现代大学英语精读2课文

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大学英语精读2课文原文

大学英语精读2课文原文大学英语精读2课文原文Beneath my clenched fingers the alder was wriggling like a small, frightened snake. My father saw that I was about to drop it."Hang on to it!"“The branch is squirming," I repeated. "And I hear something that sounds like a river!""Open your eyes," my father ordered.I was stunned, as though he'd awakened me while I was dreaming."What does it mean?" I asked my father."It means that underneath us, right here, there's a little freshwater spring. If we dig, we could drink from it. I've just taught you how to find a spring. It's something my own father taught me. It isn't something you learn in school. And it isn't useless: a man can get along without writing andarithmetic, but he can never get along without water."Much later, I discovered that my father was famous in the region because of what the people called his "gift": before digging a well they always consulted him; they would watch him prospecting the fields or the hills, eyes closed, hands clenched on the fork of an alder bough. Wherever my father stopped, they marked the ground; there they would dig; and there water would gush forth.Years passed; I went to other schools, saw other countries, I had children, I wrote some books and my poor father is lying in the earth where so many times he had found fresh water.One day someone began to make a film about my villageand its inhabitants, from whom I've stolen so many of the stories that I tell. With the film crew we went to see a farmer to capture the image of a sad man: his children didn't want to receive the inheritance he'd spent his whole life preparing for them—the finest farm in the area. While the technicians were getting cameras and microphones ready the farmer put his arm around my shoulders, saying:"I knew your father well.""Ah! I know. Everybody in the village knows each other... No one feels like an outsider.""You know what's under your feet?""Hell?" I asked, laughing."Under your feet there's a well. Before I dug I called in specialists from the Department of Agriculture; they did research, they analyzed shovelfuls of dirt; and they made a report where they said there wasn't any water on my land. With the family, the animals, the crops, I need water. When I saw that those specialists hadn't found any. I thought of your father and I asked him to come over. He didn't want to; I think he was prettyfed up with me because I'd asked those specialists instead of him. But finally came; he went and cut off a little branch, then he walked around for a while with his eyes shut; he stopped, he listened to something we couldn't hear and then he said to me: "Dig right here, there's enough water to get your whole flock drunk and drown your specialist besides." We dug and found water. Fine water that's never heard of pollution.The film people were ready; they called to me to take my place."I'm gonna show you something," said the farmer, keeping me back." You wait right here."He disappeared into a shack which he must have used to store things, then came back with a branch which he held out to me."I never throw nothing away; I kept the alder branch your father cut to find my water. I don't understand, it hasn't dried out."Moved as I touched the branch, kept out of I don't know what sense of piety—and which really wasn't dry—I had the feeling that my father was watching me over my shoulder; I closed my eyes and, standing above the spring my father had discovered, I waited for the branch to writhe, I hoped the sound of gushing water would rise to my ears.The alder stayed motionless in my hands and the water beneath the earth refused to sing.Somewhere along the roads I'd taken since the village of my childhood I had forgotten my father's knowledge."Don't feel sorry," said the man, thinking no doubt of his farm and his childhood; "nowadays fathers can't pass on anything to the next generation."And he took the alder branch from my hands.桤木树枝在我紧握的手指下扭动，如受惊的蛇一般。

现代大学英语精读Book2Unit10 Pompeii 课文原文

Pompeii1 Not very far from Naples, a strange city sleeps under the hot Italian sun. It is the city of Pompeii, and there is no other city quite like it in all the world. Nothing lives in Pompeii except crickets and beetles and lizards, yet every year thousands of people travel from distant countries to visit it.2 Pompeii is a dead city. No one has lived there for nearly two thousand years—not since the summer of the year AD 79, to be exact.3 Until that year Pompeii was a prosperous city of 25,000 people. Nearby was the bay of Naples, an arm of the blue Mediterranean. Rich men came down from wealthy Rome to build seaside villas. Farmlands surrounded Pompeii. Rising behind the city was the 4,000-foot Mount Vesuvius, a grass-covered slope where the shepherds of Pompeii took their goats to graze. Pompeii was a busy city and a happy one.4 It died suddenly, in a terrible rain of fire and ash. The tragedy struck on the 24th of August, AD 79. Mount Vesuvius, which had slept quietly for centuries, erupted with savage violence. Tons of hot ash fell on Pompeii, hiding it from sight. For three days the sun did not break through the clouds of volcanic ash that filled the sky. And when the eruption ended, Pompeii was buried deep. A city had perished.5 Centuries passed…Pompeii was forgotten. Then, seventeen hundred years later, it was discovered again. Beneath the protecting shroud of ash, the city lay intact. Everything was as it had been the day Vesuvius erupted. There were still loaves of bread in the ovens of the bakeries. In the wine shops, the wine jars were in place, and on one counter could be seen a stain where a customer had thrown down his glass and fled.6 To go to Pompeii today is to take a trip backward in time. The old city comes to life all around you. You can almost hear the clatter of horses’ hoofs on the narrow streets, the cries of children and the laughter of the shopkeepers. The sky is cloudlessly blue, with the summer sun high in the sky. The grassy slopes of great Vesuvius rise to the heavens behind the city, and sunlight shimmers on the waters of the bay a thousand yards from the city walls. Ships from every nation are in port and strange languages can be heard in the streets.7 Such was Pompeii on its last day. And so it is today, now that the volcanic ash has been cleared away. A good imagination is all you need to restore it to activity.8 At dawn on August 24, in the year AD 79, Pompeii’s 25,000 people awakened to another hot day in that hot summer. There was going to be a contest in the arena that night and the whole town was looking forward to the bloody fights of the gladiators. The children headed toward school, carrying slates and followed by their dogs, In the forum the town’s important men had gathered after breakfast to read the political signs that had been posted during the night. Elsewhere in the forum the wool merchants talked business. The banker was going over his account books. At the inn late-rising travelers from the East awakened and yawned and called for breakfast.9 The quiet morning moved slowly along. There was nothing very unusual about Pompeii. But tragedy was on its way. Beneath Vesuvius’ vine-covered slopes a mighty force was about to break loose. At one o’clo ck in the afternoon the critical point was reached. The mountain blew up, raining death on thousands. Down in Pompeii, for miles from the summit, a tremendous explosion was heard.10 “What was that?”People cried from one end of town to another. They stared at each other, puzzled, troubled. Were the gods fighting in heaven？11 “Look!” somebody shouted. “Look at Vesuvius!”12 Thousands of eyes turned upward. Thousands of arms pointed. A black cloud was rising from the shattered of the mountain. Higher and higher it rose. Like the trunk of a tree, it rose in the air, branching out as it climbed.13 Minutes passed. The sound of the explosion died away, but it still reverberated in everyone’s ears. The cloud over Vesuvius continued to ris e, black as night, higher and higher. A strange rain began to fall on Pompeii-a rain of stones. The stones were light. They were pumice stones, consisting mostly of air bubbles. These poured down as though there had been a sudden cloudburst. The pumice stones did little damage.14 “What is happening?” Pompeiians asked one another. They rushe d to the temples-the Temple of Jupiter, the Temple of Apollo, the Temple of Isis. Priests tried to calm the citizens. The sky was dark. An hour went by and darkness still shrouded everything. All was confusion. The people of Pompeii now knew that doom was at hand. Their fears were redoubled when atremendous rain of hot ash began to fall. The wooden of some of the houses began to catch fire as the ash reached them. Other buildings were collapsing under the weight of the pumice stones.15 In these first few hours, only the quick-witted managed to escape. A wealthy wool merchant called his family together and crammed jewelry and money into a sack. Lighting a torch, he led his little band out into the nightmare of the streets. Many hundreds of Pompeiians fled in those first few dark hours. Stumbling in the darkness, they made their way to the city gates, then out and down to the harbor. They boarded boats and got away, living to tell the tale of their city’s destruction. Other preferred to remain within the city, huddling inside the temples, or in the public baths or in the cells of their homes. They still hoped the nightmare would end.16 It was evening now. And a trouble was in store for Pompeii. The earth trembled and quaked! Roofs went crashing in ruin, burying hundreds who had hoped to survive the eruption. In the forum the tall columns toppled. The entire city seemed to shake in the grip of a giant fist.17 Three feet of pumice stones now covered the ground. Ash floated in the air. Poisonous gas came drifting from the crater, though people could still breathe. Roofs were collapsing everywhere. The cries of the injured and dying filled the air. Rushing throngs, blinded by the darkness and the smoke, rushed up one street and down the next, trampling the fallen in a crazy fruitless dash toward safety, Dozens of people plunged into dead-end streets and found themselves trapped by crashing buildings. They waited there, too frightened to run further, expecting the end.18 The poison gas thickened as the terrible night advanced. It was possible to protect oneself from the pumice stones but not from the gas, and Pompeiians died by the hundreds. Carbon monoxide gas prevents the body from absorbing oxygen. Victims of carbon monoxide poisoning get sleepier until they lose consciousness, never to regain it. All over Pompeii, people lay down n beds of pumice stones, overwhelmed by the gas, and death came quietly to them.19 All though the endless night, Pompeiians wandered about the streets or crouched in their ruined homes or clustered in the temples to pray. By morning few remained alive. Not once had Vesuvius stopped hurling pumice stones and ash into the air, and the streets of Pompeii were filling quickly. At midday on August 25, exactly twenty-four hours after the beginning ofthe first eruption, a second eruption occurred. A second cloud of ash rose above Vesuvius’summit. The wind blew ash as far as Rome. But most of the new ash descended on Pompeii. 20 The deadly shower of stones and ash went into its second day. But it no longer mattered to Pompeii whether the eruption continued another day or another year. For by midday on August 25, Pompeii was a city of the dead.。

现代大学英语精读2课文译文

第一课又一学年——为了什么？约翰·切阿迪1.给你们讲讲我刚当老师时候的一次失败经历吧。

那是1940年的1月，我从研究生院毕业不久，在堪萨斯城大学开始第一学期的教学工作。

一个瘦高，长得就像顶上有毛的豆角架一样的男学生走进我的课堂，坐下，双臂交叉放在胸前，看着我，好像在说：“好吧，教我一些东西。

”两周后我们开始学习《哈姆雷特》。

三周后他双手叉腰走进我的办公室，“看，”他说，“我来这是学习当药剂师的。

我为什么必须读这个？”由于没有随身带着自己的书，他就指着桌子上放着的我的那本。

2.虽然我是位新老师，我本来可以告诉这个家伙许多事情的。

我本来可以指出，他考入的不是制药技工培训学校而是大学，而且他在毕业时，应该得到一张写有理学学士而不是“合格的磨药工”的学位证书。

这证书会证明他专修过药剂学，但它还能进一步证明他曾经接触过一些人类发展史上产生的思想。

换句话说，他上的不是技能培训学校而是大学，在大学里学生既要得到培训又要接受教育。

3.我本来可以把这些话都告诉他，但是很明显，他不会待很长时间，说了也没用。

4.但是，由于我当时很年轻而且责任感也很强，我尽量把我的意思这样表达出来：“在你的余生中，”我说，“平均每天24小时左右。

谈恋爱时，你会觉得它有点短；失恋时，你会觉得它有点长。

但平均每天24小时会保持不变。

在其余的大约8个小时的时间里，你会处于睡眠状态。

5.“然后在每个工作日8个小时左右的时间里，我希望你会忙于一些有用的事情。

假设你毕业于一所药科大学——或工程大学，法学院，或者其他什么大学——在那8个小时时间里，你将用到你的专业技能。

作为一个药剂师，你要确保氯化物没有和阿斯匹林混在一起；作为一个工程师，你要确保一切都在你的掌控之中；作为一个律师，你要保证你的当事人没有因为你的无能而被处以电刑。

这些都是有用的工作，它们涉及到的技能每个人都必须尊重，而且它们都能给你带来基本的满足。

无论你还干些什么，这些技能都很可能是你养家糊口的本领。

现代大学英语精读2第二版课文翻译

UNIT1 又一学年——为了什么？约翰·切阿迪1.给你们讲讲我刚当老师时候的一次失败经历吧。

那是1940年的1月，我从研究生院毕业不久，在堪萨斯城大学开始第一学期的教学工作。

一个瘦高，长得就像顶上有毛的豆角架一样的男学生走进我的课堂，坐下，双臂交叉放在胸前，看着我，好像在说：“好吧，教我一些东西。

”两周后我们开始学习《哈姆雷特》。

三周后他双手叉腰走进我的办公室，“看，”他说，“我来这是学习当药剂师的。

我为什么必须读这个？”由于没有随身带着自己的书，他就指着桌子上放着的我的那本。

2.虽然我是位新老师，我本来可以告诉这个家伙许多事情的。

我本来可以指出，他考入的不是制药技工培训学校而是大学，而且他在毕业时，应该得到一张写有理学学士而不是“合格的磨药工”的学位证书。

这证书会证明他专修过药剂学，但它还能进一步证明他曾经接触过一些人类发展史上产生的思想。

换句话说，他上的不是技能培训学校而是大学，在大学里学生既要得到培训又要接受教育。

3.我本来可以把这些话都告诉他，但是很明显，他不会待很长时间，说了也没用。

4.但是，由于我当时很年轻而且责任感也很强，我尽量把我的意思这样表达出来：“在你的余生中，”我说，“平均每天24小时左右。

谈恋爱时，你会觉得它有点短；失恋时，你会觉得它有点长。

但平均每天24小时会保持不变。

在其余的大约8个小时的时间里，你会处于睡眠状态。

5.“然后在每个工作日8个小时左右的时间里，我希望你会忙于一些有用的事情。

假设你毕业于一所药科大学——或工程大学，法学院，或者其他什么大学——在那8个小时时间里，你将用到你的专业技能。

这些都是有用的工作，它们涉及到的技能每个人都必须尊重，而且它们都能给你带来基本的满足。

无论你还干些什么，这些技能都很可能是你养家糊口的本领。

现代大学英语第二版精读2Unit...

又是一个新学年——为什么上大学约翰·齐阿迪1 让我来给你们讲讲我在刚开始教书生涯时所遭到的一次惨败。

那是1940年1月，我刚从研究生院毕业，在堪萨斯大学开始第一个学期的执教。

有这么一个学生，瘦高个，样子活像一根长着头发的豆架。

他走进课堂，坐了下来，双臂交叉抱在胸前，看了看我，就像在说：“好吧，那就教我点什么吧。

”两周后我们开始学习《哈姆雷特》。

又过了三周，他走进我的办公室，双手放在臀部（双手叉腰），“你知道，”他说，“我来这儿是为了当药剂师。

我干嘛要念这些玩意儿？”因为连书都没带，他就指着我桌上的那本书说。

2 尽管我刚当老师，但我也蛮可以告诉此兄好些道理。

我本可以指出，他来报名的地方不是一家药剂学校，而是一所大学。

学业完成时他将获得一纸文凭，上面写的将是理科学士学位，而不会写“合格的捣药技术员”。

这一纸文凭不仅会证明他专修过药剂学，还会证明他受到过人类文明思想的熏陶。

也就是说，他进的不是一家技校，而是一所大学。

在大学里，学生既要接受专业训练，又要接受人文教育。

3 我本可以给他讲这一大通道理，但显然他在大学待不了多久，不会把我的话当回事。

4 不过当时我年轻气盛，责任感很强。

于是我就试着这么和他说：“在你日后的生活中，你一天的时间大概平均算下来是二十四小时，恋爱的时候会短些，失恋的时候会长些，但平均数基本上保持不变。

这中间有八个小时左右，你在睡觉。

”5 “然后在大概八个小时的每个工作日里，你会——但愿你会——努力从事有益的工作。

假设你已经上完药剂师学校，或工程、法律学校，或随便其他什么学校，在那八小时内你将运用你的专业技能。

你要做的是确保别因自己技艺不精而把氰化物掺进阿司匹林，或让公牛跃过你修建的篱笆，或因为你的无能而把你的委托人送上电椅。

这些都是有用的职业。

这些工作都需要人人应该尊重的技能，也能给你带来基本的满足感。

不说别的，很可能你要靠它们来养家糊口（换取餐桌的食物，养活你的妻子，养育你的子女）。

(完整版)现代大学英语精读2Unit3theriteofspring译文

现代大学英语精读2 Unit3 the rite of spring春之祭说真的，我从来都不明白，我们到底为什么要有一个菜园子，为什么36年前，当我第一次在乡下买了房子以后，我会别的事情都不做，首先就挖一块菜地。

现在想想买一堆胡萝卜或者甜菜头，相对来说那么容易，而且又那么便宜，为什么还要自己去种呢？尤其是那些块根植物，自己种的和店里买的，根本就很难分辨。

这里肯定有人的本性在起作用。

人就喜欢脱离现实，毫无意义地瞎折腾。

再说，我又并非特别喜欢吃蔬菜，我宁可吃些油汪汪、香喷喷、一咬一口肉汁的东西，比如说热狗。

要说，如果能在窗外种热狗的话，那倒真的有了一种可以毫不犹豫为自己辩护的理由了。

可是，在现在这种情况下，我无法否认，每当4月来临，我就会发现自己走出家门，倚着院子外的篱笆，望着那块倒霉的地，十分理智地下定决心再也不去种它了。

然而，总有那么一天，当我早晨醒来的时候，一股香味似乎从窗外飘进来，就好像来自地球中心的泥土的清香味。

这时，太阳似乎也突然认真起来，它投射到地毯上的光似乎比往常要更加深黄。

那些鸟开始歇斯底里地鸣叫，心里和我一样，想着那些美味可口的虫子正从那融化的土中慢慢爬出来。

让我回去看那块地的并不只是快乐，而是矛盾和斗争。

每年碰到的问题是一样的：今年我们该使用什么方法？前几年，我们在一行行的蔬菜之间放上了36英寸宽的黑塑料薄膜。

效果极好，干旱的时候能够保湿，而且保证没有杂草。

但是黑塑料薄膜一看就是来自工厂的东西，一点浪漫的情调都没有。

所以我就逐步改用干草作覆盖料。

我们收割了不少干草，草一腐烂，的确能改善土壤的结构。

再说，看起来很舒服，而且又不花一分钱。

家里有个菜园子能是你感觉到我们这个小小星球的表面有多娇嫩、多丰饶、多容易被毁坏。

在我们那块50英尺宽、70英尺长的土地上，肯定有十几种不同的土壤。

西红柿在某个地方长不好，但是在另一个地方却长得很好。

其他庄稼也一样。

我想，要是你在地里洒满化肥，这种差别就不会如此明显。

现代大学英语第二版精读2 Unit 4 The man in the water

Translation of Text A水中人穸杰•罗森布赖特就灾难而言，这次灾难虽然可怕，但并非绝无仅有，肯定也不是美国空难史上最严重的一次。

其特别之处在于发生在地面交通高峰时刻，坠落时飞机撞到了一座桥上。

另外一个特别之处就是空难发生的地点——华盛顿，在严冬里突如其来的一阵强风中，钢铁的机身猛烈撞击到钢铁的桥面，把这个布局合理、井然有序的城市，搞得一片混乱。

从华盛顿国家机场起飞后，喷气式飞机一般都像觅食的海鸥一样，会在各个总统纪念碑上空盘旋一阵。

此刻，那架坠落的飞机即是其中的代表。

除了金属与金属之间的冲突，此次空难也是色彩上的视觉冲突---有着“空中花园”之称的蓝绿相间的佛罗里达航空公司的一架客机，坠人了充满了灰色冰块、黑压压的河水中。

毫无疑问，这一切都引人注目，不过，除了人员死亡之外，其他因素都没有什么特别之处，虽说死亡总不是一般事件，但也未必会引起上百万人落泪或关注。

那么这次空难为什么如此震撼人心呢？也许在这次空难中，人们看到的不仅仅是一次机械故障。

也许，人们根本不认为这是人类的一次失败，而是看到了自身品质的某种胜利。

毕竟，这是两种自然力量---恶劣的天气与人的品德之间的冲撞。

上周三，恶劣的天气与以往一样无情，把第90次航班从空中掀了下来。

就在当天下午，人性在摸索中、抗争中挺身而出，对抗死神。

此次事件的四位英雄中，有三位能讲叙自己的事迹。

唐纳德•厄舍和尤金•温莎是美国国家公园巡警的一个直升机的机组成员，他们冒着生命危险一次次地将起落架放入水中救起幸存者。

在电视屏幕他俩并肩而坐，提起他的英勇事迹，他们说当时只是做了自己分内的事情。

28岁的勒尼•斯库特尼克是国会预算办公室的职员，谈起他跳下本将一名受伤的妇女救上岸时，他说：“我从来都没想过自己会这样做。

”他补充“总得有人下水救人。

”他说的是每个英雄都说的活，但此话无论重复多少遍，听者的敬仰丝毫不减。

实际上，没有人要求哪个人非得下水救人，可有人自觉下去了，这正是人们久久不能忘怀这次灾难的原因之一。

现代大学英语精读2课文

Unit1Another School Year — What ForLet 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 top 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" And 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 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 to say, he had not entered a technical training schoolbut 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 wasn't going to be around long enough for it to matter. Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense 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, 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 that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesn't jump the fence, or that your client doesn't 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 everything else, they will probably be what puts food on your table, supports your wife, and rearsyour children. They will be your income, and may it always suffice.""But having finished the day's work, what do you do with those other eight hours Let's say you go home to your family. What sort of family 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 without 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; I'll take care of my own. Me, I'm out to make money." "I hope you make a lot of it," I told him, "because you're going to be badly stuck for something to do when you're 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 basic look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of man's development we call history — then you haveno 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 such 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, 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.And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankind's spiritual resources. 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 mindincludes 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. A civilized mind is, in essence, 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 of a democracy.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.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, saysimplicitly: "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."Unit2Maheegun My BrotherThe year I found Maheegun, spring was late in coming. That day, I 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 was 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 didn't have our troubles. Maheegun was the most mischievous wolf cub ever. He was curious too. Like looking into Grandma's sewing basket — which he upset, scattering thread 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 the 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 Maheegun 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 Grandpa's repeated warnings, and one night left Maheegun unchained. The following morning 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 trapper's shack stood, Maheegun seemed to have become restless. 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 themoon-flooded cabin was my grandfather standing beside me. "Come and 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.Slowly 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."He's gone," I said."Yes, he's 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 battlefor life, found time to remember me.It was not long after that I found the answer.Easter came early that year and during the holidays I went to visit my cousins.My uncle was to bring me home in his truck. But he was detained by some urgent business. So I decided to come back home on my own.A mile down the road I slipped into my snowshoes and turned into the bush. The strong sunshine had dimmed. I had not gone far before big flakes of snow began drifting down.The snow thickened fast. I could not locate the tall pine that stood on the north slope of Little Mountain. I circled to my right and stumbled into a snow-filled creek bed. By then the snow had made a blanket of white darkness, but I knew only too well there should have been no creek there.I tried to travel west but only to hit the creek again. I knew I had gone in a great circle and I was lost.There was only one thing to do. Camp for the night and hope that by morning the storm would have blown itself out. I quickly made a bed of boughs and started a fire with the bark of an old dead birch. The first night I was comfortable enough. But when the first gray light came I realized that I was in deep trouble.The storm was even worse. Everything had been smothered by the fierce whiteness.The light of another day still saw no end to the storm. I began to get confused. I couldn't recall whether it had been storming for three or four days.Then came the clear dawn. A great white stillness had taken over and with it, biting cold. My supply of wood was almost gone. There must be more.Slashing off green branches with my knife, I cut my hand and blood spurted freely from my wound. It was some time before the bleeding stopped. I wrapped my hand with a piece of cloth I tore off from my shirt. After some time, my fingers grew cold and numb, so I took the bandage off and threw it away.How long I squatted over my dying fire I don't know. But then I saw the gray shadow between the trees. It was a timber wolf. He had followed the blood spots on the snow to the blood-soaked bandage."Yap... yap... yap... yoooo!" The howl seemed to freeze the world with fear.It was the food cry. He was calling, "Come, brothers, I have found meat." And I was the meat!Soon his hunting partner came to join him. Any time now, Ithought, their teeth would pierce my bones.Suddenly the world exploded in snarls. I was thrown against the branches of the shelter. But I felt no pain. And a great silence had come. Slowly I worked my way out of the snow and raised my head. There, about 50 feet away, crouched my two attackers with their tails between their legs. Then I heard a noise to my side and turned my head. There stood a giant black wolf. It was Maheegun, and he had driven off the others. "Maheegun... Maheegun...," I sobbed, as I moved through the snow toward him. "My brother, my brother," I said, giving him my hand. He reached out and licked at the dried blood.I got my little fire going again, and as I squatted by it, I started to cry. Maybe it was relief or weakness or both — I don't know. Maheegun whimpered too.Maheegun stayed with me through the long night, watching me with those big eyes. The cold and loss of blood were taking their toll.The sun was midway across the sky when I noticed how restless Maheegun had become. He would run away a few paces — head up, listening — then run back to me. Then I heard. It was dogs. It was the searching party! I put the last of my birch bark on the fire and fanned it into life.The sound of the dogs grew louder. Then the voices of men. Suddenly, as if by magic, the police dog team came up out of the creek bed, and a man came running toward my fire. It was my grandfather.The old hunter stopped suddenly when he saw the wolf. He raised his rifle. "Don't shoot!" I screamed and ran toward him, falling through the snow. "It's Maheegun. Don't shoot!"He lowered his rifle. Then I fell forward on my face, into the snow.I woke up in my bedroom. It was quite some time before my eyes came into focus enough to see my grandfather sitting by my bed. "You have slept three days," he said softly. "The doc says you will be all right in a week or two.""And Maheegun" I asked weakly."He should be fine. He is with his own kind."Unit3More Crime and Less PunishmentIf you are looking for an explanation of why we don't get tough with criminals, you need only look at the numbers. Each year almost a third of the households in America are victims of violence or theft. This amounts to more than 41 million crimes,many more than we are able to punish. There are also too many criminals. The best estimates suggest that 36 million to 40 million people (16 to 18 percent of the U. S. population) have arrest records for nontraffic offenses. We already have 2. 4 million people under some form of correctional supervision, 412, 000 of them locked away in a prison cell. We don't have room for any more!The painful fact is that the more crime there is the less we are able to punish it. This is why the certainty and severity of punishment must go down when the crime rate goes up. Countries like Saudi Arabia can afford to give out harsh punishments precisely because they have so little crime. But can we afford to cut off the hands of those who committed more than 35 million property crimes each year Can we send them to prison Can we execute more than 22,000 murderersWe need to think about the relationship between punishment and crime in a new way. A decade of careful research has failed to provide clear and convincing evidence that the threat of punishment reduces crime. We think that punishment deters crime, but it just might be the other way around. It just might be that crime deters punishment: that there is so much crime that it simply cannot be punished.This is the situation we find ourselves in today. Just as the decline in the number of high-school graduates has made it easier to gain admission to the college of one's choice, the gradual increase in the criminal population has made it more difficult to get into prison. While elite colleges and universities still have high standards of admissions, some of the most "exclusive" prisons now require about five prior serious crimes before an inmate is accepted into their correctional program. Our current crop of prisoners is an elite group, on the whole much more serious offenders than those who were once imprisoned in Alcatraz.These features show that it makes little sense to blame the police, judges or correctional personnel for being soft on criminals. There is not much else they can do. The police can't find most criminals and those they do find are difficult and costly to convict. Those convicted can't all be sent to prison. The society demands that we do everything we can against crime. The practical reality is that there is very little the police, courts or prisons can do about the crime problem. The criminal justice system must then become as powerless as a parent who has charge of hundreds of teenage children and who is nonetheless expected to answer the TV message: "It's 10 o'clock!Do you know where your children are"A few statistics from the Justice Department's recent "Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice" illustrate my point. Of every 100 serious crimes committed in America, only 33 are actually reported to the police. Of the 33 reported, about six lead to arrest. Of the six arrested, only three are prosecuted and convicted. The others are rejected or dismissed due to evidence or witness problems or are sent elsewhere for medical treatment instead of punishment. Of the three convicted, only one is sent to prison. The other two are allowed to live in their community under supervision. Of the select few sent to prison, more than half receive a maximum sentence of five years. The average inmate, however, leaves prison in about two years. Most prisoners gain early release not because parole boards are too easy on crime, but because it is much cheaper to supervise a criminal in the community. And, of course, prison officials must make room for the new prisoners sent almost daily from the courts.We could, of course, get tough with the people we already have in prison and keep them locked up for longer periods of time. Yet when measured against the lower crime rates this would probably produce, longer prison sentences are not worth thecost to state and local governments. Besides, those states that have tried to gain voters' approval for bonds to build new prisons often discover that the public is unwilling to pay for prison construction.And if it were willing to pay, long prison sentences may not be effective in reducing crime. In 1981, 124,000 convicts were released from prison. If we had kept them in jail for an additional year, how many crimes would have been prevented While it is not possible to know the true amount of crime committed by people released from prison in any given year, we do know the extent to which those under parole are jailed again for major crime convictions. This number is a surprisingly low 6 percent (after three years it rises to only 11 percent). Even if released prisoners commit an average of two crimes each, this would amount to only 15,000 crimes prevented: a drop in the bucket when measured against the 41 million crimes committed each year.More time spent in prison is also more expensive. The best estimates are that it costs an average of $13,000 to keep a person in prison for one year. If we had a place to keep the 124,000 released prisoners, it would have cost us $ billion to prevent 15,000 crimes. This works out to more than $100,000 percrime prevented. But there is more. With the average cost of prison construction running around $50,000 per bed, it would cost more than $6 billion to build the necessary cells. The first-year operating cost would be $150,000 per crime prevented, worth it if the victim were you or me, but much too expensive to be feasible as a national policy.Faced with the reality of the numbers, I will not be so foolish as to suggest a solution to the crime problem. My contribution to the public debate begins and ends with this simple observation: getting tough with criminals is not the answer.Unit4The Nightingale and the Rose "She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student, "but in all my garden there is no red rose."From her nest in the oak tree the Nightingale heard him and she looked out through the leaves and wondered."No red rose in all my garden!" he cried, and his beautiful eyes filled with tears. "Ah, I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose my life is made wretched.""Here at last is a true lover," said the Nightingale. "Night after night have I sung of him, and now I see him."The Prince gives a ball tomorrow night," murmured the young Student, "and my love will be there. If I bring her a red rose she will dance with me till dawn. I shall hold her in my arms, and she will lean her head upon my shoulder. But there is no red rose in my garden, so I shall sit lonely and my heart will break.""Here, indeed, is the true lover," said the Nightingale. Surely love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds and opals."The musicians will play upon their stringed instruments," said the young Student, "and my love will dance to the sound of the harp and the violin. She will dance so lightly that her feet will not touch the floor. But with me she will not dance, for I have no red rose to give her," and he flung himself down on the grass, and buried his face in his hands, and wept. "Why is he weeping" asked a green Lizard, as he ran past him with his tail in the air."Why, indeed" said a Butterfly, who was fluttering about after a sunbeam."Why, indeed" whispered a Daisy to his neighbor, in a soft, lowvoice."He is weeping for a red rose," said the Nightingale. "For a red rose" they cried, "how very ridiculous!" and the little Lizard, who was something of a cynic, laughed outright. But the Nightingale understood the Student's sorrow, and sat silent in the Oak-tree.Suddenly she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She passed through the grove like a shadow and like a shadow she sailed across the garden.In the centre of the grass-plot stood a beautiful Rose-tree, and when she saw it she flew over to it. "Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song."But the Tree shook its head."My roses are white," it answered, "as white as the foam of the sea, and whiter than the snow upon the mountain. But go to my brother who grows round the old sun-dial, and perhaps he will give you what you want."So the Nightingale flew over to the Rose-tree that was growing round the old sun-dial."Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song." But the Tree shook its head."My roses are yellow," it answered, "as yellow as the hair ofthe mermaiden, and yellower than the daffodil that blooms In the meadow. But go to my brother who grows beneath the Student's window, and perhaps he will give you what you want."So the Nightingale flew over to the Rose-tree that was growing beneath the Student's window."Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song." But the Tree shook its head."My roses are red," it answered, "as red as the feet of the dove, and redder than the great fans of coral. But the winter has chilled my veins, and the frost has nipped my buds, and the storm has broken my branches, and I shall have no roses at all this year.""One red rose is all that I want," cried the Nightingale, "only one red rose! Is there no way by which I can get it" "There is a way," answered the Tree, "but it is so terrible that I dare not tell it to you.""Tell it to me," said the Nightingale, "I am not afraid." "If you want a red rose," said the Tree, "you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart's blood. You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine.""Death is a great price to pay for a red rose," cried the Nightingale, "and life is very dear to all. Yet love is better than life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man"So she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She swept over the garden like a shadow, and like a shadow she sailed through the grove.The young Student was still lying on the grass, and the tears were not yet dry in his beautiful eyes. "Be happy," cried the Nightingale, "be happy, you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover."The Student looked up from the grass, and listened, but he could not understand what the Nightingale was saying to him. But the Oak-tree understood and felt sad, for he was very fond of the little Nightingale. "Sing me one last song," he whispered. "I shall feel lonely when you are gone."So the Nightingale sang to the Oak-tree, and her voice was like water bubbling from a silver jar.When she had finished her song, the Student got up."She has form," he said to himself, as he walked away. "Thatcannot be denied. But has she got feeling I am afraid not. In fact, like most artists, she is all style without any sincerity." And he went to his room, and lay down on his bed, and after a time, he fell asleep.And when the Moon shone in the heaven, the Nightingale flew to the Rose-tree, and set her breast against the thorn. All night long she sang with her breast against the thorn, and the cold crystal Moon leaned down and listened. All night long she sang, and the thorn went deeper into her breast, and her life-blood ebbed away from her.She sang first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl. And on the topmost spray of the Rose-tree there blossomed a marvelous rose, petal following petal, as song followed song.But the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the thorn. "Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, "or the Day will come before the rose is finished."So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and louder and louder grew her song, for she sang of the birth of passion in the soul of a man and a maid.And a delicate flush of pink came into the leaves of the rose, like the flush in the face of the bridegroom when he kisses thelips of the bride. But the thorn had not yet reached her heart so the rose's heart remained white.And the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the thorn. "Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, "or the Day will come before the rose is finished."So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb.And the marvelous rose became crimson. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as ruby was the heart.But the Nightingale's voice grew fainter and a film came over her eyes. Fainter and fainter grew her song, and she felt something choking her in her throat.Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and lingered on in the sky. The Red Rose heard it, and trembled all over with ecstasy, and opened its petals in the cold morning air."Look, look!" cried the Tree, "the rose is finished now." But the Nightingale made no answer, for she was lying dead in the long grass, with the thorn in her heart.。

现代大学英语(第二版)精读2课文译文

第一课又一学年——为了什么？约翰•切阿迪给你们讲讲我刚当老师时候的一次失败经历吧。

那是1940年的1月，我从研究生院毕业不久，在堪萨斯城大学开始第一学期的教学工作。

一个瘦高，长得就像顶上有毛的豆角架一样的男学生走进我的课堂，坐下，双臂交叉放在胸前，看着我，好像在说：“好吧，教我一些东丙。

”两周后我们开始学习《哈姆雷特》。

三周后他双手叉腰走进我的办公室，“看，”他说，“我来这是学习当药剂师的。

我为什么必须读这个？”由于没有随身带着日己的书，他就指着桌子上放着的我的那木。

虽然我是位新老师，我木来可以告诉这个家伙许多事情的。

我木来可以指出，他考入的4、是制药技工培训学校而是大学，而且他在毕业时，应该得到一张写有理学学士而不是“合格的磨药工”的学位证书。

这证书会证明他专修过药剂学，但它还能进一步证明他曾经接触过一些人类发展史上产生的思想。

换均话说，他上的不是技能培训学校而是大学，在火学里学生既要得到培训又要接受教冇。

我本来可以把这些话都告诉他，但是很明显，他不会待很长时间，说了也没用。

但是，由于我当时很年轻而且责任感也很强，我尽景把我的意思这样表达出来：“在你的余生中，”我说，“平均每天24小时左右。

谈恋爱时，你会觉得它有点短；失恋时，你会觉得它有点长。

但平均每天24小时会保持不变。

在其余的大约8个小时的时间里，你会处于睡眠状态。

“然后在每个工作日8个小时左右的时间里，我希望你会忙于一些有用的事情。

假设你毕业于一所药科大学——或工程大学，法学院，或者其他什么大学——在那8 个小时时间里，你将用到你的专业技能。

作为一个药剂师，你要确保氣化物没有和阿斯匹林混在一起；作为一个工程师，你要确保一切都在你的掌控之中；作为一个律师，你要保证你的当事人没有因为你的无能而被处以电刑。

这呰都是有用的T.作，它们涉及到的技能每个人都必须尊重，而且它们都能给你带来基木的满足。

无论你还干些什么，这些技能都很可能是你养家糊I」的木领。

大学英语精读2全部课文

大学英语精读2全部课文.txt世上最珍贵的不是永远得不到或已经得到的，而是你已经得到并且随时都有可能失去的东西！爱情是灯，友情是影子。

灯灭时，你会发现周围都是影子。

朋友，是在最后可以给你力量的人。

1.The dinner partyI first heard this tale in India, where is told as if true -- though any naturalist would know it couldn't be. Later someone told me that the story appeared in a magazine shortly before the First World War. That magazine story, and the person who wrote it, I have never been able to track down.The country is India. A colonial official and his wife are giving a large dinner party. They are seated with their guests -- officers and their wives, and a visiting American naturalist -- in their spacious dining room, which has a bare marble floor, open rafters and wide glass doors opening onto a veranda.A spirited discussion springs up between a young girl who says that women have outgrown the jumping-on-a-chair-at-the-sight-of-a-mouse era and a major who says that they haven't."A woman's reaction in any crisis," the major says, "is to scream. And while a man may feel like it, he has that ounce more of control than a woman has. And that last ounce is what really counts."The American does not join in the argument but watches the other guests. As he looks, he sees a strange expression come over the face of the hostess. She is staring straight ahead, her muscles contracting slightly. She motions to the native boy standing behind her chair and whispers something to him. The boy's eyes widen: he quickly leaves the room.Of the guests, none except the American notices this or sees the boy place a bowl of milk on the veranda just outside the open doors.The American comes to with a start. In India, milk in a bowl means only one thing -- bait for a snake. He realizes there must be a cobra in the room. He looks up at the rafters -- the likeliest place -- but they are bare. Three corners of the room are empty, and in the fourth the servants are waiting to serve the next course. There is only one place left -- under the table.His first impulse is to jump back and warn the others, but he knows the commotion would frighten the cobra into striking. He speaks quickly, the tone of his voice so commanding that it silences everyone."I want to know just what control everyone at this table has. I will count three hundred -- that's five minutes -- and not one of you is to move a muscle. Those who move will forfeit 50 rupees. Ready?"The 20 people sit like stone images while he counts. He is saying "...two hundred and eighty..." when, out of the corner of his eye, he sees the cobra emerge and make for the bowl of milk. Screams ring out as he jumps to slam the veranda doors safely shut."You were right, Major!" the host exclaims. "A man has just shown us an example of perfect self-control.""Just a minute," the American says, turning to his hostess. "Mrs. Wynnes, how did you know that cobra was in the room?"A faint smile lights up the woman's face as she replies: "Because it was crawling across my foot."提问者：纯美素然 - 三级最佳答案检举晚宴我最初听到这个故事是在印度，那儿的人们今天讲起它来仍好像确有其事似的——尽管任何一位博物学家都知道这不可能是真的。

现代大学英语第二版精读2 unit 4课文翻译

the plane clipped it at a moment of high traffic, one routine thus intersecting another and disrupting both. Then, too, there was the location of the event. Washington, the city of form and regulations, turned chaotic, deregulated, by a blast of real winter and a single slap of metal on metal. The jets from Washington National Airport that normally swoop around the presidential monuments like famished gulls are, for the moment, emblemized by the one that fell; so there is that detail. And there was the aesthetic clash as well—blue-and-green Air Florida, the name a flying garden, sunk down among gray chunks in a black river. All that was worth noticing, to be sure. Still, there was nothing very special in any of it, except death, which, while always special, does not necessarily bring millions to tears or to attention. Why, then, the shock here?就这次灾难而言，这次灾难和其他灾难一样很严重，但并不特殊，当然也绝对不在美国有记载的伤亡人数最多的空难之列。

现代大学英语精读2课文

Unit1Another School Year — What ForLet 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 top 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" And 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 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 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 wasn't going to be around long enough for it to matter.Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense 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, 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 that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesn't jump the fence, or that your client doesn't 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 everything 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 day's work, what do you do with those other eight hours Let's say you go home to your family. What sort of family 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 without 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; I'll take care of my own. Me, I'm out to make money.""I hope you make a lot of it," I told him, "because you're going to be badly stuck for something to do when you're 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 basic look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of man's development we call history —then you have nobusiness 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 such 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 s ingle lifetime to invent for oneself everything one needs to know in order to be a civilized human.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.And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankind's spiritual resources. 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. A civilized mind is, in essence, 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 of a democracy.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.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."Unit2Maheegun My BrotherThe year I found Maheegun, spring was late in coming. That day, I 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 was 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 didn't have our troubles. Maheegun was the most mischievous wolf cub ever. Hewas curious too. Like looking into Grandma's sewing basket —which he upset, scattering thread 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 the 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 Maheegun 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 Grandpa's repeated warnings, and one night left Maheegun unchained. The following morning 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 trapper's shack stood, Maheegun seemed to have become restless. 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 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 s itting still, ears pointed, alert, listening."Maheegun," whispered my grandfather.Slowly 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."He's gone," I said."Yes, he's 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 answer.Easter came early that year and during the holidays I went to visit my cousins.My uncle was to bring me home in his truck. But he was detained by some urgent business. So I decided to come back home on my own.A mile down the road I slipped into my snowshoes and turned into the bush. The strong sunshine had dimmed. I had not gone far before big flakes of snow began drifting down.The snow thickened fast. I could not locate the tall pine that stood on the north slope of Little Mountain. I circled to my right and stumbled into a snow-filled creek bed. By then the snowhad made a blanket of white darkness, but I knew only too well there should have been no creek there.I tried to travel west but only to hit the creek again. I knew I had gone in a great circle and I was lost.There was only one thing to do. Camp for the night and hope that by morning the storm would have blown itself out. I quickly made a bed of boughs and started a fire with the bark of an old dead birch. The first night I was comfortable enough. But when the first gray light came I realized that I was in deep trouble. The storm was even worse. Everything had been smothered by the fierce whiteness.The light of another day still saw no end to the storm. I began to get confused. I couldn't recall whether it had been storming for three or four days.Then came the clear dawn. A great white stillness had taken over and with it, biting cold. My supply of wood was almost gone. There must be more.Slashing off green branches with my knife, I cut my hand and blood spurted freely from my wound. It was some time before the bleeding stopped. I wrapped my hand with a piece of cloth I tore off from my shirt. After some time, my fingers grew cold and numb, so I took the bandage off and threw it away.How long I squatted over my dying fire I don't know. But then I saw the gray shadow between the trees. It was a timber wolf. He had followed the blood spots on the snow to the blood-soaked bandage."Yap... yap... yap... yoooo!" The howl seemed to freeze the world with fear.It was the food cry. He was calling, "Come, brothers, I have found meat." And I was the meat! Soon his hunting partner came to join him. Any time now, I thought, their teeth would pierce my bones.Suddenly the world exploded in snarls. I was thrown against the branches of the shelter. But I felt no pain. And a great silence had come. Slowly I worked my way out of the snow and raised my head. There, about 50 feet away, crouched my two attackers with their tails between their legs. Then I heard a noise to my side and turned my head. There stood a giant black wolf. It was Maheegun, and he had driven off the others."Maheegun... Maheegun...," I sobbed, as I moved through the snow toward him. "My brother, my brother," I said, giving him my hand. He reached out and licked at the dried blood.I got my little fire going again, and as I squatted by it, I started to cry. Maybe it was relief or weakness or both — I don't know. Maheegun whimpered too.Maheegun stayed with me through the long night, watching me with those big eyes. The cold and loss of blood were taking their toll.The sun was midway across the sky when I noticed how restless Maheegun had become. He would run away a few paces — head up, listening — then run back to me. Then I heard. It was dogs. It was the searching party! I put the last of my birch bark on the fire and fanned it into life.The sound of the dogs grew louder. Then the voices of men. Suddenly, as if by magic, the police dog team came up out of the creek bed, and a man came running toward my fire. It was my grandfather.The old hunter stopped suddenly when he saw the wolf. He raised his rifle. "Don't shoot!" I screamed and ran toward him, falling through the snow. "It's Maheegun. Don't shoot!"He lowered his rifle. Then I fell forward on my face, into the snow.I woke up in my bedroom. It was quite some time before my eyes came into focus enough to see my grandfather sitting by my bed."You have slept three days," he said softly. "The doc says you will be all right in a week or two." "And Maheegun" I asked weakly."He should be fine. He is with his own kind."Unit3More Crime and Less PunishmentIf you are looking for an explanation of why we don't get tough with criminals, you need only look at the numbers. Each year almost a third of the households in America are victims of violence or theft. This amounts to more than 41 million crimes, many more than we are able to punish. There are also too many criminals. The best estimates suggest that 36 million to 40 million people (16 to 18 percent of the U. S. population) have arrest records for nontraffic offenses. We already have 2. 4 million people under some form of correctional supervision, 412, 000 of them locked away in a prison cell. We don't have room for any more!The painful fact is that the more crime there is the less we are able to punish it. This is why the certainty and severity of punishment must go down when the crime rate goes up. Countries like Saudi Arabia can afford to give out harsh punishments precisely because they have so little crime. But can we afford to cut off the hands of those who committed more than 35 million property crimes each year Can we send them to prison Can we execute more than 22,000 murderersWe need to think about the relationship between punishment and crime in a new way. A decade of careful research has failed to provide clear and convincing evidence that the threat of punishment reduces crime. We think that punishment deters crime, but it just might be the other way around. It just might be that crime deters punishment: that there is so much crime that it simply cannot be punished.This is the situation we find ourselves in today. Just as the decline in the number of high-school graduates has made it easier to gain admission to the college of one's choice, the gradual increase in the criminal population has made it more difficult to get into prison. While elite colleges and universities still have high standards of admissions, some of the most "exclusive" prisons now require about five prior serious crimes before an inmate is accepted into their correctional program. Our current crop of prisoners is an elite group, on the whole much more serious offenders than those who were once imprisoned in Alcatraz.These features show that it makes little sense to blame the police, judges or correctional personnel for being soft on criminals. There is not much else they can do. The police can't find most criminals and those they do find are difficult and costly to convict. Those convicted can't all be sent to prison. The society demands that we do everything we can against crime. The practical reality is that there is very little the police, courts or prisons can do about the crime problem. The criminal justice system must then become as powerless as a parent who has charge of hundreds of teenage children and who is nonetheless expected to answer the TV message: "It's 10 o'clock! Do you know where your children are"A few statistics from the Justice Department's recent "Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice" illustrate my point. Of every 100 serious crimes committed in America, only 33 areactually reported to the police. Of the 33 reported, about six lead to arrest. Of the six arrested, only three are prosecuted and convicted. The others are rejected or dismissed due to evidence or witness problems or are sent elsewhere for medical treatment instead of punishment. Of the three convicted, only one is sent to prison. The other two are allowed to live in their community under supervision. Of the select few sent to prison, more than half receive a maximum sentence of five years. The average inmate, however, leaves prison in about two years. Most prisoners gain early release not because parole boards are too easy on crime, but because it is much cheaper to supervise a criminal in the community. And, of course, prison officials must make room for the new prisoners sent almost daily from the courts.We could, of course, get tough with the people we already have in prison and keep them locked up for longer periods of time. Yet when measured against the lower crime rates this would probably produce, longer prison sentences are not worth the cost to state and local governments. Besides, those states that have tried to gain voters' approval for bonds to build new prisons often discover that the public is unwilling to pay for prison construction.And if it were willing to pay, long prison sentences may not be effective in reducing crime. In 1981, 124,000 convicts were released from prison. If we had kept them in jail for an additional year, how many crimes would have been prevented While it is not possible to know the true amount of crime committed by people released from prison in any given year, we do know the extent to which those under parole are jailed again for major crime convictions. This number is a surprisingly low 6 percent (after three years it rises to only 11 percent). Even if released prisoners commit an average of two crimes each, this would amount to only 15,000 crimes prevented: a drop in the bucket when measured against the 41 million crimes committed each year.More time spent in prison is also more expensive. The best estimates are that it costs an average of $13,000 to keep a person in prison for one year. If we had a place to keep the 124,000 released prisoners, it would have cost us $1.6 billion to prevent 15,000 crimes. This works out to more than $100,000 per crime prevented. But there is more. With the average cost of prison construction running around $50,000 per bed, it would cost more than $6 billion to build the necessary cells. The first-year operating cost would be $150,000 per crime prevented, worth it if the victim were you or me, but much too expensive to be feasible as a national policy.Faced with the reality of the numbers, I will not be so foolish as to suggest a so lution to the crime problem. My contribution to the public debate begins and ends with this simple observation: getting tough with criminals is not the answer.Unit4The Nightingale and the Rose"She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student, "but in all my garden there is no red rose."From her nest in the oak tree the Nightingale heard him and she looked out through the leaves and wondered."No red rose in all my garden!" he cried, and his beautiful eyes filled with tears. "Ah, I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose my life is made wretched.""Here at last is a true lover," said the Nightingale. "Night after night have I sung o f him, and now I see him."The Prince gives a ball tomorrow night," murmured the young Student, "and my love will be there. If I bring her a red rose she will dance with me till dawn. I shall hold her in my arms, and she will lean her head upon my shoulder. But there is no red rose in my garden, so I shall sit lonely and my heart will break.""Here, indeed, is the true lover," said the Nightingale. Surely love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds and opals."The musicians will play upon their stringed instruments," said the young Student, "and my love will dance to the sound of the harp and the violin. She will dance so lightly that her feet will not touch the floor. But with me she will not dance, for I have no red rose to give her," and he flung himself down on the grass, and buried his face in his hands, and wept."Why is he weeping" asked a green Lizard, as he ran past him with his tail in the air."Why, indeed" said a Butterfly, who was fluttering about after a sunbeam."Why, indeed" whispered a Daisy to his neighbor, in a soft, low voice."He is weeping for a red rose," said the Nightingale."For a red rose" they cried, "how very ridiculous!" and the little Lizard, who was something of a cynic, laughed outright. But the Nightingale understood the Student's sorrow, and sat silent in the Oak-tree.Suddenly she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She passed through the grove like a shadow and like a shadow she sailed across the garden.In the centre of the grass-plot stood a beautiful Rose-tree, and when she saw it she flew over to it. "Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song."But the Tree shook its head."My roses are white," it answered, "as white as the foam of the sea, and whiter than the snow upon the mountain. But go to my brother who grows round the old sun-dial, and perhaps he will give you what you want."So the Nightingale flew over to the Rose-tree that was growing round the old sun-dial."Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song." But the Tree shook its head."My roses are yellow," it answered, "as yellow as the hair of the mermaiden, and yellower than the daffodil that blooms In the meadow. But go to my brother who grows beneath the Student's window, and perhaps he will give you what you want."So the Nightingale flew over to the Rose-tree that was growing beneath the Student's window. "Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song." But the Tree shook its head."My roses are red," it answered, "as red as the feet of the dove, and redder than the great fans of coral. But the winter has chilled my veins, and the frost has nipped my buds, and the storm has broken my branches, and I shall have no roses at all this year.""One red rose is all that I want," cried the Nightingale, "only one red rose! Is there no way by which I can get it""There is a way," answered the Tree, "but it is so terrible that I dare not tell it to you.""Tell it to me," said the Nightingale, "I am not afraid.""If you want a red rose," said the Tree, "you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stainit with your own heart's blood.You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and your life-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine.""Death is a great price to pay for a red rose," cried the Nightingale, "and life is very dear to all. Yet love is better than life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man"So she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She swept over the garden like a shadow, and like a shadow she sailed through the grove.The young Student was still lying on the grass, and the tears were not yet dry in his beautiful eyes. "Be happy," cried the Nightingale, "be happy, you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover."The Student looked up from the grass, and listened, but he could not understand what the Nightingale was saying to him. But the Oak-tree understood and felt sad, for he was very fond of the little Nightingale. "Sing me one last song," he whispered. "I shall feel lonely when you are gone."So the Nightingale sang to the Oak-tree, and her voice was like water bubbling from a silver jar. When she had finished her song, the Student got up."She has form," he said to himself, as he walked away. "That cannot be denied. But has she got feeling I am afraid not. In fact, like most artists, she is all style without any sincerity." And he went to his room, and lay down on his bed, and after a time, he fell asleep.And when the Moon shone in the heaven, the Nightingale flew to the Rose-tree, and set her breast against the thorn. All night long she sang with her breast against the thorn, and the cold crystal Moon leaned down and listened. All night long she sang, and the thorn went deeper into her breast, and her life-blood ebbed away from her.She sang first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl. And on the topmost spray of the Rose-tree there blossomed a marvelous rose, petal following petal, as song followed song. But the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the thorn. "Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, "or the Day will come before the rose is finished."So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and louder and louder grew her song, for she sang of the birth of passion in the soul of a man and a maid.And a delicate flush of pink came into the leaves of the rose, like the flush in the face of the bridegroom when he kisses the lips of the bride. But the thorn had not yet reached her heart so the rose's heart remained white.And the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the thorn. "Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, "or the Day will come before the rose is finished."So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and the thorn touched her heart, and a fierce pang of pain shot through her. Bitter, bitter was the pain, and wilder and wilder grew her song, for she sang of the Love that is perfected by Death, of the Love that dies not in the tomb. And the marvelous rose became crimson. Crimson was the girdle of petals, and crimson as ruby was the heart.But the Nightingale's voice grew fainter and a film came over her eyes. Fainter and fainter grew her song, and she felt something choking her in her throat.Then she gave one last burst of music. The white Moon heard it, and she forgot the dawn, and。

现代大学英语精读Book2Unit4 The Man in the Water 课文原文

The man in the water1 As disasters go, this one was terrible, but not unique, certainly not among the worst US air crashes on record2. There was the unusual element of the bridge, of course, and the fact that the plane hit it at a moment of high traffic. Then, too, there was the location of the event. Washington, the city of form and rules, turned chaotic by a blast of real winter and a single slap of metal on metal. The jets from Washington National Airport that normally fly around the presidential monuments like hungry gulls are, for the moment represented by the one that fell. And there was the aesthetic clash as well—blue-and-green Air Florida, the name of a flying garden, to be sure. Still, there was nothing very special in any of it, expect death, which while always special, does not necessarily bring the nation to tears or to attention. Why, then, the shock here?2 Perhaps because the nation saw in this disaster something more than a mechanical failure. Perhaps because people saw in it no failure at all, but rather something successful about themselves. Here, after all, were two forms of nature in collision, the elements and human character. Last Wednesday, the elements, indifferent as ever, brought down Flight 90. And on that same afternoon, human nature—groping and struggling—rose to the occasion.3 Of the four acknowledged heroes of the event, three are able to account for their behavior. Donald Usher and Eugene Windsor, a park police helicopter team, risked their lives every time they dipped their skids into the water to pick up survivors. On television, side by side, they described their courage as all in the line of duty. Lenny Skutnik, a 28-year-old employee of the Congressional Budget Office, said: ”It’s something I never thought I would do”—referring to his jumping into the water to drag an injur ed woman to shore. Skutnik added that “somebody had to go in the water,” delivering every hero’s line that is no less admirable for being repeated. In fact, nobody had to go into the water. That somebody actually did so is part of the reason this particular tragedy sticks in the mind.4 But the person most responsible for the emotional impact of the disaster is the one known at first simply as “the man in the water.” Balding, probably in his 50s, a huge mustache. He was seen clinging with five other survivors to the tail section of the airplane. This man was describedby Usher and Windsor as appearing alert and in control. Every time they lowered a lifeline and flotation ring to him, he passed it on to another of the passengers. “In a mass casualty, you’ll find people like him,” said Windsor. “But I’ve never seen one with that commitment.” When the helicopter came back for him, the man had gone under. His selflessness was one reason the story held national attention; his anonymity another. The fact that he went unidentified gave him a universal character. For a while he was Everyman, and thus proof (as if one needed it) that no man is ordinary.5 Still, he could never have imagined such a capacity in himself. Only minutes before his character was tested, he was sitting in the ordinary plane among the ordinary passengers, dutifully listening to the stewardess telling him to fasten his seat belt and saying something about the “no smoking sign.” So our man relaxed with the others, some of whom would owe their lives to him. Perhaps he started to read, or to doze, or to regret some harsh remark made in the office that morning. Then suddenly he knew that the trip would not be ordinary. Like every other person on that flight, he was desperate to live, which makes his final act so stunning.6 For at some moment in the water he must have realized that he would not live if he continued to hand over the rope and ring to others. He had to know it, no matter how gradual the effect of the cold. He felt he had no choice. When the helicopter took off with what was to be the last survivor, he watched everything in the world move away from him, and he let it happen.7 Yet there was something else about our man that kept our thoughts on him, and which keeps our thoughts on him still. He was there, in the essential, classic circumstance. Man in nature. The man in the water. For its part, nature cared nothing about the five passengers. Our man, on the other hand, cared totally. So age-old battle began again in the Potomac. For as long as that man could last, they went at each other, nature and man; the one making no distinctions of good and evil, acting on no principles, offering no lifelines; the other acting wholly on distinctions, principles and, perhaps, on faith.8 Since it was he who lost the fight, we ought to come again to the conclusion that people are powerless in the world. In reality, we believe the opposite, and it takes the act of the man inthe water to remind us of our true feelings in this matter. It is not to say that everyone would have acted as he did, or as Usher, Windsor and Skutnik. Yet whatever moved these men to challenge death on behalf of their fellows is not peculiar to them. Everyone feels the possibility in himself. That is the enduring wonder of the story. That is why we would not let go of it. If the man in the water gave a lifeline to the people gasping for survival, he was likewise giving a lifeline to those who watched him.9 The odd thing is that we do not even really believe that the man in the water lost his fight. “Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature.” said Emerson. Exactly. The man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water set himself against an immovable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with kindness and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do.。

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Unit1Another School Year — What ForLet 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 top 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" And 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 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 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 wasn't going to be around long enough for it to matter. Nevertheless, I was young and I had a high sense 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, 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 that the cyanide stays out of the aspirin, that the bull doesn't jump the fence, or that your client doesn't 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 everything 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 day's work, what do you do with those other eight hours Let's say you go home to your family. What sort of family are you raising Will the children ever be exposed to a reasonably penetratingidea 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 without 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; I'll take care of my own. Me, I'm out to make money.""I hope you make a lot of it," I told him, "because you're going to be badly stuck for something to do when you're 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 basic look at philosophy, for the continuity of the fine arts, for that lesson of man's 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 such 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 inorder to be a civilized human.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.And as this is true of the techniques of mankind, so it is true of mankind's spiritual resources. 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. A civilized mind is, in essence, 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 of a democracy.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.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."Unit2Maheegun My BrotherThe year I found Maheegun, spring was late in coming. That day, I 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 was full andwarm.My grandfather finally agreed to let me keep him.That year, which was my 14th, was the happiest of my life.Not that we didn't have our troubles. Maheegun was the most mischievous wolf cub ever. He was curious too. Like looking into Grandma's sewing basket —which he upset, scattering thread 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 the 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 Maheegun 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 Grandpa's repeated warnings, and one night left Maheegun unchained. The following morning 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 thenorth shack.By the time we reached the lake where the trapper's shack stood, Maheegun seemed to have become restless. 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 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.Slowly 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."He's gone," I said."Yes, he's 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 mybrother.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 answer.Easter came early that year and during the holidays I went to visit my cousins.My uncle was to bring me home in his truck. But he was detained by some urgent business. So I decided to come back home on my own.A mile down the road I slipped into my snowshoes and turned into the bush. The strong sunshine had dimmed. I had not gone far before big flakes of snow began drifting down.The snow thickened fast. I could not locate the tall pine that stood on the north slope of Little Mountain. I circled to my right and stumbled into a snow-filled creek bed. By then the snow had made a blanket of white darkness, but I knew only too well there should have been no creek there.I tried to travel west but only to hit the creek again. I knew I had gone ina great circle and I was lost.There was only one thing to do. Camp for the night and hope that by morning the storm would have blown itself out. I quickly made a bed ofboughs and started a fire with the bark of an old dead birch. The first night I was comfortable enough. But when the first gray light came I realized that I was in deep trouble. The storm was even worse. Everything had been smothered by the fierce whiteness. The light of another day still saw no end to the storm. I began to get confused. I couldn't recall whether it had been storming for three or four days.Then came the clear dawn. A great white stillness had taken over and with it, biting cold. My supply of wood was almost gone. There must be more.Slashing off green branches with my knife, I cut my hand and blood spurted freely from my wound. It was some time before the bleeding stopped. I wrapped my hand with a piece of cloth I tore off from my shirt. After some time, my fingers grew cold and numb, so I took the bandage off and threw it away.How long I squatted over my dying fire I don't know. But then I saw the gray shadow between the trees. It was a timber wolf. He had followed the blood spots on the snow to the blood-soaked bandage. "Yap... yap... yap... yoooo!" The howl seemed to freeze the world with fear.It was the food cry. He was calling, "Come, brothers, I have found meat." And I was the meat!Soon his hunting partner came to join him. Any time now, I thought, their teeth would pierce my bones.Suddenly the world exploded in snarls. I was thrown against the branches of the shelter. But I felt no pain. And a great silence had come. Slowly I worked my way out of the snow and raised my head. There, about 50 feet away, crouched my two attackers with their tails between their legs. Then I heard a noise to my side and turned my head. There stood a giant black wolf. It was Maheegun, and he had driven off the others."Maheegun... Maheegun...," I sobbed, as I moved through the snow toward him. "My brother, my brother," I said, giving him my hand. He reached out and licked at the dried blood.I got my little fire going again, and as I squatted by it, I started to cry. Maybe it was relief or weakness or both —I don't know. Maheegun whimpered too.Maheegun stayed with me through the long night, watching me with those big eyes. The cold and loss of blood were taking their toll.The sun was midway across the sky when I noticed how restless Maheegun had become. He would run away a few paces —head up, listening — then run back to me. Then I heard. It was dogs. It was the searching party! I put the last of my birch bark on the fire and fanned itinto life.The sound of the dogs grew louder. Then the voices of men. Suddenly, as if by magic, the police dog team came up out of the creek bed, and a man came running toward my fire. It was my grandfather.The old hunter stopped suddenly when he saw the wolf. He raised his rifle. "Don't shoot!" I screamed and ran toward him, falling through the snow. "It's Maheegun. Don't shoot!"He lowered his rifle. Then I fell forward on my face, into the snow.I woke up in my bedroom. It was quite some time before my eyes came into focus enough to see my grandfather sitting by my bed."You have slept three days," he said softly. "The doc says you will be all right in a week or two.""And Maheegun" I asked weakly."He should be fine. He is with his own kind."Unit3More Crime and Less PunishmentIf you are looking for an explanation of why we don't get tough with criminals, you need only look at the numbers. Each year almost a third of the households in America are victims of violence or theft. This amounts to more than 41 million crimes, many more than we are able to punish. There are also too many criminals. The best estimates suggest that 36million to 40 million people (16 to 18 percent of the U. S. population)have arrest records for nontraffic offenses. We already have 2. 4 million people under some form of correctional supervision, 412, 000 of them locked away in a prison cell. We don't have room for any more!The painful fact is that the more crime there is the less we are able to punish it. This is why the certainty and severity of punishment must go down when the crime rate goes up. Countries like Saudi Arabia can afford to give out harsh punishments precisely because they have so little crime. But can we afford to cut off the hands of those who committed more than 35 million property crimes each year Can we send them to prison Can we execute more than 22,000 murderersWe need to think about the relationship between punishment and crime in a new way. A decade of careful research has failed to provide clear and convincing evidence that the threat of punishment reduces crime. We think that punishment deters crime, but it just might be the other way around. It just might be that crime deters punishment: that there is so much crime that it simply cannot be punished.This is the situation we find ourselves in today. Just as the decline in the number of high-school graduates has made it easier to gain admission to the college of one's choice, the gradual increase in the criminal population has made it more difficult to get into prison. While elite colleges and universities still have high standards of admissions, some ofthe most "exclusive" prisons now require about five prior serious crimesbefore an inmate is accepted into their correctional program. Our current crop of prisoners is an elite group, on the whole much more serious offenders than those who were once imprisoned in Alcatraz.These features show that it makes little sense to blame the police, judges or correctional personnel for being soft on criminals. There is not much else they can do. The police can't find most criminals and those they do find are difficult and costly to convict. Those convicted can't all be sent to prison. The society demands that we do everything we can against crime. The practical reality is that there is very little the police, courts or prisons can do about the crime problem. The criminal justice system must then become as powerless as a parent who has charge of hundreds of teenage children and who is nonetheless expected to answer the TV message: "It's 10 o'clock! Do you know where your children are"A few statistics from the Justice Department's recent "Report to the Nation on Crime and Justice" illustrate my point. Of every 100 serious crimes committed in America, only 33 are actually reported to the police. Of the 33 reported, about six lead to arrest. Of the six arrested, only three are prosecuted and convicted. The others are rejected or dismissed due to evidence or witness problems or are sent elsewhere for medical treatment instead of punishment. Of the three convicted, only one is sent to prison. The other two are allowed to live in their communityunder supervision. Of the select few sent to prison, more than halfreceive a maximum sentence of five years. The average inmate, however, leaves prison in about two years. Most prisoners gain early release not because parole boards are too easy on crime, but because it is much cheaper to supervise a criminal in the community. And, of course, prison officials must make room for the new prisoners sent almost daily from the courts.We could, of course, get tough with the people we already have in prison and keep them locked up for longer periods of time. Yet when measured against the lower crime rates this would probably produce, longer prison sentences are not worth the cost to state and local governments. Besides, those states that have tried to gain voters' approval for bonds to build new prisons often discover that the public is unwilling to pay for prison construction.And if it were willing to pay, long prison sentences may not be effective in reducing crime. In 1981, 124,000 convicts were released from prison. If we had kept them in jail for an additional year, how many crimes would have been prevented While it is not possible to know the true amount of crime committed by people released from prison in any given year, we do know the extent to which those under parole are jailed again for major crime convictions. This number is a surprisingly low 6 percent (after three years it rises to only 11 percent). Even if released prisoners commit an average of two crimes each, this would amount to only15,000 crimes prevented: a drop in the bucket when measured against the 41 million crimes committed each year.More time spent in prison is also more expensive. The best estimates are that it costs an average of $13,000 to keep a person in prison for one year. If we had a place to keep the 124,000 released prisoners, it would have cost us $1.6 billion to prevent 15,000 crimes. This works out to more than $100,000 per crime prevented. But there is more. With the average cost of prison construction running around $50,000 per bed, it would cost more than $6 billion to build the necessary cells. The first-year operating cost would be $150,000 per crime prevented, worth it if the victim were you or me, but much too expensive to be feasible as a national policy.Faced with the reality of the numbers, I will not be so foolish as to suggest a solution to the crime problem. My contribution to the public debate begins and ends with this simple observation: getting tough with criminals is not the answer.Unit4The Nightingale and the Rose"She said that she would dance with me if I brought her red roses," cried the young Student, "but in all my garden there is no red rose."From her nest in the oak tree the Nightingale heard him and she looked out through the leaves and wondered."No red rose in all my garden!" he cried, and his beautiful eyes filled with tears. "Ah, I have read all that the wise men have written, and all the secrets of philosophy are mine, yet for want of a red rose my life is made wretched.""Here at last is a true lover," said the Nightingale. "Night after night have I sung of him, and now I see him."The Prince gives a ball tomorrow night," murmured the young Student, "and my love will be there. If I bring her a red rose she will dance with me till dawn. I shall hold her in my arms, and she will lean her head upon my shoulder. But there is no red rose in my garden, so I shall sit lonely and my heart will break.""Here, indeed, is the true lover," said the Nightingale. Surely love is a wonderful thing. It is more precious than emeralds and opals."The musicians will play upon their stringed instruments," said the young Student, "and my love will dance to the sound of the harp and the violin. She will dance so lightly that her feet will not touch the floor. But with me she will not dance, for I have no red rose to give her," and he flung himself down on the grass, and buried his face in his hands, and wept. "Why is he weeping" asked a green Lizard, as he ran past him with his tailin the air."Why, indeed" said a Butterfly, who was fluttering about after a sunbeam. "Why, indeed" whispered a Daisy to his neighbor, in a soft, low voice. "He is weeping for a red rose," said the Nightingale."For a red rose" they cried, "how very ridiculous!" and the little Lizard, who was something of a cynic, laughed outright. But the Nightingale understood the Student's sorrow, and sat silent in the Oak-tree. Suddenly she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She passed through the grove like a shadow and like a shadow she sailed across the garden.In the centre of the grass-plot stood a beautiful Rose-tree, and when she saw it she flew over to it. "Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song."But the Tree shook its head."My roses are white," it answered, "as white as the foam of the sea, and whiter than the snow upon the mountain. But go to my brother who grows round the old sun-dial, and perhaps he will give you what you want."So the Nightingale flew over to the Rose-tree that was growing round the old sun-dial."Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song." But the Tree shook its head."My roses are yellow," it answered, "as yellow as the hair of the mermaiden, and yellower than the daffodil that blooms In the meadow. But go to my brother who grows beneath the Student's window, and perhaps he will give you what you want."So the Nightingale flew over to the Rose-tree that was growing beneath the Student's window."Give me a red rose," she cried, "and I will sing you my sweetest song." But the Tree shook its head."My roses are red," it answered, "as red as the feet of the dove, and redder than the great fans of coral. But the winter has chilled my veins, and the frost has nipped my buds, and the storm has broken my branches, and I shall have no roses at all this year.""One red rose is all that I want," cried the Nightingale, "only one red rose! Is there no way by which I can get it""There is a way," answered the Tree, "but it is so terrible that I dare not tell it to you.""Tell it to me," said the Nightingale, "I am not afraid.""If you want a red rose," said the Tree, "you must build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with your own heart's blood.You must sing to me with your breast against a thorn. All night long you must sing to me, and the thorn must pierce your heart, and yourlife-blood must flow into my veins, and become mine.""Death is a great price to pay for a red rose," cried the Nightingale, "and life is very dear to all. Yet love is better than life, and what is the heart of a bird compared to the heart of a man"So she spread her brown wings for flight, and soared into the air. She swept over the garden like a shadow, and like a shadow she sailed through the grove.The young Student was still lying on the grass, and the tears were not yet dry in his beautiful eyes. "Be happy," cried the Nightingale, "be happy, you shall have your red rose. I will build it out of music by moonlight, and stain it with my own heart's blood. All that I ask of you in return is that you will be a true lover."The Student looked up from the grass, and listened, but he could not understand what the Nightingale was saying to him. But the Oak-tree understood and felt sad, for he was very fond of the little Nightingale. "Sing me one last song," he whispered. "I shall feel lonely when you are gone."So the Nightingale sang to the Oak-tree, and her voice was like water bubbling from a silver jar.When she had finished her song, the Student got up."She has form," he said to himself, as he walked away. "That cannot be denied. But has she got feeling I am afraid not. In fact, like most artists,she is all style without any sincerity." And he went to his room, and lay down on his bed, and after a time, he fell asleep.And when the Moon shone in the heaven, the Nightingale flew to the Rose-tree, and set her breast against the thorn. All night long she sang with her breast against the thorn, and the cold crystal Moon leaned down and listened. All night long she sang, and the thorn went deeper into her breast, and her life-blood ebbed away from her.She sang first of the birth of love in the heart of a boy and a girl. And on the topmost spray of the Rose-tree there blossomed a marvelous rose, petal following petal, as song followed song.But the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the thorn. "Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, "or the Day will come before the rose is finished."So the Nightingale pressed closer against the thorn, and louder and louder grew her song, for she sang of the birth of passion in the soul of a man and a maid.And a delicate flush of pink came into the leaves of the rose, like the flush in the face of the bridegroom when he kisses the lips of the bride. But the thorn had not yet reached her heart so the rose's heart remained white.And the Tree cried to the Nightingale to press closer against the thorn. "Press closer, little Nightingale," cried the Tree, "or the Day will come before the rose is finished."。

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