精读.docx

1、精读1Text AAnother School Year What For?John CiardiLet me tell you one of the earliest disasters in my career as a teacher. It was January of 1940 and I was fresh out of graduate school starting my first semester at the University of Kansas City. Part of the student body was a beanpole with hair on to

2、p who came into my class, sat down, folded his arms, and looked at me as if to say All right, teach me something. Two weeks later we started Hamlet. Three weeks later he came into my office with his hands on his hips. Look, he said, I came here to be a pharmacist. Why do I have to read this stuff? A

3、nd not having a book of his own to point to, he pointed to mine which was lying on the desk.New as I was to the faculty, I could have told this specimen a number of things. I could have pointed out that he had enrolled, not in a drugstore-mechanics school, but in a college and that at the end of his

4、 course meant to reach for a scroll that read Bachelor of Science. It would not read: Qualified Pill-Grinding Technician. It would certify that he had specialized in pharmacy, but it would further certify that he had been exposed to some of the ideas mankind has generated within its history. That is

5、 to say, he had not entered a technical training school but a university and in universities students enroll for both training and education.I could have told him all this, but it was fairly obvious he wasnt going to be around long enough for it to matter.Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high s

6、ense of duty and I tried to put it this way: For the rest of your life, I said, your days are going to average out to about twenty-four hours. They will be a little shorter when you are in love, and a little longer when you are out of love, but the average will tend to hold. For eight of these hours

7、, more or less, you will be asleep.Then for about eight hours of each working day you will, I hope, be usefully employed. Assume you have gone through pharmacy school or engineering, or law school, or whatever during those eight hours you will be using your professional skills. You will see to it th

8、at the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesnt jump the fence, or that your client doesnt go to the electric chair as a result of your incompetence. These are all useful pursuits. They involve skills every man must respect, and they can all bring you basic satisfactions. Along with ev

9、erything else, they will probably be what puts food on your table, supports your wife, and rears your children. They will be your income, and may it always suffice.But having finished the days work, what do you do with those other eight hours? Lets say you go home to your family. What sort of family

10、 are you raising? Will the children ever be exposed to a reasonably penetrating idea at home? Will you be presiding over a family that maintains some contact with the great democratic intellect? Will there be a book in the house? Will there be a painting a reasonably sensitive man can look at withou

11、t shuddering? Will the kids ever get to hear Bach?That is about what I said, but this particular pest was not interested. Look, he said, you professors raise your kids your way; Ill take care of my own. Me, Im out to make money.I hope you make a lot of it, I told him, because youre going to be badly

12、 stuck for something to do when youre not signing checks.Fourteen years later I am still teaching, and I am here to tell you that the business of the college is not only to train you, but to put you in touch with what the best human minds have thought. If you have no time for Shakespeare, for a basi

13、c look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of mans development we call history then you have no business being in college. You are on your way to being that new species of mechanized savage, the push-button Neanderthal. Our colleges inevitably graduate a number of suc

14、h life forms, but it cannot be said that they went to college; rather the college went through them without making contact.No one gets to be a human being unaided. There is not time enough in a single lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human.Assume

15、, 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

16、 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.And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankin

17、ds spiritual resources. Most of these resources, both technical and spiritual, are stored in books. Books are mans peculiar accomplishment. When you have read a book, you have added to your human experience. Read Homer and your mind includes a piece of Homers mind. Through books you can acquire at l

18、east fragments of the mind and experience of Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare the list is endless. For a great book is necessarily a gift; it offers you a life you have not the time to live yourself, and it takes you into a world you have not the time to travel in literal time. A civilized mind is, in ess

19、ence, one that contains many such lives and many such worlds. If you are too much in a hurry, or too arrogantly proud of your own limitations, to accept as a gift to your humanity some pieces of the minds of Aristotle, or Chaucer, or Einstein, you are neither a developed human nor a useful citizen o

20、f a democracy.I think it was La Rochefoucauld who said that most people would never fall in love if they hadnt read about it. He might have said that no one would ever manage to become human if they hadnt read about it.I speak, Im sure, for the faculty of the liberal arts college and for the faculti

21、es 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

22、: 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.2Maheegun My BrotherEric AclandThe year I found Maheegun, spring was late in coming. That day, I

23、was spearing fish with my grandfather when I heard the faint crying and found the shivering wolf cub.As I bent down, he moved weakly toward me. I picked him up and put him inside my jacket. Little Maheegun gained strength after I got the first few drops of warm milk in him. He wiggled and soon he wa

24、s full and warm.My grandfather finally agreed to let me keep him.That year, which was my 14th, was the happiest of my life.Not that we didnt have our troubles. Maheegun was the most mischievous wolf cub ever. He was curious too. Like looking into Grandmas sewing basket which he upset, scattering thr

25、ead and buttons all over the floor. At such times, she would chase him out with a broom and Maheegun would poke his head around the corner, waiting for things to quiet down.That summer Maheegun and I became hunting partners. We hunted the grasshoppers that leaped about like little rockets. And in th

26、e fall, after the first snow our games took us to the nearest meadows in search of field mice. By then, Maheegun was half grown. Gone was the puppy-wool coat. In its place was a handsome black mantle.The winter months that came soon after were the happiest I could remember. They belonged only to Mah

27、eegun and myself. Often we would make a fire in the bushes. Maheegun would lay his head between his front paws, with his eyes on me as I told him stories.It all served to fog my mind with pleasure so that I forgot my Grandpas repeated warnings, and one night left Maheegun unchained. The following mo

28、rning in sailed Mrs. Yesno, wild with anger, who demanded Maheegun be shot because he had killed her rooster. The next morning, my grandpa announced that we were going to take Maheegun to the north shack.By the time we reached the lake where the trappers shack stood, Maheegun seemed to have become r

29、estless. Often he would sit with his nose to the sky, turning his head this way and that as if to check the wind.The warmth of the stove soon brought sleep to me. But something caused me to wake up with a start. I sat up, and in the moon-flooded cabin was my grandfather standing beside me. Come and

30、see, son, whispered my grandfather.Outside the moon was full and the world looked all white with snow. He pointed to a rock that stood high at the edge of the lake. On the top was the clear outline of a great wolf sitting still, ears pointed, alert, listening.Maheegun, whispered my grandfather.Slowl

31、y the wolf raised his muzzle. Oooo-oo-wow-wowoo-oooo!The whole white world thrilled to that wild cry. Then after a while, from the distance came a softer call in reply. Maheegun stirred, with the deep rumble of pleasure in his throat. He slipped down the rock and headed out across the ice.Hes gone,

32、I said.Yes, hes gone to that young she-wolf. My grandfather slowly filled his pipe. He will take her for life, hunt for her, protect her. This is the way the Creator planned life. No man can change it.I tried to tell myself it was all for the best, but it was hard to lose my brother.For the next two years I was as busy as a squirrel storing nuts for the winter. But once or twice when I heard wolf cries from distant hills, I would still wonder if Maheegun, in his battle for life, found time to remember me.It was not long after that I found the a