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1、We all listen to music according to our separate capacities.But, for the sake of analysis, the whole listening process may become clearer if we break it up into its component parts, so to speak.In certain sense we all listen to music on three separate planes.For lack of a better terminology, one mig
2、ht name these: 1) the sensuous plane, 2) the expressive plane, 3) the sheerly musical plane.The only advantage to be gained from mechanically splitting up the listening process into these hypothetical planes is the clearer view to be had of the way in which we listen. The simplest way of listening t
3、o music is to listen for the sheer pleasure of the musical sound itself.That is the sensuous plane.It is the plane on which we hear music without thinking, without considering it in any way.One turns on the radio while doing something else andabsent-mindedly bathes in the sound.A kind of brainless b
4、ut attractive state of mind is engendered by the mere sound appeal of the music. The surprising thing is that many people who consider themselves qualified music lovers abuse that plane in listening.They go to concerts in order to lose themselves.They use music as a consolation or an escape.They ent
5、er an ideal world where one doesnt have to think of the realities of everyday life.Of course they arent thinking about the music either.Music allows them to leave it, and they go off to a place to dream, dreaming because of and apropos of the music yet never quite listening to it. Yes, the sound app
6、eal of music is a potent and primitive force, but you must not allow it to usurp a disproportionate share of your interest.The sensuous plane is an important one in music, a very important one, but it does not constitute the whole story. The second plane on which music exists is what I have called t
7、he expressive one.Here, immediately, we tread on controversialground.Composers have a way of shying away from any discussion of musics expressive side.Did not Stravinsky himself proclaim that his music was an object , a thing , with a life of its own, and with no other meaning than its own purely mu
8、sical existence?This intransigent attitude of Stravinskys may be due to the fact that so many people have tried to read different meanings into so many pieces.Heaven knows it is difficult enough to say preciselywhat it is that a piece of music means, to say it definitely to say it finally so that ev
9、eryone is satisfied with yourexplanation.But that should not lead one to the other extreme of denying to music the right to be expressive .Listen, if you can,to the 48 fugue themes of Bachs Well-tempered Clavichore.Listen to each theme, one after another.You will soon realize that each theme mirrors
10、 a different world of feeling.You will also soon realize that the more beautiful a theme seems to you the harder it is to find any word that will describe it to your complete satisfaction.Yes, you will certainly know whether it is a gaytheme or a sad one.You will be able, on other words, in your own
11、 mind, to draw a frame of emotional feeling around your theme.Now study the sad one a little closer. Try to pin down the exact quality of its sadness.Is it pessimistically sad or resignedly sad; is it fatefully sad or smilingly sad?Let us suppose that you are fortunate and can describe to your own s
12、atisfactionin so many words the exact meaning of your chosen theme.There is still no guarantee that anyone else will be satisfied.Nor need they be.The important thing is that each one feels for himself the specific expressive quality of a theme or, similarly, an entire piece of music.And if it is a
13、great work of art, dont expect it to mean exactly the same thing to you each time you return to it. The third plane on which music exists is the sheerly musical plane.Besides the pleasurable sound of music and the expressive feeling that it gives off, music does exist in terms of the notes themselve
14、s and of their manipulation.Most listeners are not sufficiently conscious of this third plane. It is very important for all of us to become more alive to music on its sheerly musical plane.After all, an actual musical material is being used.The intelligent listener must be prepared to increase his a
15、wareness of the musical material and what happens to it.He must hear the melodies, the rhythms, the harmonies, the tone colors in a more conscious fashion.But above all he must, in order to follow the line of the composers thought, know something of the principles of musical form.Listening to all of
16、 these elements is listening to the sheerly musical plane. Let me repeat that I have split up mechanically the three separate planes on whichwe listen merely for the sake of greater clarity. Actually, we never listenon one or the other of these planes.What we do is to correlate them listening in all
17、 three ways at the same time.It takes no mental effort, for we do it instinctively Perhaps an analogy with what happens to us when we visit the theater will makethis instinctive correlation clearer.In the theater, you are aware of the actors and actresses, costumes and sets, sounds and movements.All
18、 these give one the sense that the theater is a pleasant place to be in.They constitute the sensuous plane in our theatrical reactions. The expressive plane in the theater would be derived from the feeling that you get from what is happening on the stage.You are moved to pity, excitement, or gaiety.
19、It isthis general feeling, generated aside from the particular words being spoken, a certain emotional something which exists on the stage,that isanalogousto the expressive quality in music. The plot and plot development is equivalent to our sheerly musical plane.The playwright creates and develops
20、a character in just the same way that a composer creates and develops a theme.According to the degree of your awareness of the way in which the artist in either field handles his material will you become a more intelligent listener.It is easy enough to see that the theatergoer never is conscious of
21、any of these elements separately.He is aware of them all at the same time.The same is true of music listening.We simultaneously and without thinking listen on all three planes. 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 1 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - It is not surpr
22、ising that modern children tend to look blank and dispirited when informed that they will someday have to go to work and make a living. The problem is that they cannot visualize what work is in corporate America. Not so long ago, when a parent said he was off to work, the child knew very well what w
23、as about to happen. His parent was going to make something or fix something. The parent could take his offspring to his place of business and let him watch while he repaired a buggy or built a table. When a child asked, What kind of work do you do, Daddy? his father could answer in terms that a chil
24、d could come to grips with, such as I fix steam engines or Imake horse collars. Well, a few fathers still fix steam engines and build tables, but most do not. Nowadays, most fathers sit in glass buildings doing things that are absolutely incomprehensible to children. The answers they give when asked
25、, What kind of work do you do, Daddy? are likely to be utterly mystifying to a child. I sell space I do market research., I am a data processor.I am in public relations. I am a systems analyst Such explanations must seem nonsense to a child. How can he possibly envision anyone analyzing a system or
26、researching a market? Even grown men who do market research have trouble visualizing what a public relations man does with his day, and it is a safe bet that the average systems analyst is as baffled about what a space salesman does at the shop as the average space salesman is about the tools needed
27、 to analyze a system. In the common everyday job, nothing is made any more. Things are now made by machines. Very little is repaired. The machines that make things make them in such a fashion that they will quickly fall apart in such a way that repairs will be prohibitively expensive. Thus the buyer
28、 is encouraged to throw the thing away and buy a new one. In effect, the machines are making junk.The handful of people remotely associated with these machines can, of course, tell their inquisitive children Daddy makes junk . Most of the workforce, however, is too remote from junk production to sen
29、se any contribution to the industry. What do these people do? Consider the typical 12-story glass building in the typical American city. Nothing is being made in this building and nothing is being repaired, including the building itself. Constructed as a piece of junk, the building will be discarded
30、 when it wears out, and another piece of junk will be set in its place. Still, the building is filled with people who think of themselves as working. At any given moment during the day perhaps one-third of them will be talking into telephones. Most of these conversations will be about paper, for pap
31、er is what occupies nearly everyone in this building. Some jobs in the building require men to fill paper with words. There are persons who type neatly on paper and persons who read paper and jot notes in the margins. Some persons make copies of paper and other persons deliver paper. There are perso
32、ns who file paper and persons who unfile paper. Some persons mail paper. Some persons telephone other persons and ask that paper be sent to them. Others telephone to ascertain the whereabouts of paper. Some persons confer about paper. In the grandest offices, men approve of some paper and disapprove
33、 of other paper. The elevators are filled throughout the day with young men carrying paper from floor to floor and with vital men carrying paper to be discussed with other vital men. What is a child to make of all this? His father may be so eminent that he lunches with other men about paper. Suppose
34、 he brings his son to work to give the boy some idea of what work is all about. What does the boy see happening? His father calls for paper. He reads paper. Perhaps he scowls at paper. Perhaps he makes an angry red mark on paper. He telephones another man and says they had better lunch over paper. A
35、t lunch they talk about paper. Back at the office, the father orders the paper retyped and reproduced in quintuplicate, and then sent to another man for comparison with paper that was reproduced in triplicate last year. Imagine his poor son afterwards mulling over the mysteries of work with a friend
36、, who asks him, What s your father do? What can the boy reply? It beats me, perhaps, if he is not very observant. Or if he is, Something that has to do with making junk, I think. Same as everybody else. 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 2 页，共 7 页 - - - -
37、 - - - - - It was snowing heavily, and although every true New Yorker looks forward to a white Christmas, the shoppers on Fifth Avenue were in a hurry, not just to track down the last-minute presents, but to escape the bitter cold and get home with their families for Christmas Eve. Josh Lester turne
38、d into 46th Street. He was not yet enjoying the Christmas spirit, because he was still at work, albeit a working dinner at Joannes. Josh was black, in his early thirties, and an agreeable-looking person, dressed smartly but not expensively. He was from a hard-working family in upstate Virginia, and
39、was probably happiest back home in his parents house. But his demeanor concealed a Harvard law degree and an internship in DC with a congressman, a junior partnership in a New York law firm, along with a razor-sharp intellect and an ability to think on his feet. Josh was very smart. The appointment
40、meant Josh wouldnt get home until after Christmas. He was not, however, unhappy. He was meeting Jo Rogers, the senior senator for Connecticut, and one of the best-known faces in the US. Senator Rogers was a Democrat in her third term of office, who knew Capitol Hill inside out but who had neverthele
41、ss managed to keep her credibility with her voters as a Washington outsider. She was pro-abortion, anti-corruption, pro-low carbon emissions and anti-capital punishment, as fine a progressive liberal as you could find this side of the Atlantic. Talk show hosts called her Honest Senator Jo, and a cou
42、ple of years ago, Time magazine had her in the running for Woman of the Year. It was election time in the following year, and the word was she was going to run for the Democratic nomination. Rogers had met Josh in DC, thought him highly competent, and had invited him to dinner. Josh shivered as he c
43、hecked the address on the slip of paper in his hand. Hed never been to Joannes, but knew it by reputation, not because of its food, which had often been maligned, or its jazz orchestra, which had a guest slot for a well-known movie director who played trumpet, but because of the stellar quality of i
44、ts sophisticated guests: politicians, diplomats, movie actors, hall-of-fame athletes, journalists, writers, rock stars and Nobel Prize winners in short, anyone who was anyone in this city of power brokers. Josh told him, and although the waiter refrained from curling his lip, he managed to show both
45、 disdain and effortless superiority with a simple flaring of his nostrils. Yes, Senator, please come this way, and as Senator Rogers passed through the crowded room, heads turned as the diners recognized her and greeted her with silent applause. In a classless society, Rogers was the closest thing t
46、o aristocracy that America had. Alberto hovered for a moment, then went to speak to a colleague. After two hours, Rogers and Josh got up to leave. There was a further flurry of attention by the staff, including an offer by Alberto to waive payment of the bill, which Rogers refused. As they were putt
47、ing on their coats , Rogers said, Thank you, Alberto. Oh, have I introduced you to my companion, Josh Lester?A look of panic, followed by one of desperate optimism flashed across Albertos face. Ah, not yet, no, . not properly, he said weakly.Josh Lester. This i s the latest recruit to my election ca
48、mpaign. Hes going to be my new deputy campaign manager, in charge of raising donations. And if we get that Republican out of the White House next year, youve just met my Chief of Staff.名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 3 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - It came
49、 as if from nowhere. There were about two dozen of us by the bank of elevators on the 35th floor of the north tower of the World Trade Center. We were firefighters, mostly, and we were in various stages of exhaustion. Some guys were sweating like pigs. Some had their turnout coats off, or tied aroun
50、d their waists. Quite a few were breathing heavily. Others were raring to go. All of us were taking a beat to catch our breaths, and our bearings, figure out what the hell was going on. Wed been at this thing, hard, for almost an hour, some a little bit less, and we were nowhere close to done. Of co
51、urse, we had no idea what there was left to do, but we hadnt made a dent. And then the noise started, and the building began to tremble, and we all froze. Dead solid still. Whatever there had been left to do would now have to wait. For what, we had no idea, but it would wait. Or, it wouldnt, but tha
52、t wasnt the point. The point was that no one was moving. To a man, no one moved, except to lift his eyes to the ceiling, to see where the racket was coming from. As if we could see clear through the ceiling tiles for an easy answer. No one spoke. There wasnt time to turn thought into words, even tho
53、ugh there was time to think. For me anyway, there was time to think, too much time to think, and my thoughts were all over the place. Every possible worst-case scenario, and a few more besides. The building was shaking like in an earthquake, like an amusement park thrill ride gone berserk, but it wa
54、s the rumble that struck me still with fear. The sheer volume of it. The way it coursed right through me. I couldnt think what the hell would make a noise like that. Like a thousand runaway trains speeding towards me. Like a herd of wild beasts. Like the thunder of a rockslide. Hard to put it into w
55、ords, but whatever the hell it was it was gaining speed, and gathering force, and getting closer, and I was stuck in the middle, unable to get out of its path. Its amazing, the kind of thing you think about when there should be no time to think. I thought about my wife and my kids, but only fleeting
56、ly and not in any kind of life-flashing-before-my-eyes sort of way. I thought about the job, how close I was to making deputy. I thought about the bagels I had left on the kitchen counter back at the firehouse. I thought how we firemen were always saying to each other, Ill see you at the big one. Or
57、, Well all meet at the big one. I never knew how it started, or when Id picked up on it myself, but it was part of our shorthand.Meaning, no matter how big this fire is, therell be another one bigger, somewhere down the road. Well make it through this one, and well make it through that one, too. I a
58、lways said it, at big fires, and I always heard it back, and here I was, thinking I would never say or hear these words again, because there would never be another fire as big as this. This was the big one we had all talked about, all our lives, and if I hadnt known this before just before these chi
59、lling moments this sick, black noise now confirmed it. I fumbled for some fix on the situation, thinking maybe if I understood what was happening I could steel myself against it. All of these thoughts were landing in my brain in a kind of flashpoint, one on top of the other and all at once, but ther
60、e they were. And each thought landed fully formed, as if there might be time to act on each, when in truth there was no time at all. Richard Picciotto (also known as Pitch) was in the north tower of the World Trade Center when it collapsed in the aftermath of the massive terrorist attack on 11 Septe
61、mber 2001. A battalion commander for the New York Fire Department, he was on the scene of the disaster within minutes of the attack, to lead seven companies of firefighters into the tower to help people trapped and to extinguish fires blazing everywhere. The north tower was the first of the twin tow
62、ers to be hit. It was followed 17 minutes later by the south tower. The south tower, however, was the first to collapse, at 9:59 am. At that moment, Picciotto was in the north tower, racing upwards by the stairs because the elevators were out of action. He then gave the order to evacuate. On the 12t
63、h story he came across 50 people amid the debris, too badly hurt or frightened to move. Picciotto and his men helped them down. When he reached the seventh floor, the tower fell, and he was buried beneath thousands of tons of rubble. He eventually came round four hours later, leading his men to safe
64、ty. Picciotto was the highest ranking firefighter to survive the attack. The chief of the department, the first deputy and the chief of rescue operations had all been killed. Altogether the death toll included 343 firefighters and more than 3,000 civilians. 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - -
65、 - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 4 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - Toast always lands butter side down. It always rains on bank holidays. You never win the lottery, but other people you know seem to . Do you ever get the impression that you were born unlucky? Even the most rational person can be conv
66、inced at times that there is a force out there making mishaps occur at the worst possible time. We all like to believe that Murphys Law is true。Part of the explanation for bad luck is mathematical, but part is psychological. Indeed there is a very close connection between peoples perception of bad l
67、uck and interesting coincidences. For example, take the belief that “bad things always happen in threes ”This popular notion would be unlikely to stand the scrutiny of any scientific study, but it must have some basis in experience, otherwise the phrase would never have arisen in the first place. Wh
68、at might be the rational explanation? Some things are only marginally bad, for example the train arriving five minutes late. Some are extremely bad, such as failing an exam or being sacked. So badness is much better represented as being on a spectrum rather than something which is there or not there
69、. A particular event may only be a misfortune because of the circumstances around it. The train arriving five minutes late is a neutral event if you are in no hurry and reading an interesting newspaper article while you wait. It is bad if you are late for an important meeting. When it comes to bad t
70、hings happening in threes, what may be most important of all is the duration and memorability of the first event. Take a burst pipe while you are away on holiday, for example. It may take less than an hour to flood the house, but this one bad event can remain alive and kicking for many months, with
71、the cleaning up operation and the debate with your insurers acting as constant reminders of the original event. The longer the first bad event sticks in the front of your mind, the moreopportunities you will have to experience two more bad events. A month latersomeone bumps the back of your car and
72、a week after that you lose your wedding ring. The mind which is already on a low from the first event will quickly leap to connect the subsequent misfortunes as part of the series. It wouldnt matter that there could be a two-month timescale over which everything happened. By the time you have recove
73、red from the water damage you are actively looking out for the next disaster. The timescale has been extended as long as is necessary to confirm the original prophecy. As with coincidences, in bad luck there is a tendency to look for the examples which confirm the theory, and ignore those which don
74、t (because they are less interesting). Single bad events happen all the time. That alone should be enough to disprove the theory. Bad things also come in twos. But it is more likely that a friend will tell you “three bad things have happened to me, isn t that typical” than “only two bad things have
75、happened to me, which just proves that the theory doesnt work”. After all, the latter is tempting fate! There is, however, at least one rational reason why bad events might cluster together. It is related to probability and independence. Unlucky events are not always independent of each other. Anybo
76、dy who is made redundant is bound to suffer some depression. That will lower the body s defences, making the person vulnerable to illness, and also making them less alert and responsive (so they may be more likely to drop a precious vase, for example). So while the probability of being made redundan
77、t on any particular day and the probability of being sick may both be small, the chance of both occurring is almost certainly higher than the product of the two probabilities. So much for the general incidents of bad luck which crop up in life. Let s get on to a specific one that everyone has encoun
78、tered. You are off to visit a friend who lives at the other end of the city. You look up the road in the street atlas, and discover that it is right on the edge of the page. This means that finding the precise route becomes a chore of flicking backwards and forwards from one page to the next. Either
79、 the road is half on one page and half on the other, or its spread across the fold in the middle of the book. And if its an ordnance survey map, then your destination is at just the point where you folded the map over. It doesnt seem fair. After all a map only has a tiny bit of “edge ” but plenty of
80、 “middle”in which your destination could be situated. Or has it? In fact the chance of picking a destination which is close to the edge of the map is a lot higher than you might expect. That represents 28 per cent of the area of the whole page of the map, which means that any specific point that you
81、 are seeking on this map has a 28 per cent chance (thats nearly one in three) of being in an awkward position within 1 cm of the edge of the page. And if you regard being within 2 cm of the edge of the page as being awkward, the chance of ill-fortune climbs to 52 per cent. In other words, you might
82、expect this misfortune to occur on almost every other journey. As in most bad luck stories, you forget about the number of times the road doesn t land awkwardly and remember the times it does, and in this case the chance of a bad result is so high that before long you are bound to be cursing your mi
83、sfortune, or the maps printer, or both. This, incidentally, is why many modern road maps allow significant overlaps between adjacent map pages. In a good road atlas, at least 30 per cent of the page is duplicated elsewhere. One of the best examples of selective memory where an unfair comparison is m
84、ade between good and bad is in the relative frequency of red and green lights on a journey. For once, the perception of “I always seem to get red lights when I m in a hurry” is true and verifiable. To simplify the situation, think of a traffic light as being like tossing a coin, with a 50 per cent c
85、hance of being red, and 50 per cent of being green. (In fact most traffic lights spend more time on red). If you encounter six traffic lights on a journey, then you are no more likely to escape a red light than you are to toss six consecutive heads, the chance of which is 1 in 64. Red lights come up
86、 just as often when the driver is not in a hurry; it s just that the disadvantage of the red light is considerably less if time is not critical. The false part of the perception is that red lights happen more than green lights. The reason for this is simply that a driver has more time to think about
87、 a red light than a green light, because while the latter is gone in seconds and indeed is an experience no different from just driving along the open road the red light forces a change of behaviour, a moment of exertion and stress, and then a deprivation of freedom for a minute or so. Red lights st
88、ick in the mind, while green lights are instantly forgotten. 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 5 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - The year the war began I was in the fifth grade at the Annie F. Warren Grammar School in Winthrop, and that was the winter I won th
89、e prize for drawing the best Civil Defense signs. That was also the winter of Paula Browns new snowsuit, and even now, 13 years later, I can recall the changing colors of those days, clear and definite as a pattern seen through a kaleidoscope. I lived on the bay side of town, on Johnson Avenue, oppo
90、site the Logan Airport, and before I went to bed each night, I used to kneel by the west window of my room and look over the lights of Boston that blazed and blinked far off across the darkening water. The sunset flaunted its pink flag above the airport, and the sound of waves was lost in the perpet
91、ual droning of the planes. I marveled at the moving beacons on the runway and watched, until it grew completely dark, the flashing red and green lights that rose and set in the sky like shooting stars. The airport was my Mecca, my Jerusalem. All night I dreamed of flying. Those were the days of my t
92、echnicolor dreams. Mother believed that I should have an enormous amount of sleep, and so I was never really tired when I went to bed. This was the best time of the day, when I could lie in the vague twilight, drifting off to sleep, making up dreams inside my head the way they should go. My flying d
93、reams were believable as a landscape by Dali, so real that I would awake with a sudden shock, a breathless sense of having tumbled like Icarus from the sky and caught myself on the soft bed just in time. These nightly adventures in space began when Superman started invading my dreams and teaching me
94、 how to fly. He used to come roaring by in his shining blue suit with his cape whistling in the wind, looking remarkably like my Uncle Frank who was living with mother and me. In the magic whirling of his cape I could hear the wings of a hundred seagulls, the motors of a thousand planes. I was not t
95、he only worshipper of Superman in our block. David Stirling, a pale, bookish boy who lived down the street, shared my love for the sheer poetry of flight. Before supper every night, we listened to Superman together on the radio, and during the day we made up our own adventures on the way to school.
96、The Annie F. Warren Grammar School was a red-brick building, set back from the main highway on a black tar street, surrounded by barren gravel playgrounds. Out by the parking lot David and I found the perfect alcove for our Superman dramas. The dingy back entrance to the school was deep-set in a lon
97、g passageway which was an excellent place for surprise captures and sudden rescues. During recess, David and I came into our own. We ignored the boys playing baseball on the gravel court and the girls giggling at dodge-ball in the dell. Our Superman games made us outlaws, yet gave us a sense of wind
98、y superiority. We even found a stand-in for a villain in Sheldon Fein, the sallow mammas boy on our block who was left out of the boys games because he cried whenever anybody tagged him and always managed to fall down and skin his fat knees. At first, we had to prompt Sheldon in his part, but after
99、a while he became an expert on inventing tortures and even carried them out in private, beyond the game. He used to pull the wings from flies and the legs off grasshoppers, and keep the broken insects captive in a jar hidden under his bed where he could take them out in secret and watch them struggl
100、ing. David and I never played with Sheldon except at recess. After school we left him to his mamma and his bonbons and his helpless insects. At the time my Uncle Frank was living with us while waiting to be drafted, and I was sure that he bore an extraordinary resemblance to Superman incognito. Davi
101、d couldnt see the likeness as clearly as I did, but he admitted that Uncle Frank was the strongest man he had ever known, and could do lots of tricks like making caramels disappear under napkins and walking on his hands. 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第
102、 6 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - - In the fall of our final year, our mood changed. the relaxed atmosphere of the preceding summer semester, the impromptu ball games, the boating on the Charles River, the late-night parties had disappeared, and we all started to get our heads down, studying late, and atte
103、ndance at classes rose steeply again. We all sensed we were coming to the end of our stay here, that we would never get a chance like this again, and we became determined not to waste it. Most important of course were the final exams in April and May in the following year. No one wanted the humiliat
104、ion of finishing last in class, so the peer group pressure to work hard was strong. Libraries which were once empty after five oclock in the afternoon were standing room only until the early hours of the morning, and guys wore the bags under their eyes and their pale, sleepy faces with pride, like m
105、edals proving their diligence. But there was something else. At the back of everyones mind was what we would do next, when we left university in a few months time. It wasnt always the high flyers with the top grades who knew what they were going to do. Quite often it was the quieter, less impressive
106、 students who had the next stages of their life mapped out. One had landed a job in his brothers advertising firm in Madison Avenue, another had got a script under provisional acceptance in Hollywood.The most ambitious student among us was going to work as a party activist at a local level. We all s
107、aw him ending up in the Senate or in Congress one day. But most people were either looking to continue their studies, or to make a living with a white-collar job in a bank, local government, or anything which would pay them enough to have a comfortable time in their early twenties, and then settle d
108、own with a family, a mortgage and some hope of promotion. I went home at Thanksgiving, and inevitably, mybrothers and sisters kept asking me what I was planning to do. I didnt know what to say. Actually, I did know what to say, but I thought theyd probably criticize me, so I told them what everyone
109、else was thinking of doing. My father was a lawyer, and I had always assumed he wanted me to go to law school, and follow his path through life. So I hesitated. This was not the answer I thought he would expect. Travel? Where? A writer? About what? I braced myself for some resistance to the idea. Yo
110、u have plenty of time. You dont need to go into a career which pays well just at the moment. You need to find out what you really enjoy now, because if you dont, you wont be successful later. He thought for a moment. Then he said, Look, its late. Lets take the boat out tomorrow morning, just you and
111、 me. Maybe we can catch some crabs for dinner, and we can talk more. It was a small motor boat, moored ten minutes away, and my father had owned it for years. Early next morning we set off along the estuary. We didnt talk much, but enjoyed the sound of the seagulls and the sight of the estuary coast
112、line and the sea beyond. There was no surf on the coastal waters at that time of day, so it was a smooth half-hour ride until my father switched off the motor. Lets see if we get lucky, he said, picked up a rusty, mesh basket with a rope attached and threw it into the sea. We waited a while, then my
113、 father stood up and said, Give me a hand with this, and we hauled up the crab cage onto the deck. Crabs fascinated me. They were so easy to catch. It wasnt just that they crawled into such an obvious trap, through a small hole in the lid of the basket, but it seemed as if they couldnt be bothered t
114、o crawl out again even when you took the lid off. They just sat there, waving their claws at you. The cage was brimming with dozens of soft shell crabs, piled high on top of each other. Why dont they try to escape? I wondered aloud to my father. And we watched. The crab climbed up the mesh towards t
115、he lid, and sure enough, just as it reached the top, one of its fellow crabs reached out, clamped its claw onto any available leg, and pulled it back. Several times the crab tried to defy his fellow captives, without luck. Not only did the crab give up its lengthy struggle to escape, but it actually
116、 began to help stop other crabs trying to escape. Hed finally chosen an easy way of life. Suddenly I understood why my father had suggested catching crabs that morning. He looked at me. Dont get pulled back by the others, he said. Spend some time figuring out who you are and what you want in life. L
117、ook back at the classes youre taking, and think aboutwhich ones were most productive for you personally.Then think about whats really important to you, what really interests you, what skills you have. Try to figure out where you want to live, where you want to go, what you want to earn, how you want to work. And if you cant answer these questions now, then take some time to find out. Because if you dont, youll never be happy. 名师资料总结 - - -精品资料欢迎下载 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 名师精心整理 - - - - - - - 第 7 页，共 7 页 - - - - - - - - -
