英语专业

Assume, for example, that you want to be a physicist. You pass the great stone halls of, say, M.

I. T., and there cut into the stone are the names of the scientists. The chances are that few, if any, of you will leave your names to be cut into those stones. Yet any of you who managed to stay awake through part of a high school course in physics, knows more about physics than did many of those great scholars of the past. You know more because they left you what they knew, because you can start from what the past learned for you.

比如说你想成为一个物理学家。你走过，比方说，麻省理工学院的宏伟的石头大厅，

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

Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books are man's peculiar accomplishment. When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience. Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homer's mind. Through books you can acquire at least fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare —the list is endless. For a great book is necessarily a gift; it offers you a life you have not the time to live yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time.

worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer, or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen of a democracy.

人类的技术发展是如此，人类精神财富的积累也是如此。这些技术和精神的大部分

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

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

我记得拉罗什富科说过，大多数人如果没有读过关于爱情方面的书，他们就不会恋

爱；他可能还说过如果没有读过有关人类的书，就没有一个人能成为真正的人。

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

当我说到只有当大学使你们，无论作为专业人才还是普通人，接触到那些你们的头

脑应该有的那些人类的思想，它才有存在的意义，才有真正的办学目的的时候，我敢肯定我在替