sat down, I envisioned people
jumping to their feet and Ed Sullivan rushing up to introduce me to everyone on TV.
And I started to play. Everything was so beautiful. I was so caught up in how lovely I looked that I
wasn’t worried about how I would sound. So I was surprised when I hit the first wrong note. And then I hit
another and another. A chill started at the top of my head and began to trickle down. Yet I couldn’t stop
playing, as though my hands were bewitched. I kept thinking my fingers would adjust themselves back,
like a train switching to the right track. I played this strange jumble through to the end, the sour notes
staying with me all the way.

15

When I stood up, I discovered my legs were shaking. Maybe I had just been nervous, and the
audience, like Old Chong had seen me go through the right motions and had not heard anything wrong at
all. I swept my right foot out, went down on my knee, looked up, and smiled. The room was quiet, except
fot Old Chong, who was beaming and shouting “Bravo! Bravo! Well done!” By then I saw my mother’s
face, her stricken face. The audience clapped weakly, and I walked back to my chair, with my whole face
quivering as I tried not to cry, I heard a little boy whisper loudly to his mother. “That was awful,” and
mother whispered “Well, she certainly tried.”

And now I realized how many people were in the audience, the whole world, it seemed. I was aware
of eyes burning into my back. I felt the shame of my mother and father as they sat stiffly through the rest
of the show.
We could have escaped during intermission. Pride and some strange sense of honor must have
anchored my parents to their chairs. And so we watched it all. The eighteen- year-old boy with a fake
moustache who did a magic show and juggled flaming hoops while riding a unicycle. The breasted girl
with white make up who sang an aria from Madame Butterfly22 and got an honorable mention. And the
eleven-year- old boy who was first prize playing a tricky violin song that sounded like a busy bee.
After the show the Hsus, the Jongs, and the St. Clairs, from the Joy Luck Club, came up to my
mother and father.
“Lots of talented kids,” Auntie Lindo said vaguely, smiling broadly. “That was something else,” my
father said, and I wondered if he was referring to me in a humorous way, or whether he even
remembered what I had done.
Waverly looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. “You aren’t a genius like me,” she said
matter-of-factly. And if I hadn’t felt so bad, I would have pulled her braids and punched her stomach.
But my mother’s expression was what devastated me: a quiet, blank look that said she had lost
everything. I felt the same way, and everybody seemed now to be coming up, like gawkers at the scene
of an accident to see what parts were actually missing. When we got on the bus to go home, my father
was humming the busy-bee tune and my mother kept silent. I kept thinking she wanted to wait until we
got home before shouting at me. But when my father unlocked the door to our apartment, my mother
walked in and went straight to the back, into the bedroom. No accusations, No blame. And in a way, I felt
disappointed. I had been waiting for her to start shouting, so that I could shout back and cry and blame
her for all my misery.
I had assumed that my talent-show fiasco meant that I would never have to play the piano again. But two
days later, after school, my mother came out of the kitchen and saw me watching TV.
“Four clock,” she reminded me, as if it were any other day. I was stunned, as though she were
asking me to go through the talent-show torture again. I planted myself more squarely in front of the TV.
“Turn off TV,” she called from the kitchen five minutes later. I didn’t budge. And then I decided, I
didn’t have to do what mother said anymore. I wasn’t her slave. This wasn’t China. I had listened to her
before, and look what happened she was the stupid one.
She came out of the kitchen and stood in the arched entryway of the living room. “Four clock,” she
said once again, louder.
“I’m not going to play anymore,” I said nonchalantly23. “Why should I? I’m not a genius.”
She stood in front of the TV. I saw that her chest was heaving up and down in an angry way.
“No!” I said, and I now felt stronger, as if my true self had finally emerged. So this was what had been
inside me all along.

16

“No! I won’t!” I screamed. She snapped off the TV, yanked me by the arm and pulled me off the floor.
She was frighteningly strong, half pulling, half carrying me towards the piano as I kicked the throw rugs
under my feet. She lifted me up onto the hard bench. I was sobbing by now, looking at her bitterly. Her
chest was heaving even more and her mouth was open, smiling crazily as if she were pleased that I was
crying.
“You want me to be something that I’m not!” I sobbed. “I’ll never be the kind of daughter you want me
to be!”
“Only two kinds of daughters,” she shouted in Chinese. “Those who are obedient and those who
follow their own mind! Only one kind of daughter can live in this house. Obedient daughter!”
“Then I wish I weren’t your daughter, I wish you weren’t my mother,” I shouted. As I said these things
I got scared. It felt like worms and toads and slimy things crawling out of my chest, but it also felt good,
that this awful side of me had surfaced, at last.
“Too late to change this,” my mother said shrilly.
And I could sense her anger rising to its breaking point. I wanted see it spill over. And that’s when I
remembered the babies she had lost in China, the ones we never talked about. “Then I wish I’d never
been born!” I shouted. “I wish I were dead! Like them.”
It was as if I had said magic words. Alakazam!-her face went blank, her mouth closed, her arms went
slack, and she backed out of the room, stunned, as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf, thin,
brittle, lifeless.
It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her many
times, each time asserting my will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As24. I didn’t
become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college.
Unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be, I could only be me.
And for all those years we never talked about the disaster at the recital or my terrible delarations
afterward at the piano bench. Neither of us talked about it again, as if it were a betrayal that was now
unspeakable. So I never found a way to ask her why she had hoped for something so large that failure
was inevitable.
And even worse, I never asked her about what frightened me the most: Why had she given up hope?
For after our struggle at the piano, she never mentioned my playing again. The lessons stopped The lid
to the piano was closed shutting out the dust, my misery, and her dreams.
So she surprised me. A few years ago she offered to give me the piano, for my thirtieth birthday. I
had not played in all those years. I saw the offer as a sign of forgiveness, a tremendous burden removed.
“Are you sure?” I asked shyly. “I mean, won’t you and Dad miss it?” “No, this your piano,” she said firmly.
“Always your piano. You only one can play.”
“Well, I probably can’t play anymore,” I said. “It’s been years.” “You pick up fast,” my mother said, as
if she knew this was certain. “You have natural talent. You could be a genius if you want to.”
“No, I couldn’t.”
“You just not trying,” my mother said. And she was neither angry nor sad. She said it as if announcing a
fact that could never be disproved. “Take it,” she said.
But I didn’t at first. It was enough that she had offered it to me. And after that, everytime I saw it in my
parents’living room, standing in front of the bay window, it made me feel proud, as if it were a shiny trophy
that I had won back.
Last week I sent a tuner over to my parent’s apartment and had the piano reconditioned, for purely
sentimental reasons. My mother had died a few months before and I had been bgetting things in order for

17

my father a little bit at a time. I put the jewelry in special silk pouches. The sweaters I put in mothproof
boxes. I found some old chinese silk dresses, the kind with little slits up the sides. I rubbed the old silk
against my skin, and then wrapped them in tissue and decided to take them hoe with me.
After I had the piano tuned, I opened the lid and touched the keys. It sounded even richer that I
remembered. Really, it was a very good piano. Inside the bench were the same exercise notes with
handwritten scales, the same sedcondhand music books with their covers held together with yellow tape.
I opened up the Schumann book to the dark little piecce I had played at the recital. It was on the left-hand
page, “Pleading Child” It looked more difficult than I remembered. I played a few bars, surprised at how
easily the notes came back to me.
And for the first time, or so it seemed, I noticed the piece on the right-hand side, It was called “Perfectly
Contented” I tried to play this one as well. It had a lighter melody but with the same flowing rhythm and
turned out to be quite easy. “Pleading Child” was shorter but slower; “Perfectly Contented” was longer but
faster. And after I had played them both a few times, I realized they were two halves of the same song.
第二课Two Kinds
1.妈相信，在美国，任何梦想都能成为事实。你可以做一切你想做的：开家餐馆， 或者在政府部门工
作，以期得到很高的退休待遇。你可以不用付一个子儿的现金， 就可以买到一幢房子。你有可能发财，也
有可能出人头地，反正，到处是机会。
2.在我九岁时，妈就对我说： “你也能成为天才。你会样样事都应付得很出色的。 琳达姨算什么？
她那女儿，只不过心眼多一点而已。 ”
3.妈将一切未遂的心愿、希望，都寄托在美国这片土地上。她是在 1949 年来到美 国的。在中国，她
丧失了一切：双亲，家园，她的前夫和一对孪生女儿。但她对过 去的一切，从不用悲恸的目光去回顾，眼
前，她有太多的打算，以便将生活安排得 更好。
二 4.至于我将成为哪方面的天才，妈并不急于立时拍板定案。起初，她认为我完全 可以成为个中国
的秀兰?邓波儿。我们不放过电视里的秀兰?邓波儿的旧片子，每 每这时，妈便会抬起我的手臂往屏幕频频
挥动： “你——看， ”这用的是汉语。而 我，也确实看见秀兰摆出轻盈的舞姿，或演唱一支水手歌，有
时，则将嘴唇撅成个 圆圆的“０”字，说一声“哦，我的上帝” 。
5.当屏幕上的秀兰双目满噙着晶莹的泪珠时，妈又说了： “你看，你早就会哭了。 哭不需要什么天
才！ ”
6.立时，妈有了培养目标了。她把我带去我们附近一家美容培训班开办的理发店， 把我交到一个学员
手里。这个学生，甚至连剪刀都拿不像，经她一番折腾，我的头 发，成了一堆稀浓不均的鬈曲的乱草堆。
妈伤心地说： “你看着，像个中国黑人了。 ” 美容培训班的指导老师不得不亲自出马，再操起剪刀来修
理我头上那湿漉漉的 一团。
7.“彼得?潘的式样，近日是非常时行的。 ”那位指导老师向妈吹嘘着。 我的头发，已剪成个男孩子
样，前面留着浓密的、直至眉毛的刘海。我挺喜欢 这次理发，它令我确信，我将前途无量。
8.确实刚开始，我跟妈一样兴奋，或许要更兴奋。我憧憬着自己种种各不相同的 天才形象，犹如一位
已在天幕侧摆好优美姿势的芭蕾舞演员，只等着音乐的腾起， 即踮起足尖翩然起舞。我就像降生在马槽里
的圣婴，是从南瓜马车上下来的灰姑娘……
9.反正我觉得，我立时会变得十分完美：父母会称赞我，我再不会挨骂，我会应 有尽有，不用为着没
有能得到某样心想的东西而赌气不快。
10.然而看来，天才本身对我，颇有点不耐烦了： “你再不成才，我就走了，再也 不来光顾你了， ”
它警告着， “这一来，你就什么也没有了。 ”
11.每天晚饭后，我和妈就坐在厨房桌边，她每天给我作一些智力测试，这些测试 题目，是她从《信
不信由你》《好管家》《读者文摘》等杂志里收罗来的。在 、 、 家里洗澡间里，我们有一大堆这样的旧

18

杂志，那是妈从她做清洁工的那些住户家里 要来的。每周，她为好几户住户做清洁工。因此这里有各式各
样的旧杂志，她从中 搜寻着各种有关天才孩子的智力培养和他们成才的过程。
12.开始这种测试的当晚，她就给我讲了一个三岁神童的故事，他能诸熟地背出各 州的首府，甚至大
部分欧洲国家的名字。另一位教师证明，这小男孩能正确无误地 拼出外国城市的名字。
13.“芬兰的首都是哪？”于是，母亲当场对我开始测试了。
14.天呀，我只知道加州的首府！因为我们在唐人街上住的街名，就叫萨克拉曼多。 “乃洛比！ ”我
冒出一个莫名其妙的，所能想象得出的最奇特的外国字。
15.测试的题目越来越复杂了：心算乘法，在一叠扑克牌里抽出红心皇后，做倒立 动作，预测洛杉矶、
纽约和伦敦的气温。
16.还有一次，妈让我读三分钟《圣经》 ，然后说出我所读过的内容。 “现在，耶 和华非有丰富的
财富和荣誉……妈，我只记得这一句。 ”
17.再次看到妈失望的眼神之后，我内心对成才的激动和向往，也消遁了。我开始 憎恨这样的测试，
每一次都是以满怀希望开始，以失望而告终。那晚上床之前，我 站在浴室的洗脸盆镜子前，看到一张普普
通通，毫无出众之处的哭丧着的脸——我 哭了。我尖叫着，跺脚，就像一只发怒的小兽，拼命去抓镜中那
个丑女孩的脸。
18.随后，忽然我似乎这才发现了真正的天才的自己，镜中的女孩，闪眨着聪明强 硬的目光看着我，
一个新的念头从我心里升起：我就是我，我不愿让她来任意改变 我。我向自己起誓，我要永远保持原来的
我。
19.所以后来，每当妈再要我做什么测试时，我便做出一副无精打采的样子，将手 肘撑在桌上，头懒
懒地倚在上面，装出一副心不在焉的样子。事实上，我也实在无 法专心。当妈又开始她的测试课时，我便
开始专心倾听迷雾茫茫的海湾处的浪涛声， 那沉闷的声响，颇似一条在气喘吁吁奔跑的母牛。几次下来，
妈放弃了对我的测试。
20.两三个月安然无事地过去了，其间，再没提一个有关“天才”的字眼了。一天， 妈在看电视，那
是艾德?索利凡的专题节目，一个小女孩正在表演钢琴独奏。这是 台很旧的电视机，发出的声音时响时轻，
有时甚至还会停顿。每每它哑巴的时候， 妈就要起身去调整它，待她还没走到电视机前，电视机又讲话了，
于是就像故意要 作弄她一番似的，反正她一离沙发，电视就出声了，她一坐下，艾德就变哑巴。最 后，
妈索性守在电视机边，将手按在键盘上。
21.电视里的琴声似令她着迷了，只见演奏者既有力，又柔和地敲着琴键，突地， 一阵密切铿锵的琶
音倾泻而下，犹如决堤的洪水，翻江倒海地奔腾起来，只见她手 腕一抬，那激动急骤的旋律顿时烟消云散
了，那含有诗意、温存的音符，从她手指 尖下飘逸出来。
22.“你——看！ ”我妈说着，急促地把我叫到电视机前。
23.我马上领会了，妈为什么这样深深地被琴声迷住。原来，那个正在向观众行屈 膝礼的演奏者，不
过只八九岁的光景。而且同样是一个留着彼得?潘发式的中国女 孩子。她穿着蓬松的白色短裙，就像一朵
含苞欲放的康乃馨。在她优雅地行礼时， 既有秀兰?邓波儿的活泼，又持典型的中国式的谦和。
24.我们家反正没有钢琴，也没有钱买钢琴，所以，当妈一再将这个小钢琴家作话 题时，我竟失却了
警惕，大咧咧地说起大话了。 “弹倒弹得不错，就是怎么她自己不跟着唱。 ”我妈对我批评着那个女孩
子。
25.“你要求太高了， ”我一不小心说溜了嘴！ “她弹得蛮不错了。虽然说不上最 好，但至少，她
已很下过一番苦功了。 ”话一出口我就后悔了。
26.果然，妈抓住我小辫子了。 “所以呀， ”她说， “可你，连一点苦功都不肯下。 ” 她有点愠
怒地拉长着脸，又回到沙发上去。
27.电视里的那个中国女孩子，也重番坐下再弹了一曲《安尼托拉的舞蹈》 ，是由 格林卡作曲的。我
之所以印象这么深，是因为后来，我花了很大功夫去学习弹奏它。

19

28.三天后，妈给我制定了一张钢琴课和练琴的课程表。原来，她已跟我们公寓里 一楼的一位退休钢
琴教师商量妥，妈免费为他做清洁工，作为互惠，他则免费为我 教授钢琴，而且每天下午的四点到六点，
将他的琴供我练习。
29.当妈把她的计划告诉我时，我即感头皮发麻，有一种被送进炼狱的感觉。
30.“我现在这样不是很好嘛！我本来就不是神童，我永远也成不了天才！我不会 弹钢琴，学也学不
会。哪怕你给我一百万元，我也永远上不了电视！ ”我哭着嚷着， 跺着脚。
31.妈当即给了我一个巴掌。 “谁要你做什么天才， ”她厉声叱责着我， “只要你 尽力就行了。还
不都是为了要你好！难道是我要你做什么天才的？你成了天才，我 有什么好处！哼，我这样操心，到底是
为的什么呀！ ”
32.“没有良心！ ”我听见她用汉语狠狠地嘟哝了一句， “要是她的天分有她脾气 这般大就好了，
她早就可以出人头地了！ ”
33.那个钟先生，我私下称他为老钟，是个很古怪的老头。他似已很老很老了，头 顶秃得光光的，戴
着副啤酒瓶底一样厚的眼镜，在层层叠叠的圈圈里，一双眼睛整 日像昏昏欲睡的样子。他常常会悠然地对
着一支看不见的乐队，指挥着听不见的音 乐。但我想，他一定没我想象的那般老朽，因为他还有个妈妈。
而且，他还没有结 婚吧。 那钟老太，可真让我够受了。她身上带有一股怪味，那种……尿骚味。她的手 指
看着就像是烂桃子的感觉。一次我在冰箱后边摸到过一只这样的烂桃子，当我捡 起它时，那层皮，就滑漉
漉地脱落了下来。
34.我很快就明白了，老钟为什么只好退休。原来他是个聋子。 “像贝多芬一样， ” 他常常喜欢扯
大嗓门说话， “我们俩都是只用心来倾听！ ”他如此自诩着，说毕， 依旧陶醉在对无人无声乐队的指挥
中，如痴如醉地挥动着他的手臂。
35.我们的课程是这样进行的。他先打开琴谱，指着各种不同的标记，向我解释着 它们各自代表的意
义： “这是高音谱号！低音谱号！没有升号和降号的，就是 C 调。 喏，跟着我。 ”
36.随后他弹了几个 C 调音阶，一组简单的和弦，然后似受一种无法抑制的渴望所激 动，他的手指在
琴键上按了更多的和弦，仿佛是感情的迸发和泛滥，他弹出了令人 神魂震荡、形销骨立的颤音，接着又加
进了低音，整个气氛，颇有一种豪迈的，雷 霆万钧的浑厚气概。
37.我就跟着他，先是简单的音阶和和弦，接着，就有点胡闹了，只是些杂乱的噪 声，那声音，活像
一只猫在垃圾洞顶上窜蹦不停。老钟却大声叫好： “好！非常好， 但要学会掌握弹奏的速度。 ”
38.他这一说，倒让我发现了，他的目力也不行了，来不及对照谱子来核准我有无 按出正确的音符。
他的目光要比我弹奏的速度慢半拍。他在教我弹奏琶音时，便在 我手腕处放上几个硬币，以此训练我的手
腕保持平衡。在弹奏和弦时，则要求我的 手握成个空圆弧状，有如手心里握着一只苹果。然后，他又示范
给我看，如何令每 一个手指，都像一个独立的小兵似的，服从大脑的指挥。
39.在他教会我这一整套技巧时，我也学会了如何偷懒，并掩盖自己的失误。如果 我按错了一个琴键，
我从来不去纠正，只是坦然地接着往下弹。而老钟，则自顾往 下指挥着他自己的无声的音乐。
40.或许，我确实没有好好地下过功夫，否则，我想我极有可能在这方面有所作为 的；或许我真的会
成为一个少年钢琴家。就我这样学钢琴，也很快地掌握了基本的 要领和技巧。可我实在太执拗，那么顽固
地拒绝与众不同，所以我只学会弹震耳欲 聋的前奏曲和最最不和谐的赞美诗。
41.我就这样我行我素地学了一年。一天礼拜结束后，听到妈和琳达姨正在互相用 一种炫耀的口气吹
嘘着各自的女儿。 “ 薇弗莱与我同年。我俩从小一起玩耍，就像姐妹一样，我们也吵架，也争夺过 彩色
蜡笔和洋娃娃。换句话说，我们并不太友好。我认为她太傲慢了。薇弗莱的名 气很大，有“唐人街最小的
棋圣”之称。
42.哎，薇弗莱捧回来的奖品实在太多了， ”琳达姨以一种似是抱怨，实在是夸 耀的口吻说， “她
自己整天只顾着下棋，我可忙坏了。每天，就光擦拭她捧回的那 些奖品，就够我忙的了。 ”
43.琳达姨得意地抱怨了一番后，长长地嘘了一口气，对妈说： “你真福气，你可 没这种烦心事。”

20

44.“谁说呀， ”妈妈高高地耸起了双肩，以一种得意的无奈说， “我可比你还要 烦心呢。我们的
精美，满耳只有音乐，叫她洗盆子，你叫哑了嗓子她也听不见。有 啥办法，她天生这样一副对音乐失魂落
魄的模样！ ”
45.就是这时，我萌生出个报复的念头，以制止她这种令人可笑的攀比。
46.几星期后，老钟和我妈试图要我在一次联谊会上登一次台，这次联谊会将在教 堂大厅里举行。那
阵，父母已储足钱为我买了架旧钢琴，那是一架黑色的乌立兹牌， 连带一张有疤痕的琴凳。它也是我们起
居室的摆设。
47.在那次联谊会上，我将演奏舒曼的《请愿的孩童》 。这是一首忧郁的弹奏技巧 简单的曲子，但听
起来还是像很有点难度的。我得把它背出来，然后在重复部分连 弹两次，以令它听起来可以显得长一点。
可我在弹的时候，经常偷工减料，跳过好 几节。我从不仔细听一听自己弹出的那些音符，弹琴时，我总有
点心不在焉。
48.我最愿意练习的，要算那个屈膝礼，我已可以把它行得十分漂亮了。
49.爸妈兴致勃勃地将喜福会的朋友全部请来为我捧场，连薇弗莱和她两个哥哥也 来了。表演者以年
龄为序，由小至大上台表演。有朗诵诗歌的，跳芭蕾舞的，还有， 在儿童小提琴上奏出鸭叫一样的声音。
每一个表演的结束，都得到热烈的掌声。
50.待轮到我上阵时，我很兴奋。那纯粹是一种孩子气的自信，我还不懂得害怕和 紧张。记得当时，
我心里一个劲这样想：就这么回事，就这么回事！我往观众席瞥 了一眼，看到妈那张茫然的脸，爸在打呵
欠，琳达姨的有如刻上去的微笑，薇弗莱 的拉长的脸。我穿着一条缀着层层花边的白短裙，在彼得?潘式
的头发上，扎着一 只粉色的大蝴蝶结。当我在钢琴边坐下时，我想象着，艾德?索利凡正把我介绍给 电视
机屏幕前的每一位观众，而台下的听众，都激动得连连跺脚。
51.我的手触到了琴键。多好呀，我看上去那么可爱！对于我手下按出的音阶将是 怎样，我却毫不担
心。因此，当我按错了第一个音阶时，我自己都有点吃惊，我以 为我会弹得十分出色。不对了，又是一个
错的，怎么搞的？我头顶开始冒凉气了， 然后慢慢弥散开来。但我不能停下不弹呀。我的手指似着了魔，
有点自说自话，尽 管我一心想将它们重新调整一番，好比将火车重新拨回到正确的轨道上，可手指就 是
不听指挥。反正从头到尾，就是这么杂乱刺耳的一堆！
52.待我终于从凳子上站起身时，我发现自己两腿直打哆嗦，大概是太紧张了。四 周一片默然，唯有
老钟笑着大声叫好。在人群中，我看到妈一张铁青的脸。观众们 稀稀拉拉地拍了几下手。回到自己座位上，
我整个脸抽搐了，我尽力克制自己不哭 出声。这时，一个小男孩轻声对他妈说： “她弹得糟透了！ ”他
母亲忙轻声阻止他： “嘘！可她已经尽最大努力了。 ”
53.一下子我觉得，似乎全世界的人都坐在观众席上。我只觉得千万双眼睛在后边 盯着我，热辣辣的。
我甚至感觉到那直挺挺地硬支撑着看节目的父母，他们那份难 堪和丢脸。
54.其实我们可以趁幕间休息时溜走，但出于虚荣和自尊，爸妈硬是坐到节目全部 结束。
55.表演结束后，喜福会的许家、龚家和圣克莱尔家的人都来到父母跟前：
56.“不错呀，多有本事的小朋友！ ”琳达姨只是含糊地敷衍着，显出一抹刻上去 般的微笑。
57.“当然。文章是自己的好，孩子是人家的好。 ”父亲苦笑着说。
58.薇弗莱则看着我，再耸耸肩，干脆地说： “你不行呀，还不及我呢！ ”要不是 我有自知之明，
确实觉得自己表演得实在不怎样，我准会上去扯她辫子的。
59.但最令我惊然的，是妈。她满脸的冷漠和晦败，那就是说，她已灰心丧气了。 我也觉得灰心丧气
了。现在大家都这么团团地围着我们，似车祸中看热闹的人一样， 一心要看看那倒霉的压在车轮底下的家
伙，到底压成个什么样子！直到我们乘上公 共汽车回家时，妈一路上还是一言不发。我心想妈只须一踏进
家门，就会冲着我大 大发作一场。然而当爸打开家门时，妈便径自走进卧室，还是没有一声叱责，一声 埋
怨。我很失望。否则，我正好可以借机大哭一场，以宣泄郁积的那份窝囊气。
60.我原以为，这次的惨败，从此可以让我从钢琴边解脱出来，我不用再练琴了。 岂料两天后，当妈
从厨房里出来，见我已在笃悠悠地看电视时，便又催我去练琴：

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61.“四点啦。 ”她如往常一样提醒我。我一震，好像她这是在叫我再去经历一番 那场联谊会上的出
丑似的。我牢牢地把住椅子背。
62.“关掉电视！ ”五分钟后，她从厨房里伸出头警告我。
63.我不吭声。但我打定主意，我再也不听她摆布了。我不是她的奴隶，这里不是 中国。我以前一味
由她摆布着，结果呢？她这样做太笨了！
64.她噎噎地从厨房走出来，站在起居室门口的过道上。 “四点啦！ ”她再一次重 复了一遍，音量
提高了几度。
65.“我再也不弹琴了， ”我平静地说， “为什么我非要弹琴呢？我又没这天分。 ”
66.她移步到电视机前站住，气得胸部一起一伏，像台抽水机似的。
67.“不。 ”我觉得更坚决了，觉得终于敢表示自己真正的意愿。
68.“不！ ”我尖声叫着。
69.妈拎着我双臂，啪一声关了电视，把我悬空拎到钢琴前，她的力气大得吓人， 我拼命踢着脚下的
地毯，挣扎着、呜咽着、痛苦地望着她。她的胸部起伏得更剧烈 了，咧着嘴，失却理智般地痴笑着，仿佛
我的嚎哭令她很高兴。
70.“我成不了你希望的那样， ”我呜咽着说， “我成不了你希望的那样的女儿。 ”
71.“世上从来只有两种女儿， ”她用中国话高声说， “听话的和不听话的。在我 家里，只允许听
话的女儿住进来！ ”
72.“那末，我希望不做你的女儿，你也不是我的母亲！ ”我哭着，当这些话从我 嘴里吐出来时，我
只觉得，癞蛤蟆、蜥蜴和蝎子这种令人作恶的东西，也从我胸里 吐了出来。这样也好，令我看到了自己那
可怕的一面。
73.“可是，要改变既成的事实，你来不及了！ ”妈激怒地喊着。
74.我感觉到，她的怒火已升至极限了，我要看着它爆炸。我一下子想到了她的失 散在中国的那对双
胞胎。关于她们，我们谈话中，从来不提及的。这次，我却大声 地对着她嚷嚷着： “那么，我希望我没
有出世，希望我已经死了，就跟桂林的那对 双胞胎一样！ ”
75.好像我念了什么咒似的，顿时，她呆住了，她放开了手，一言不发地，蹒跚着 回到自己房里，就
像秋天一片落叶，又薄又脆弱，没有一点生命的活力。
三76.这并不是唯一的一次使母亲对我失望。多年来，我让她失望了好多次。为着我 的执拗，我对自
己权利的维护，我的分数达不到 A 级，我当不上班长，我进不了斯坦 福大学，我后来的辍学……
77.跟妈相反，我从不相信，我能成为任何我想成为的人。我只可能是我自己。
78.以后的那么些年，我们再也不谈及那场倒霉的联谊会上的灾难，及后来在钢琴 前我那番可怕的抗
争。所有这一切，我们都再也不提及，就像对一件已作了结论的 谋反案一样。因此，我也老找不到话题问
她，为什么，她会对我怀这么大的希望。
80.还有，我也从未问过她，那令我最最百思不得其解的，为什么，她终于又放弃 了那份希望？
81.自那次为了练琴争执后，她就此再也不叫我练琴了。再也没有钢琴课。琴盖上 了锁，紧紧地合闭
着，唉，我的灾难，她的梦想！
82.几年前，她又做了一件让我吃惊的事。在我三十岁生日时，她将这架钢琴送给 了我。多年来，我
碰都没碰过那架钢琴。现在，她却把它作为我的生日礼物。我想， 这是一种原谅的表示，那长年压着我的
负疚感，终于释然。
83.“噢，你真把它送给我了？”我讪讪地说， “你和爸舍得吗？”
84.“不，这本来就是你的钢琴，”她毫不含糊地说， “从来就是你的。只有你会 弹琴。 ”
85.“哦，我怕我大概已不会弹了， ”我说， “那么多年了！ ”
86.“你会很快又记起来的， ”妈说，非常肯定地， “你在这方面很有天分，其实 如果你肯下点功
夫，本来你真可以在这方面有所作为的。 ”
87.“不，不可能。 ”

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88.“你就是不肯试一下。 ”妈继续说着，既不生气，也不懊丧，那口气，似只是 在讲述一件永远无
法得到核准的事实。 “拿去吧！ ”她说。
89.但是，起先我并没马上把琴拉走。它依旧静静地置在妈妈家起居室里，那个回 窗框前。打这以后
每次看到它，总使我有一种自豪感，好像它是我曾经赢得的一个 荣誉的奖品。
90.上星期，我请了个调音师到我父母公寓去，那纯粹是出于一种感情寄托。数月 前，妈去世了。爸
交给我一些她的遗物，我每去一次，便带回去一点。我把首饰放 在一只缎锦荷包里，还有，她自己编织的
毛衣：有黄的、粉红的、橘黄的——恰恰 都是我最不喜欢的颜色。我一一把它们置放在防蛀的箱子里。我
还发现几件旧的绸 旗袍，那种边上镶滚条两边开高叉的。我把它们挨到脸颊上轻轻摩挲着，心中有一 阵
温暖的触动，然后用软纸把它们小心包起来带回家去。
91.钢琴调校好，那音色比我记忆中的，还要圆润清丽，这实在是一架上乘的钢琴。 琴凳里，我的练
习记录本和手写的音阶还在。一本封皮已脱落的旧琴谱，被小心地 用黄缎带扎捆着。
92.我将琴谱翻到舒曼的那曲《请愿的孩童》，就是那次联谊会上让我丢丑的。它 似比我记忆中更有
难度。我摸索着琴键弹了几小节，很惊讶自己竟这么快就记起了乐谱，应付自如。
93.似是第一次，我刚刚发现这首曲子的右边，是一曲《臻美》 ，它的旋律更活泼 轻快，但风格和《请
愿的孩童》很相近，这首曲子里，美好的意境得到更广阔无垠 的展现，充满慰藉与信心，流畅谐美，很容
易弹上手。 《请愿的孩童》比它要短一 点，但节奏要缓慢一点。 《臻美》要长一点，节奏轻快一点。在
我分别将这两首曲 子弹了多次后，忽然悟出，这两首曲子，其实是出于同一主题的两个变奏。

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 drea
ms called, in the curious argot of social scientists,
nt of changes in politics, business, health, entertainment.
arket. All old-established national industries are dislodged by new industries whose products are consu
med, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe. In place of the old wants we find new wants, re
quiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes.
ote this 150 years ago in The Communist Manifesto. Their statement now describes an ordinary fact of li
fe.
How people feel about this depends a great deal on where they live and how much money they hav
e. Yet globalization, as one report stated,
ercial and cultural connections since before the first camel caravan ventured afield. In the 19th century t
he postal service, newspapers, transcontinental railroads, and great steam- powered ships wrought fund
amental changes. Telegraph, telephone, radio, and television tied tighter and more intricate knots betwe
en 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 c
hange. The difference now is the speed and scope of these changes. It took television 13 years to acqui
re 50 million users; the Internet took only five.
Not everyone is happy about this. Some Western social scientists and anthropologists, and not a fe
w foreign politicians, believe that a sort of cultural cloning will result from what they regard as the
al assault—more than a
fifth of all the people in the world now speak English to some degree. Whatever their backgrounds or ag
endas, these critics are convinced that Western—often equated with American—influences will flatten e
very cultural crease, producing, as one observer terms it, one big

23

Popular factions sprout to exploit nationalist anxieties. In China, where xenophobia and economic a
mbition have often struggled for the upper hand, a recent book called China can say no became the bes
t-seller by attacking what it considers the Chinese willingness to believe blindly in foreign things, advisin
g Chinese travelers to not fly on a Boeing 777 and suggesting that Hollywood be burned.
There are many Westerners among the denouncers of Western cultural influences, but James Wats
on, a Harvard anthropologist, isn't one of them.
now than they were 30 years ago,
nds of ordinary people. They want to become part of the world—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 wor
k.'
Westernization, I discovered over months of study and travel, is a phenomenon shot through with in
consistencies and populated by very strange bedfellows. Critics of Western culture blast Coke and Holly
wood but not organ transplants and computers. Boosters of Western culture can point to increased effort
s to preserve and protect the environment. Yet they make no mention of some less salubrious aspects o
f Western culture, such as cigarettes and automobiles, which, even as they are being eagerly adopted in
the developing world, are having disastrous effects. Apparently westernization is not a straight road to h
ell, or to paradise either.
But I also discovered that cultures are as resourceful, resilient, and unpredictable as the people wh
o 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 di
fferent languages. In Shanghai I found that the television show Sesame Street has been redesigned by
Chinese educators to teach Chinese values and traditions.
e,
strict religions, McDonald's serves mutton instead of beef and offers a vegetarian menu acceptable to e
ven 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 ou
t, and above all they buy stuff. I'm sorry to say I failed to discover who was the first teenager to put his b
aseball cap on backward. Or the first one to copy him. But I do know that rap music, which sprang from t
he inner-city ghettos, began making big money only when rebellious white teenagers started buying it. B
ut how can anyone predict what kids are going to want? Companies urgently need to know, so consulta
nts have sprung up to forecast trends. They're called
and one morning to explain how it works.
Amanda, who is 22, works for a New York-based company called Youth Intelligence and has come
to Los Angeles to conduct one of three annual surveys, whose results go to such clients as Sprint and M
TV. She has shoulder- length brown hair and is wearing a knee-length brocade skirt and simple black wr
ap top. Amanda looks very cool to me, but she says no.
have to be cool to do it,
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.
Amanda remarks,
What trends does she see forming now?
travel's huge right now—you go to a place and bring stuff back.

24

Amanda, who is 22, works for a New York-based company called Youth Intelligence and has come
to Los Angeles to conduct one of three annual surveys, whose results go to such clients as Sprint and M
TV. She has shoulder-length brown hair and is wearing a knee- length brocade skirt and simple black wr
ap top. Amanda looks very cool to me, but she says no.
have to be cool to do it,
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.
Amanda remarks,
What trends does she see forming now?
travel's huge right now—you go to a place and bring stuff back.

gs that already exist. Fusion is going to be the huge term that everybody's going to use,
—things that are so unrelated.
Los Angeles is fusion central, where cultures mix and morph. Take Tom Sloper and mah-jongg. To
m is a computer geek who is also a mah-jongg fanatic. This being America, he has found a way to marry
these two passions and sell the result. He has designed a software program, Shanghai: Dynasty, that e
nables you to play mah-jongg on the Internet. This ancient Chinese game involves both strategy and luc
k, and it is still played all over Asia in small rooms that are full of smoke and the ceaseless click of the ch
unky plastic tiles and the fierce concentration of the players. It is also played by rich society women at c
ountry clubs in Beverly Hills and in apartments on Manhattan's Upper West Side. But Tom, 50, was playi
ng it at his desk in Los 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 pro
gress with several habitual partners:
a Chinese-American who lives in Edina, Minnesota. Tom played effortlessly as we talked.

ose whose true connection is with machines.
ca. We usually play Chinese mah-jongg.
I watched the little tiles, like cards, bounce around the screen. As Tom played, he and his partners c
onversed 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 even
ing, and Thursday at lunch.” A new name appeared on the screen. “There‟s Fred‟s mother. Can‟t be, th
ey‟ re in Vegas. Oh, it must be his sister. TJ‟s online too, she‟s the one from Wales-a real night owl. Sh
e‟s getting married soon, and she lived with her fiance, and sometimes he gets up and says „ Get off tha
t 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 in Germany, Wales, Ohio, and Minnesota, was up in the cybersphere far above the le
vel of time zones. It is a realm populated by individuals he‟s never met who may be more real to him tha
n 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, sin
ce market forces were unleashed by economic reforms begun in 1978, life for many urban Chinese has
changed drastically. A recent survey of 12 major cities showed that 97 percent of the respondents had t
elevisions, and 88 percent had refrigerators and washing machines. Another study revealed that farmers

are eating 48 percent more meat each year and 400 percent more fruit. Cosmopolitan magazine, plungi
ng necklines and all, is read by 260,000 Chinese women every month.

25

I went to Shanghai to see how the cultural trends show up in the largest city in the world's most pop
ulous nation. It is also a city that has long been open to the West. General Motors, for example, set up it
s first Buick sales outlet in Shanghai in 1929; today GM has invested 1.5 billion dollars in a new plant th
ere, 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 is currently ripping itself to ribbons. In a decade scores of gleaming new skyscrapers
have shot up to crowd and jostle the skyline, cramp the narrow winding streets, and choke the parks an
d open spaces with their sheer soaring presence (most are 80 percent vacant). Traffic crawls, even on t
he new multilane overpasses. But on the streets the women are dressed in bright colors, and many carr
y several shopping bags, especially on the Nanjing Road, which is lined with boutiques and malls. In its f
irst two weeks of business the Gucci store took in a surprising $$100,000.

se edition of the French fashion magazine Elle.
wearing this blouse.„
How long will it last?' A housewife knew that most of the monthly salary would be spent on food, and no
w it's just a small part, so she can think about what to wear or where to travel. And now with refrigerator
s, we don't have to buy food every day.
As for the cultural dislocation this might bring:
a young German businessman. —„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 t
hat the truly great leap forward [in Shanghai] is at the level of ideas. To really grasp this, I had only to wit
ness the local performance of Shakespeare'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 an
d drama from all over china and I, on folding chairs around a space ont alike half of a basketball court. “
I‟m not going to be much help,” murmured Zhang Fang, my interpreter. “I don‟t understand the Cantone
se 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. Oth
erwise the small group spent most of an hour running in circles, leaping, and threatening to beat each ot
her with long sticks. The lighting was heavy on shadows, with frequent strobelike flashes. Language was
n't a problem, as the actors mainly snarled and shrieked. Then they turned their backs to the audience a
nd a few shouted something in Cantonese. The lights went out, and for a moment the 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 that 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 when I was in Los Angeles, I sought out Alvin Toffler, whose book Future Shock was
published in 1970. In the nearly three decades since, he has developed and refined a number of interest
ing 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?
der grows out of chaos,
he scale of Russia or China, without conflict. Not conflicts between East and West, or North and South,

26

but „wave' conflicts between industrially dominant countries and predominantly agrarian countries, or co
nflicts 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 o
f agriculture, the second with industry. Today we are in the midst of the third, which is based on informati
on. In 1956 something new began to happen, which amounts to the emergence of a new civilization. Tof
fler said.
orkers. In 1957 Sputnik went up. Then jet aviation became commercial, television became universal, an
d computers began to be widely used. And with all these changes came changes in culture.

om, smokestack countries in between, and knowledge-based economies on top.
countries—Brazil, for example—where all three civilizations coexist and collide.

and Fijian TV in your own language.
e channels, may be used by smaller groups to foster their separate, distinctive cultures and languages.
„Can we become third wave and still remain Chinese?' Yes,
ve 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—fr
om 1987 to 1995 local economies in California exported 200 percent more products, businesses in Idah
o 375 percent more. People move: It is cheaper for businesses to import talented employees than to trai
n people at home. Ideas move: In Japan a generation of children raised with interactive computer game
s has sensed, at least at the cyber level, new possibilities. this,” wrote in Ke
nichi Ohmac, “is that it is possible to actively take control of one's situation or circumstances and, thereb
y, 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 mo
re uniform; instead, both old and new tend to transform each other. The late philosopher Isaiah Berlin be
lieved that, rather than aspire to some utopian ideal, a society should strive for something else:
we agree with each other,
In Shanghai one October evening I joined a group gathered in a small, sterile hotel meeting room. It
was the eve of Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement, and there were diplomats, teachers, and bus
inessmen from many Western countries. 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 H
oly Days as rabbi of the infant congregation.

eceived a lot from local cultures, but they also kept their own identity.
The solemn liturgy proceeded, unchanged over thousands of years and hundreds of alien cultures:

or Chinese, but sitting there I didn't feel foreign—I felt at home. The penitence may have been Jewish, b
ut the aspiration was universal.
Global culture doesn't mean just more TV sets and Nike shoes. Linking is humanity's natural impuls
e, its common destiny. But the ties that bind people around the world are not merely technological or co
mmercial. 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

27

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< br>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< br>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< br>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，

28

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< br>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

29

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。”
3 2．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19 95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。

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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 rightful 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 Aphra Behn, 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

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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 are 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.


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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,

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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?

Virginia Woolf

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1 6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

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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、< br>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< br>
35

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)

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,
word to describe this essay;
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.
7
8
9
10 I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental.
11
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
13
14
15 He leaped from the bed and paced the room,
passionately.

36

16
They weight too much. They're unsightly. They--
17
the swim?
18
19
20 My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear.
narrowly.
21
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 Kozy Kampus Korner 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
29
30
anything like that?
31
32
33
34 I nodded with satisfaction.
Is that right?
35
36
37
38
39
from your old man, could you, and lend it to me so I can buy a raccoon coat?

37

40
41
the huge, hairy, gamy object that my father had worn in his Stutz Bearcat in 1925.
42
face.
43
44
do you want for it?
45
46
47
48 He flung the coat from him.
49 I shrugged.
50 I sat down in a chair and pretended to read a book, but out of the corner of my eye I kept watching
Petey. He was a torn man. First he looked at the coat with the expression of a waif at a bakery window.
Then he turned away and set his jaw resolutely. Then he looked back at the coat, with even more longing
in his face. Then he turned away, but with not so much resolution this time. Back and forth his head
swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning . Finally he didn't turn away at all; he just stood and stared
with mad lust at the coat.
51
52
53
54
55
56
57 He complied. The coat bunched high over his ears and dropped all the way down to his shoe tops.
He looked like a mound of dead raccoons.
58 I rose from my chair.
59 He swallowed.
60 I had my first date with Polly the following evening. This was in the nature of a survey; I wanted to
find out just how much work I had to do to get her mind up to the standard I required. I took her first to
dinner. （=delicious） dinner,
to a movie.
her home.
61 I went back to my room with a heavy heart. I had gravely underestimated the size of my task. This
girl's lack of information was terrifying. Nor would it be enough merely to supply her with information First
she had to be taught to think. This loomed as a project of no small dimensions, and at first I was tempted
to give her back to Petey. But then I got to thinking about her abundant physical charms and about the
way she entered a room and the way she handled a knife and fork, and I decided to make an effort.
62 I went about it, as in all things, systematically. I gave her a course in logic. It happened that I, as a
law student, was taking a course in logic myself, so I had all the facts at my finger tips.
her when I picked her up on our next date,
63
so agreeable

38

“s
64 We went to the Knoll, the campus trysting place, and we sat down under an old oak, and she
looked at me expectantly.
65
66 She thought this over for a minute and decided she liked it.
67
must first learn to recognize the common fallacies of logic. These we will take up tonight.
68
69 I winced, but went bravely on.
70
71,
Exercise is good. Therefore everybody should exercise.
72
everything.
73
For instance, if you have heart disease, exercise is bad, not good. Many people are ordered by their
doctors not to exercise. You must qualify the generalization. You must say exercise is usually good, or
exercise is good for most people. Otherwise you have committed a Dicto Simplioiter. Do you see?
74
75

speak French. Petey Burch can't speak French. I must therefore conclude that nobody at the University
of Minnesota can speak French.
76
77 I hid my exasperation.
too few instances to support such a conclusion.
78
79 I fought off a wave of despair. I was getting nowhere with this girl absolutely nowhere. Still, I am
nothing if not persistent. I continued.
80
with us, it rains.
81
never falls. Every single time we take her on a picnic--
82
with the rain. You are guilty of Post Hoc if you blame Eula Becker.
83
84 I sighed deeply.
85
86
87
88 I frowned, but plunged ahead.
anything, can He make a stone so heavy that He won't be able to lift it?
89
90

39

91
92
93 She scratched her pretty, empty head.
94
be no argument. If there is an irresistible force, there can be no immovable object. If there is an
immovable object, there can be no irresistible force. Get it?
95
96 I cousulted my watch.
all the things you've learned. We'll have another session tomorrow night.
97 I deposited her at the girls' dormitory, where she assured me that she had had a perfectly terrif
evening, and I went glumly to my room. Petey lay snoring in his bed, the raccoon coat huddled like a
great hairy beast at his feet. For a moment I considered waking him and telling him that he could have his
girl back. It seemed clear that my project was doomed to failure. The girl simply had a logic-proof head.
98 But then I reconsidered. I had wasted one evening: I might as well waste another. Who knew?
Maybe somewhere in the extinct crater of her mind, a few embers still smoldered. Maybe somehow I
could fan them into flame. Admittedly it was not a prospect fraught with hope, but I decided to give it one
more try.
99 Seated under the oak the next evening I said,
Misericordiam.
100 She quivered with delight.
101
are, he replies that he has a wife and six children at home, the wife is a helpless cripple, the children
have nothing to eat, no clothes to wear, no shoes on their feet, there are no beds in the house, no coal in
the cellar, and winter is coming.
102 A tear rolled down each of Polly's pink cheeks.
103
about his qualifications. Instead he appealed to the boss's sympathy. He committed the fallacy of Ad
Misericordiam. Do you understand?
104
105 I handed her a handkerchief and tried to keep from screaming while she wiped her eyes.
I said in a carefully controlled tone,
be allowed to look at their textbooks during examinations. After all, surgeons have X-rays to guide them
during an operation, lawyers have briefs to guide them during a trial, carpenters have blueprints to guide
them when they are building a house. Why, then, shouldn't students be allowed to look at their textbooks
during an examination?
106
107
test to see how much they have learned, but students are. The situations are altogether different, and
you can't make an analogy between them.
108
109
110
111
chunk of pitchblende (n.沥青油矿), the world today would not know about radium .

40

112
That Walter Pidgeon is so dreamy. I mean he fractures me.
113
statement is a fallacy. Maybe Madame Curie would have discovered radium at some later date. Maybe
somebody else would have discovered it. Maybe any number of things would have happened. You can't
start with a hypothesis that is not true and then draw any supportable conclusions from it.
114
more.
115 One more chance, I decided. But just one more. There is a limit to what flesh and blood can bear.

116
117 ‘My opponent is a notorious liar.
You can't believe a word that he is going to say. '... Now, Polly, think. Think hard. What's wrong?
118 I watched her closely as she knit her creamy brow in concentration. Suddenly, a g1immer of
intelligence—the first I had seen-- came into her eyes.
fair. What chance has the second man got if the first man calls him a liar before he even begins talking?
119
the well before anybody could drink from it. He has hamstrung his opponent before he could even
start. … Polly, I’m proud of you.
120
121
Think--examine—evaluate. Come now, let's review everything we have learned.”
122
123 Heartened by the knowledge that Polly was not altogether a cretin , I began a long, patient
review of all I had told her. Over and over and over again I cited instances pointed out flaws, kept
hammering away without let-up. It was like digging a tunnel. At first everything was work, sweat, and
darkness. I had no idea when I would reach the light, or even if I would. But I persisted. I pounded and
clawed and scraped, and finally I was rewarded. I saw a chink of light. And then the chink got bigger and
the sun came pouring in and all was bright.
124 Five grueling nights this took, but it was worth it. I had made a logician out of Polly; I had taught
her to think. My job was done. She was worthy of me at last. She was a fit wife for me, a proper hostess
for my many mansions, a suitable mother for my well-heeled children.
125 It must not be thought that I was without love for this girl. Quite the contrary, Just as Pygmalion
loved the perfect woman he had fashioned, so I loved mine. I determined to acquaint her with my feeling
at our very next meeting. The time had come to change our relationship from academic to romantic.
126
127
128 “we have now spent five evenings together. We
have gotten along splendidly. It is clear that we are well matched.”
129 “Hasty Generalization,” said Polly brightly.
130 “I beg your pardon,” said I.
131 “Hasty Generalization,” she repeated. “How can you say that we are well matched on the
basis of only five dates?”

41

132 I chuckled with amusement. The dear child had learned her lessons well.
Patting her hand in a tolerant manner,
know it's good.
133 ”, said Polly promptly. ”
134 I chuckled with somewhat less amusement. The dear child had learned her lessons perhaps too
well. I decided to change tactics. Obviously the best approach was a simple, strong, direct declaration of
love. I paused for a moment while my massive brain chose the proper words. Then I began:
135
constellations of outer space. Please, my darling, say that you will go steady with me, for if you will not,
life will be meaningless. I will languish (vi.憔悴). I will refuse my meals. I will wander the face of the earth,
a shambling (摇摇晃晃地走), hollow-eyed hulk.
136 There, I thought, folding my arms, that ought to do it.
137 ” Said Polly.
138 I ground my teeth. I was not Pygmalion; I was Frankenstein, and my monster had me by the
throat. Frantically I fought back the tide of panic surging through me. At all costs I had to keep cool.
139
140 ’re darn right,
141
142
143
never would have learned about fallacies.
144
145 I dashed perspiration from my brow.
literally. I mean this is just classroom stuff. You know that the things you learn in school don't have
anything to do with life.
146
147 That did it. I leaped to my feet, bellowing like a bull.
148
149
150
151 I reeled back, overcome with the infamy of it. After he promised, after he made a deal, after he
shook my hand!
liar. He's a cheat. He's a rat.
152
153 With an immense effort of will, I modulated my voice.
look at this thing logically. How could you choose Petey Burch over me? Look at me--a brilliant student, a
tremendous intellectual, a man with an assured future. Look at Petey--a knothead, a jitterbug, a guy
who'll never know where his next meal is coming from. Can you give me one logical reason why you
should go stead with Petey Burch?
154 ”
(from Rhetoric in a Modern Modeby James K. Bell and Adrian A. Cohn)

课文5译文 爱情就是谬误 马克斯•舒尔曼

42

1．查尔斯.兰姆是个世所罕见的性情欢快、富有 进取心的人，他笔下的散文《古瓷器》和《梦中的孩
子》无拘无束、自由奔放，实在令人难忘。下面这篇 文章比兰姆的作品更加自由奔放。事实上，用“自由
奔放”的字眼来形容这篇文章并不十分贴切，或许用 “柔软”、“轻松”或“轻软而富有弹性”更为恰当。
2．尽管很难说清这篇文章属于哪一类 ，但可以肯定它是一篇散文小品文。它提出了论点，引用了许多
例证，并得出了结论。卡里尔能写得更好 吗?拉斯金呢?
3．这篇文章意在论证逻辑学非但不枯燥乏味，而且活泼、清新，富于美感和 激情，并给人以启迪。诸
位不妨一读。 ---作者注
4．我这个人头脑冷静，逻辑思维能力强。敏锐、慎重、深刻、机智----这 些就是我的特点。我的大脑
像发电机一样发达，像化学家的天平一样精确，像手术刀一样锋利。---你 知道吗?我才18岁。
5．年纪这么轻而智力又如此非凡的人并不常有。就拿在明尼苏达大学 和我同住一个房间的皮蒂.伯奇
来说吧，他和我年龄相仿，经历一样，可他笨得像头驴。小伙子长得年轻 漂亮，可惜脑子里却空空如也。
他易于激动，情绪反复无常，容易受别人的影响。最糟糕的是他爱赶时髦 。在我看来，赶时髦就是最缺乏
理智的表现。见到一种新鲜的东西就跟着学，以为别人都在这么干，自己 也就卷进去傻干---我认为这简直
是愚蠢至极，但皮蒂却不以为然。
6．一天下午 ，我看见皮蒂躺在床上，脸上露出一副痛苦不堪的表情，我立刻断定他是得了阑尾炎。“别
动，”我说， “别吃泻药，我就请医生来。”
7．“浣熊．”他咕哝着。
8．“浣熊?”我停下来问道。
9．“我要一件浣熊皮大衣，”他痛苦地哭叫着。
10．我明白了，他不是身体不舒服，而是精神上的问题。“你为什么要浣熊皮大衣?”
11 ．“我早该知道，”他哭叫着，用拳头捶打着太阳穴，“我早该知道查尔斯登舞再度流行时．浣熊
皮大衣 也会时兴起来的。我真傻，钱都买了课本，弄得现在不能买浣熊皮大衣了。”
12．我带着怀疑的眼神问道：“你是说人们真的又要穿浣熊皮大衣了吗?”
13．“校园里有身份的人哪个不穿?你刚从哪儿来?”
14．“图书馆，”我说了一个有身份的人不常去的地方。
15．他从床上一跃而起，在房间 里踱来踱去。“我一定要弄到一件浣熊皮大衣，”他激动地说，“非
弄到不可!”
1 6．“皮蒂，你怎么啦?冷静地想一想吧。浣熊皮大衣不卫生、掉毛、味道难闻、既笨重又不好看，
而且 ……”
17．“你不懂，”他不耐烦地打断我的话，“这就叫时髦。难道你不想赶时髦吗?”
18．“不想，”我坦率地回答。
19．“好啦，我可想着呢!”他肯定地说，“弄到浣熊皮大衣让我干什么都行。”
20．我的大脑---这件精密的仪器 ---立刻运转起来。我紧盯着他，问道：“什么都行?”
21．“什么都行!”他斩钉截铁地说。
22．我若有所思地抚着下巴。好极了，我知道哪儿 能弄到浣熊皮大衣。我父亲在大学读书期间就穿过
一件，现在还放在家里顶楼的箱子里。恰好皮蒂也有我 需要的东两。尽管他还没有弄到手，但至少他有优
先权。我说的是他的女朋友波莉.埃斯皮。
23．我早已钟情于波莉•埃斯皮了。我要特别说明的是我想得到这妙龄少女并不是由于感情的驱使。她
的确是个易于使人动情的姑娘。可我不是那种让感情统治理智的人，我想得到波莉是经过慎重考虑的，完
全是出于理智上的原因。
24．我是法学院一年级的学生，过不了几年就要挂牌当律师了。我 很清楚，一个合适的妻子对于一个
律师来说是非常重要的。我发现大凡有成就的律师几乎都是和美丽、文 雅、聪明的女子结婚的。波莉只差
一条就完全符合这些条件了。

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25．她漂亮。尽管她的身材还没有挂在墙上的照片 上的美女那么苗条，但我相信时间会弥补这个不足。
她已经大致不差了。
26．她温文尔稚 ---我这里是指她很有风度。她亭亭玉立、落落大方、举手投足都尽显她出身高贵。她进餐时，动作是那样的优美。我曾看见过她在“舒适的校园一角”吃名点--- 一块夹有几片带汁的炖肉和碎
核桃仁的三明治，还有一小杯泡菜 ---手指居然一点儿也没有沾湿。
27．她不聪明，实际上恰恰相反。但我相信在我的指导下，她会变聪明的。无论如何可以试一试，使一 个
漂亮的笨姑娘变得聪明比使一个聪明的丑姑娘变得漂亮毕竟要容易些。
28．“波莉,”我说．“你在跟波莉•埃斯皮谈恋爱吧?”
29．“我觉得她是一个讨人喜 欢的姑娘，”他回答说，“但我不知道这是不是就叫做爱情。你问这个干什
么?”
30．“你和她有什么正式的安排吗?我是说你们是不是经常约会，或者有诸如此类的事情?，我问。
31．“没有，我们常常见面。但我们俩各自有别的约会。你问这个干什么?”
32．“还有没有别人令她特别喜欢呢?”我问道。
33．“那我可不知道。怎么了?”
34．我满意地点点头说：“这就是说，如果你不在，场地就是空着的。你说是吧?”
35．“我想是这样的。你这话是什么意思?”
36．“没什么，没什么，”我若无其事地说，接着把手提皮箱从壁橱里拿了出来。
37．“你去哪儿?”皮蒂问。
38．“回家过周末。”我把几件衣服扔进了皮箱。
39．“听着，”他焦急地抓住我的胳膊说，“你回家后，从你父亲那儿弄点钱来借给我买一件浣熊皮大衣，< br>好吗?”
40．“也许还不只是这样呢，”我神秘地眨着眼睛说，随后关上皮箱就走了。 41．星期一上午我回到学校时对皮蒂说：“你瞧!”我猛地打开皮箱，那件肥大、毛茸茸、散发着怪味的东
西露了出来，这就是我父亲1925年在施图茨比尔凯特汽车里穿过的那一件浣熊皮大衣。
4 2．“太好了!”皮蒂恭敬地说。他把两只手插进那件皮大衣，然后把头也埋了进去。“太好了!”他不断
地重复了一二十遍。
43．“你喜欢吗?”我问道。
44.“哦，喜欢!”他高声叫着， 把那满是油腻的毛皮紧紧地搂在怀里。接着他眼里露出机警的神色，说，
“你要换什么?”
45．“你的女朋友，”我毫不讳言地说。
46．“波莉?”他吃惊了，结结巴巴地说，“你要波莉?”
47．“是的。”
48．他把皮大衣往旁边一扔，毫不妥协地说：“那可不行。”
49．我耸了耸肩膀说：“那好吧，如果你不想赶时髦，那就随你的便吧。，，
50.我在一 把椅子上坐了下来，假装看书，暗暗地瞟着皮蒂。他神情不安，用面包店窗前的流浪儿那种馋涎
欲滴的神 情望着那件皮大衣，接着扭过头去，坚定地咬紧牙关。过了一会儿，他又回过头来把目光投向那
件皮大衣 ，脸上露出更加渴望的神情。等他再扭过头去，已经不那么坚决了。他看了又看，越看越喜欢，
慢慢决心 也就减弱了。最后他再也不扭过头去，只是站在那里，贪婪地盯着那件皮大衣。
51．“我和波莉好像 不是在谈恋爱，”他含含糊糊地说，“也说不上经常约会或有诸如此类的事情。
52．“好的，”我低声 说。
53．“波莉对我算得了什么?我对波莉又算得了什么?”
54．“根本算不了什么，”我说。
55．“只不过是一时高兴 ---不过是说说笑笑罢了，仅此而已。”
56．“试试大衣吧。”我说。

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57．他照办了。衣领蒙住了他的耳朵，下摆一直拖到脚跟。 他看起来活像一具浣熊尸体。他高兴地说：“挺
合身的。”
58．我从椅子上站了起来。“成交了吗?”我说着，把手伸向他。
59.他轻易地接受了。“算数，”他说，并跟我握了握手。
60．第二天晚上，我 与波莉第一次约会了。这一次实际上是我对她的考查。我想弄清要做多大的努力
才能使她的头脑达到我的 要求。我首先请她去吃饭。“哈，这顿饭真够意思，”离开餐馆时她说。然后我
请她去看电影。“嘿，这 片子真好看。”走出电影院时她说。最后我送她回家。和我告别时她说：“嘿，
今晚玩得真痛快。”
61．我怀着不大痛快的心情回到了房间。我对这任务的艰巨性估计得太低了。这姑娘的知识少 得令人
吃惊。光教给她知识还不够。首先得教她学会思考。这可不是一件容易的事，当时我真想把她还给 皮蒂算
了。但我一想到她那充满魅力的身材、她进屋时的模样、她那拿刀叉的姿势，我还是决定再做一番 努力。
62．就像做其他事情一样，我开始有计划地干了起来。我开始给她上逻辑课。幸好我 是一个学法律的
学生，我自己也在学逻辑学，所以对要教的内容我都很熟悉。当我接她赴第二次约会的时 候，我对她说：
“今晚咱们去‘小山’谈谈吧。”
63．“啊，好极了，”她回答道。对这姑娘我要补充一句，像她这么好商量的人是不多见的。
64．我们去了“小山”，这是校园里人们幽会的地方。我们坐在一棵老橡树下，她用期待的目光看着
我 。“我们谈些什么呢?”她问。
65．“逻辑。”
66．她想了一会儿，觉得不错，便说：“好极了。”
67．“逻辑学，”我清了清嗓子，“ 就是思维的科学。在我们能正确地思维之前，首先必须学会判别
逻辑方面的常见谬误。我们今晚就要来谈 谈这些。”
68．“哇!”她叫了起来，高兴地拍着手。
69．我打了个寒噤，但还是鼓足勇气讲下去：“首先我们来考究一下被称为绝对判断的谬误。”
70．“好呀!”她眨了眨眼，催促着。
71．“绝对判断指的是根据一种无条件的前提推出 的论断。比如说，运动是有益的，因此人人都要运
动。”
72．“不错，”波莉认真地说，“运动是非常有益的。它能增强体质，好处太多了!”
73 ．“波莉，”我温和地说，“这种论点是谬误。运动有益是一种无条件的前提。比方说，假如你得
了心脏 病，运动不但无益，反而有害，有不少人医生就不准他们运动。你必须给这种前提加以限制。你应
该说， 一般来说运动是有益的。或者说，对大多数人是有益的。否则就是犯了绝对判断的错误，懂吗?”
74．“不懂，”她坦率地说，“这可太有意思了，讲吧，往下讲吧。”
75．“你最好别拉 我的袖子了，”我对她说。等她松了手，我继续讲，“下面我们讲一种被称为草率
结论的谬误。你仔细听 ：你不会讲法语，我不会讲法语，皮蒂•伯奇也不会讲法语。因此我就会断定在明尼
苏达大学谁也不会讲 法语。”
76．“真的?”波莉好奇地问道．“谁都不会吗?”
77．我压住火气。“波莉，这是一种谬误，这是一种草率的结论。能使这种结论成立的例证太少了。”
78．“你还知道其他的谬误吗?”她气喘吁吁地说：“这比跳舞还有意思啦!”
79．我极力地使自己不灰心。我真拿这姑娘没办法，确实是毫无办法。可是，如果我不坚持下去，我
就 太没用了。因此，我继续讲下去。
80．“现在听我讲讲被称为牵强附会的谬误。听着：我们 不要带比尔出去野餐。每次带他一起去，天
就下雨。”
81．“我就见过这样的人，”她感叹 地说，“我们家乡有个女孩，名叫尤拉•蓓克尔。从没有例外，每次我
们带她去野餐……”

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82．“波莉，”我严厉地说，”这是一种谬误。下 雨并不是尤拉•蓓克尔造成的，下雨与她没有任何关
系。如果你责怿尤拉•蓓克尔，你就是犯了牵强附会 的错误。”
83．“我再也不这样了．”她懊悔地保证说，“你生我的气了吗?”
84．我深深地叹了一口气：“不，波莉，我没生气。”
85．“那么，给我再讲些谬误吧!”
86．“好，让我们来看看矛盾前提吧。”
87．“行。行，”她叽叽喳喳地叫着，两眼闪现出快乐的光芒。
88．我皱了皱眉头，但还 是接着讲下去。“这里有一个矛盾前提的例子：如果上帝是万能的，他能造
出一块连他自己也搬不动的大 石头吗?”
89．“当然能，”她毫不犹豫地回答。
90．“但是如果他是万能的，他就能搬动那块石头呀。”我提醒她说。
91．“是嘛!”她若有所思地说，“嗯，我想他造不出那样的石头。”
92．“但他是万能的啊，”我进一步提醒她。
93．她用手抓了抓她那漂亮而义空虚的脑袋。“我全搞糊涂了，”她承认说。
94．“你确 实糊涂了。因为如果一种论点的各个前提相互间是矛盾的，这种论点就不能成立，假如有
一种不可抗拒的 力量，就不可能有一种不可移动的物体；假如有一种不可移动的物体，就不可能有一种不
可抗拒的力量。 懂了吗?”
95．“再给我讲些这类新奇的玩意儿吧，”她恳切地说。
9 6．我看了看表，说，“我想今晚就谈到这里。现在我该送你回去了。你把所学的东西复习一遍．我
们明 晚再上一课吧。”
97．我把她送到了女生宿舍，在那里她向我保证说这个晚上她过得非常愉 快。我闷闷不乐地回到了我
的房间，皮带正鼾声如雷地睡在床上。那件浣熊皮大衣像一头多毛的野兽趴在 他的脚边。当时我真想把他
叫醒，告诉他可以把他的女朋友要回去。看来我的计划要落空了。这姑娘对逻 辑简直是一点儿部不开窍。
98．但是我回过头一想，既然已经浪费了一个晚上，不妨还是再 花一个晚上看看。天知道，说不定她
头脑里的死火山口中的什么地方，还有些火星会喷射出来呢。也许我 会有办法能把这些火星扇成熊熊烈焰。
当然，成功的希望是不大的，但我还是决定再试一次。
99．第二天晚上我们义坐在那棵橡树下，我说，“今晚我们要谈的第一种谬误叫做文不对题。”
100．她高兴得都发抖了。
101．“注意听，”我说，“有个人申请T作，当老饭问他所 具备的条件时，他回答说他家有妻子和
六个孩子。妻子完全残废了，孩子们没吃的没穿的，睡觉没有床， 生火没有煤，眼看冬天就要到了。”
102．两滴眼泪顺着波莉那粉红的面颊往下滚。“啊，这太可怕了!太可怕了!”她抽泣着说。
103．“是的，是太可怕了，”我赞同地说，“但这可不成其为申请工作的理由。那人根本没有回答
老 板提出的关于他所具备的条件的问题。反而乞求老板的同情。他犯了文不对题的错误。你懂吗?”
104．“你带手帕了没有?”她哭着说。 、
105．我把手帕递给她。当她擦眼泪 时，我极力控制自己的火气。“下面，”我小心地压低声音说，
“我们要讨论错误类比。这里有一个例子 ：应该允许学生考试时看课本。既然外科医生在做手术时可以看
x光片，律师在审查案件时可以看案情摘 要，木匠在盖房子时可以看图纸，为什么学生在考试时不能看课
本呢?”
106．“这个．”她满怀激情地说，“可是我多少年来听到的最好的主意。”
107．“波 莉，”我生气地说，“这个论点全错了。医生、律师和木匠并不是以参加考试的方式去测
验他们所学的东 西。学生们才是这样。情况完全不同，你不能在不同的情况之间进行类比。”
108．“我还是觉得这是个好主意，”波莉说。
109．“咳!”我嘀咕着，但我还是执意地往下讲，“接下去我们试试与事实相反的假设吧。”
110．波莉的反应是：“听起来不错。”

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111．“你听着：如果居里夫人不是碰巧把一张照 片底片放在装有一块沥青铀矿石的抽屉里，那么世
人今天就不会知道镭。”
112． “对，对，”波莉点、头称是。“你看过那部影片吗?哦，真好看。沃尔特•皮金演得太好了，
我是说他 让我着迷了。”
113．“如果你能暂时忘记皮金先生，”我冷冷地说，“我会愿意指出这种 说法是错误的。也许居里
夫人以后会发现镭的，也许由别人去发现，也许还会发生其他的事情。你不能从 一个不实际的假设出发，
从中得出任何可以站得住脚的结论。”
114．“人们真应该让沃尔特•皮金多拍些照片，”波莉说，“我几乎再也看不到他了。”
115．我决定冉试一次，但只能一次。一个人的忍耐毕竟是有限度的。我说，“下一一个谬误叫做井
里 投毒。”
116．“多有趣啊!”她咯咯地笑了起来。
117．“有两个 人在进行一场辩论。第一个人站起来说：‘我的论敌是个劣迹昭彰的骗子，他所说的
每一句话都不可信。 ’……波莉，现在你想想，好好想一想，这句话错在哪里?”
118．她眉头紧锁，我凝视着她。突然，一道智慧的光芒 ---这是我从未看到过的 ---闪现在她的眼中 。
“这不公平，”她气愤地说，“一点都不公平。如果第一个人不等第二个人开口就说他是骗子，那么第 二
个人还有什么可说的呢?”
119．“对!”我高兴地叫了起来，“百分之百对， 是不公平。第一个人不等别人喝到井水，就在井里
投毒了。他还不等他的对手开口就已经伤害了他。…… 波莉，我真为你感到骄傲。”
120．她轻轻地“哼”了一声，高兴得脸都发红了。
121．“你看，亲爱的，这些问题并不深奥，只要精力集中，就能对付。思考 分析 判断。来，让
我们把所学过的东西再复习一遍。”
122．“来吧，”她说着，把手往上一晃。
123．看来波莉并不很傻，我的劲头上来了。 于是，我便开始把对她讲过的一切．长时间耐心地复习
了一遍。我给她一个一个地举例子，指出其中的错 误．不停地讲下去。就好比挖掘一条隧道，开始只有劳
累、汗水和黑暗，不知道什么时候能见到光亮，甚 至还不知道能否见到光亮。然而，我坚持着，凿啊，挖
啊，刮啊．终于得到了回报。我见到了一线光亮， 这光亮越来越大，终于阳光洒进来了，一切都豁然开朗
了。
124．我辛辛苦苦地花 了五个晚上，但总算还是没有白费。我使波莉变成一个逻辑学家了，我教她学
会了思考。我的任务完成了 ，她最终还是配得上我的。她会成为我贤惠的妻子。我那些豪华公馆里出色的
女主人，我那些有良好教养 的孩子们的合格母亲。
125．不要以为我不爱这个姑娘了，恰恰相反。正如皮格马利翁珍爱 他自己塑造的完美的少女像一样，
我也非常爱我的波莉。我决定下次会面时把自己的感情向她倾吐。该是 把我们师生关系转化为爱情的时候
了。
126．“波莉，”当我们又坐在我们那棵橡树下时，我说，“今晚我们不再讨论渗误了。”
127．“怎么啦?”她失望地问道。
128．“亲爱的，”我友好地对她笑了笑，“我们已经一起度 过了五个晚上，我们相处得很好。显然我们
俩是很相配的。”
129．“草率结论，”波莉伶俐地说。
130．“你是说 ---?”我问道。
131．“草率结论，”她重复了一遍。“你怎么能凭我们仅有的五次约会就说我们俩很相配呢?”
132．我咯咯一笑，觉得挺有意思。这可爱的小家伙功课学得可真不错。“亲爱的，”我耐心地拍打
着 她的手说，“五次约会就不少了，毕竟你不必把整个蛋糕吃下去才知道蛋糕的甜味。”
133．“错误类比，”波莉敏捷地说。“我可不是蛋糕，我是个女孩子。”

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134．我微微一笑，但这次不感到那么有意思了。 这可爱的孩子功课或许是学得太好了。我决定改变
策略。显然，最好的办法就是态度明朗，直截了当地向 她示爱。我沉默了一会儿，用我特别发达的脑袋挑
选着合适的词语。然后我便开始：
135．“波莉，我爱你。对我来说，你就是整个世界，是月亮，是星星，是整个宇宙。亲爱的，请说
你 爱我吧。如果你不这样，我的生活就失去了意义。我将会萎靡不振，茶不饮，饭不思，到处游荡，成为
一 个步履蹒跚、双眼凹陷的躯壳。”
136．我双手交叉站在那里，心想这下子可打动她了。
137．“文不对题，”波莉说。
138．我咬咬牙。我不是皮格马利翁， 我是弗兰肯斯坦，我的喉咙似乎一下子让魔鬼卡住了。我极力
控制涌上心头的阵阵痛楚。无论如何，我也 要保持冷静。
139．“好了，波莉，”我强装着笑脸说，“这些谬误你的确已学到家了。”
140．“这可说得很对，”她使劲地点了点头说道。
14l_“可是波莉，这一切是谁教给你的?”
142．“你教的呀!”
143．“是的，那你得感谢我。是吧，亲爱的?要是我不和你在一起，你永远也不会学到这些谬误的。”
144．“与事实相反的假设，”波莉不假思索地说着。
145．我甩掉r前额 的汗珠。“波莉，”我用嘶哑的声音说道，“你不要死板地接受这些东两。我是说那
只是课堂上讲的东西 。你知道学校学的东西与现实生活毫不相干。”
146．“绝对判断，”她说道，嬉戏地向我摇摇指头。
147．这一下可使我恼火了。我猛地跳了起来，向公牛似的吼叫着，“你到底想不想和我谈恋爱?”
148．“我不想，”她答道。
149．“为什么不想?”我追问着。
150．“因为今天下午我答应了皮蒂•伯奇，我愿意和他相爱。”
151．我被皮蒂这一无 耻的行径气得一阵眩晕，情不自禁地向后退去。皮蒂答应了我，跟我成了交，
还跟我握了手呢!“这个可 耻的家伙!”我尖声大叫，把一块块草皮踢了起来。“你不能跟他在一起，波莉。
他是一个说谎的人、一 个骗子、一个可耻的家伙!”
152．“井里投毒，”波莉说，“别叫嚷了，我想大声地叫嚷就是一种谬误。”
153．我 以极大的意志力把语气缓和下来。“好吧，”我说个反复无常的人，一个吃了上顿不知下顿
的家伙。你能 给我一个合乎逻辑的理由来说明你为什么要跟皮蒂好吗?”
154．“当然能，”波莉肯定地 说，“他有一件浣熊皮大衣，“你是一个逻辑学家。那就让我们从逻
辑上来分析这件事吧。你怎么会看得 上皮蒂•伯奇，而看不起我呢?你看我--- 一个才华横溢的学生，一个了
不起的知识分子，一个前途无量的人；而皮蒂---一个笨蛋，一
。”
(崔林译，李丙奎审校)











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Unit6 The Way to Rainy Mountain ——by N. Scott Momaday

A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the
Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the
world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in summer the prairie is
an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it cracks beneath your feet. There are green belts
along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan, willow and witch hazel. At a distance in
July or August the steaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers
are everywhere in the tall grass, popping up like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the
red earth, going nowhere in the plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the land. All things in the plain
are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon
that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the sense of proportion. Your
imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun.
I returned to Rainy Mountain in July. My grandmother had died in the spring, and I wanted to be at her
grave. She had lived to be very old and at last infirm. Her only living daughter was with her when she died,
and I was told that in death her face was that of a child.
I like to think of her as a child. When she was born, the Kiowas were living the last great moment of their
history. For more than a hundred years they had controlled the open range from the Smoky Hill River to
the Red, from the headwaters of the Canadian to the fork of the Arkansas and Cimarron. In alliance with
the Comanches, they had ruled the whole of the southern Plains. War was their sacred business, and
they were among the finest horsemen the world has ever known. But warfare for the Kiowas was
preeminently a matter of disposition rather than of survival, and they never understood the grim,
unrelenting advance of the U.S. Cavalry. When at last, divided and illprovisioned, they were driven onto
the Staked Plains in the cold rains of autumn, they fell into panic. In Palo Duro Canyon they abandoned
their crucial stores to pillage and had nothing then but their lives. In order to save themselves, they
surrendered to the soldiers at Fort Sill and were imprisoned in the old stone corral that now stands as a
military museum. My grandmother was spared the humiliation of those high gray walls by eight or ten
years, but she must have known from birth the affliction of defeat, the dark brooding of old warriors.
Her name was Aho, and she belonged to the last culture to evolve in North America. Her forebears came
down from the high country in western Montana nearly three centuries ago. They were a mountain
people, a mysterious tribe of hunters whose language has never been positively classified in any major
group. In the late seventeenth century they began a long migration to the south and east. It was a journey
toward the dawn, and it led to a golden age. Along the way the Kiowas were befriended by the Crows,
who gave them the culture and religion of the Plains. They acquired horses, and their ancient nomadic
spirit was suddenly free of the ground. They acquired Tai-me, the sacred Sun Dance doll, from that
moment the object and symbol of their worship, and so shared in the divinity of the sun. Not least, they
acquired the sense of destiny, therefore courage and pride. When they entered upon the southern Plains
they had been transformed. No longer were they slaves to the simple necessity of survival; they were a
lordly and dangerous society of fighters and thieves, hunters and priests of the sun. According to their
origin myth, they entered the world through a hollow log. From one point of view, their migration was the
fruit of an old prophecy, for indeed they emerged from a sunless world.
Although my grandmother lived out her long life in the shadow of Rainy Mountain, the immense
landscape of the continental interior lay like memory in her blood. She could tell of the Crows, whom she

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had never seen, and of the Black Hills, where she had never been. I wanted to see in reality what she
had seen more perfectly in the mind's eye, and traveled fifteen hundred miles to begin my pilgrimage.
Yellowstone, it seemed to me, was the top of the world, a region of deep lakes and dark timber, canyons
and waterfalls. But, beautiful as it is, one might have the sense of confinement there. The skyline in all
directions is close at hand, the high wall of the woods and deep cleavages of shade. There is a perfect
freedom in the mountains, but it belongs to the eagle and the elk, the badger and the bear. The Kiowas
reckoned their stature by the distance they could see, and they were bent and blind in the wilderness.
Descending eastward, the highland meadows are a stairway to the plain. In July the inland slope of the
Rockies is luxuriant with flax and buckwheat, stonecrop and larkspur. The earth unfolds and the limit of
the land recedes. Clusters of trees, and animals grazing far in the distance, cause the vision to reach
away and wonder to build upon the mind. The sun follows a longer course in the day, and the sky is
immense beyond all comparison. The great billowing clouds that sail upon it are shadows that move upon
the grain like water, dividing light. Farther down, in the land of the Crows and Blackfeet, the plain is
yellow. Sweet clover takes hold of the hills and bends upon itself to cover and seal the soil. There the
Kiowas paused on their way; they had come to the place where they must change their lives. The sun is
at home on the plains. Precisely there does it have the certain character of a god. When the Kiowas
came to the land of the Crows, they could see the darklees of the hills at dawn across the Bighorn River,
the profusion of light on the grain shelves, the oldest deity ranging after the solstices. Not yet would they
veer southward to the caldron of the land that lay below; they must wean their blood from the northern
winter and hold the mountains a while longer in their view. They bore Tai-me in procession to the east.
A dark mist lay over the Black Hills, and the land was like iron. At the top of a ridge I caught sight of
Devil's Tower upthrust against the gray sky as if in the birth of time the core of the earth had broken
through its crust and the motion of the world was begun. There are things in nature that engender an
awful quiet in the heart of man; Devil's Tower is one of them. Two centuries ago, because they could not
do otherwise, the Kiowas made a legend at the base of the rock. My grandmother said:
Eight children were there at play, seven sisters and their brother. Suddenly the boy was struck dumb; he
trembled and began to run upon his hands and feet. His fingers became claws, and his body was
covered with fur. Directly there was a bear where the boy had been. The sisters were terrified; they ran,
and the bear after them. They came to the stump of a great tree, and the tree spoke to them. It bade them
climb upon it, and as they did so it began to rise into the air. The bear came to kill them, but they were just
beyond its reach. It reared against the tree and scored the bark all around with its claws. The seven
sisters were borne into the sky, and they became the stars of the Big Dipper.
From that moment, and so long as the legend lives, the Kiowas have kinsmen in the night sky. Whatever
they were in the mountains, they could be no more. However tenuous their well- being, however much
they had suffered and would suffer again, they had found a way out of the wilderness.
My grandmother had a reverence for the sun, a holy regard that now is all but gone out of mankind. There
was a wariness in her, and an ancient awe. She was a Christian in her later years, but she had come a
long way about, and she never forgot her birthright. As a child she had been to the Sun Dances; she had
taken part in those annual rites, and by them she had learned the restoration of her people in the
presence of Tai-me. She was about seven when the last Kiowa Sun Dance was held in 1887 on the
Washita River above Rainy Mountain Creek. The buffalo were gone. In order to consummate the ancient
sacrifice--to impale the head of a buffalo bull upon the medicine tree--a delegation of old men journeyed
into Texas, there to beg and barter for an animal from the Goodnight herd. She was ten when the Kiowas
came together for the last time as a living Sun Dance culture. They could find no buffalo; they had to

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