32 KiB
32 KiB
- This is Water #朗读
- There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”
- This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning.
- Of course the main requirement of speeches like this is that I’m supposed to talk about your liberal arts education’s meaning, to try to explain why the degree you are about to receive has actual human value instead of just a material payoff. So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliché in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about “teaching you how to think.” If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think. But I’m going to posit to you that the liberal arts cliché turns out not to be insulting at all, because the really significant education in thinking that we’re supposed to get in a place like this isn’t really about the capacity to think, but rather about the choice of what to think about. If your total freedom of choice regarding what to think about seems too obvious to waste time discussing, I’d ask you to think about fish and water, and to bracket for just a few minutes your scepticism about the value of the totally obvious.
- Here’s another didactic little story. There are these two guys sitting together in a bar in the remote Alaskan wilderness. One of the guys is religious, the other is an atheist, and the two are arguing about the existence of God with that special intensity that comes after about the fourth beer. And the atheist says: “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God and prayer thing. Just last month I got caught away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I was totally lost and I couldn’t see a thing, and it was 50 below, and so I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me.’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then you must believe now,” he says, “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist just rolls his eyes. “No, man, all that was was a couple Eskimos happened to come wandering by and showed me the way back to camp.”
- It’s easy to run this story through kind of a standard liberal arts analysis: the exact same experience can mean two totally different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates and two different ways of constructing meaning from experience. Because we prize tolerance and diversity of belief, nowhere in our liberal arts analysis do we want to claim that one guy’s interpretation is true and the other guy’s is false or bad. Which is fine, except we also never end up talking about just where these individual templates and beliefs come from. Meaning, where they come from INSIDE the two guys. As if a person’s most basic orientation toward the world, and the meaning of his experience were somehow just hard-wired, like height or shoe-size; or automatically absorbed from the culture, like language. As if how we construct meaning were not actually a matter of personal, intentional choice. Plus, there’s the whole matter of arrogance. The nonreligious guy is so totally certain in his dismissal of the possibility that the passing Eskimos had anything to do with his prayer for help. True, there are plenty of religious people who seem arrogant and certain of their own interpretations, too. They’re probably even more repulsive than atheists, at least to most of us. But religious dogmatists’ problem is exactly the same as the story’s unbeliever: blind certainty, a close-mindedness that amounts to an imprisonment so total that the prisoner doesn’t even know he’s locked up.
- The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
- Here is just one example of the total wrongness of something I tend to be automatically sure of: everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence. We rarely think about this sort of natural, basic self-centredness because it’s so socially repulsive. But it’s pretty much the same for all of us. It is our default setting, hard-wired into our boards at birth. Think about it: there is no experience you have had that you are not the absolute centre of. The world as you experience it is there in front of YOU or behind YOU, to the left or right of YOU, on YOUR TV or YOUR monitor. And so on. Other people’s thoughts and feelings have to be communicated to you somehow, but your own are so immediate, urgent, real.
- Please don’t worry that I’m getting ready to lecture you about compassion or other-directedness or all the so-called virtues. This is not a matter of virtue. It’s a matter of my choosing to do the work of somehow altering or getting free of my natural, hard-wired default setting which is to be deeply and literally self-centered and to see and interpret everything through this lens of self. People who can adjust their natural default setting this way are often described as being “well-adjusted”, which I suggest to you is not an accidental term.
- Given the triumphant academic setting here, an obvious question is how much of this work of adjusting our default setting involves actual knowledge or intellect. This question gets very tricky. Probably the most dangerous thing about an academic education–least in my own case–is that it enables my tendency to over-intellectualise stuff, to get lost in abstract argument inside my head, instead of simply paying attention to what is going on right in front of me, paying attention to what is going on inside me.
- As I’m sure you guys know by now, it is extremely difficult to stay alert and attentive, instead of getting hypnotised by the constant monologue inside your own head (may be happening right now). Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed. Think of the old cliché about “the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.”
- This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth. It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. And the truth is that most of these suicides are actually dead long before they pull the trigger.
- And I submit that this is what the real, no bullshit value of your liberal arts education is supposed to be about: how to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out. That may sound like hyperbole, or abstract nonsense. Let’s get concrete. The plain fact is that you graduating seniors do not yet have any clue what “day in day out” really means. There happen to be whole, large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about.
- By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for eight or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired and somewhat stressed and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for an hour, and then hit the sack early because, of course, you have to get up the next day and do it all again. But then you remember there’s no food at home. You haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job, and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. It’s the end of the work day and the traffic is apt to be: very bad. So getting to the store takes way longer than it should, and when you finally get there, the supermarket is very crowded, because of course it’s the time of day when all the other people with jobs also try to squeeze in some grocery shopping. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing muzak or corporate pop and it’s pretty much the last place you want to be but you can’t just get in and quickly out; you have to wander all over the huge, over-lit store’s confusing aisles to find the stuff you want and you have to manoeuvre your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts (et cetera, et cetera, cutting stuff out because this is a long ceremony) and eventually you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush. So the checkout line is incredibly long, which is stupid and infuriating. But you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.
- But anyway, you finally get to the checkout line’s front, and you pay for your food, and you get told to “Have a nice day” in a voice that is the absolute voice of death. Then you have to take your creepy, flimsy, plastic bags of groceries in your cart with the one crazy wheel that pulls maddeningly to the left, all the way out through the crowded, bumpy, littery parking lot, and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera et cetera.
- Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
- But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in. Because the traffic jams and crowded aisles and long checkout lines give me time to think, and if I don’t make a conscious decision about how to think and what to pay attention to, I’m gonna be pissed and miserable every time I have to shop. Because my natural default setting is the certainty that situations like this are really all about me. About MY hungriness and MY fatigue and MY desire to just get home, and it’s going to seem for all the world like everybody else is just in my way. And who are all these people in my way? And look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem in the checkout line, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones in the middle of the line. And look at how deeply and personally unfair this is.
- Or, of course, if I’m in a more socially conscious liberal arts form of my default setting, I can spend time in the end-of-the-day traffic being disgusted about all the huge, stupid, lane-blocking SUV’s and Hummers and V-12 pickup trucks, burning their wasteful, selfish, 40-gallon tanks of gas, and I can dwell on the fact that the patriotic or religious bumper-stickers always seem to be on the biggest, most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest [responding here to loud applause] — this is an example of how NOT to think, though — most disgustingly selfish vehicles, driven by the ugliest, most inconsiderate and aggressive drivers. And I can think about how our children’s children will despise us for wasting all the future’s fuel, and probably screwing up the climate, and how spoiled and stupid and selfish and disgusting we all are, and how modern consumer society just sucks, and so forth and so on.
- You get the idea.
- If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
- The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stopped and idling in my way, it’s not impossible that some of these people in SUV’s have been in horrible auto accidents in the past, and now find driving so terrifying that their therapist has all but ordered them to get a huge, heavy SUV so they can feel safe enough to drive. Or that the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to get this kid to the hospital, and he’s in a bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am: it is actually I who am in HIS way.
- Or I can choose to force myself to consider the likelihood that everyone else in the supermarket’s checkout line is just as bored and frustrated as I am, and that some of these people probably have harder, more tedious and painful lives than I do.
- Again, please don’t think that I’m giving you moral advice, or that I’m saying you are supposed to think this way, or that anyone expects you to just automatically do it. Because it’s hard. It takes will and effort, and if you are like me, some days you won’t be able to do it, or you just flat out won’t want to.
- But most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage clerk at the motor vehicle department, who just yesterday helped your spouse resolve a horrific, infuriating, red-tape problem through some small act of bureaucratic kindness. Of course, none of this is likely, but it’s also not impossible. It just depends what you want to consider. If you’re automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won’t consider possibilities that aren’t annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
- Not that that mystical stuff is necessarily true. The only thing that’s capital-T True is that you get to decide how you’re gonna try to see it.
- This, I submit, is the freedom of a real education, of learning how to be well-adjusted. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t. You get to decide what to worship.
- Because here’s something else that’s weird but true: in the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And the compelling reason for maybe choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship–be it JC or Allah, be it YHWH or the Wiccan Mother Goddess, or the Four Noble Truths, or some inviolable set of ethical principles–is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive. If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.
- Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. But the insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings.
- They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.
- And the so-called real world will not discourage you from operating on your default settings, because the so-called real world of men and money and power hums merrily along in a pool of fear and anger and frustration and craving and worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom. The freedom all to be lords of our tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the centre of all creation. This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.
- That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.
- I know that this stuff probably doesn’t sound fun and breezy or grandly inspirational the way a commencement speech is supposed to sound. What it is, as far as I can see, is the capital-T Truth, with a whole lot of rhetorical niceties stripped away. You are, of course, free to think of it whatever you wish. But please don’t just dismiss it as just some finger-wagging Dr Laura sermon. None of this stuff is really about morality or religion or dogma or big fancy questions of life after death.
- The capital-T Truth is about life before death.
- It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:
- “This is water.”
- “This is water.”
- It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.
- I wish you way more than luck.
- 两条小鱼在水里游泳，突然碰到一条从对面游来的老鱼向他们点头问好：
- “早啊，小伙子们。水里怎么样？”
- 小鱼继续往前游了一会儿，其中一条终于忍不住了，望着另一条，问道：
- “水是个什么玩意？”
- 这便是大学毕业典礼演讲上的必备故事，演讲者由此便能展开寓意深刻的说教。
- 这个故事似乎稍好一些，不比其他俗气的故事那么胡扯...... 不过，你们若以为我会将自己喻作智慧老鱼，向你们这些小鱼儿阐释水的含义，那就错了。
- 我可不是什么智慧老鱼。
- 这个鱼儿的故事要表达的观点很简单：最明显、最普遍、最重要的关系，往往是最难发现、最少谈论的。
- 这句话说出来也是陈词滥调 —— 但事实是，在成年人的日常之中，即便是陈词滥调，也可能攸关生死。
- 当然，我做这样的演讲，主要是想给各位说说教育本身的意义。人文科学教育并非知识填鸭，而是 “让你学会如何思考”。
- 如果此时的你们像大学时代的我一样，那肯定不愿听到刚才这句话，这是一种侮辱。因为你们已经无需任何人来教你们如何思考了 —— 既然已经获得了一流大学的认可，就证明，你们早已懂得如何思考。
- 但我们在大学里应当接受的真正有意义的教育，并非关乎思考能力，而是对思考内容的选择。
- “教我们如何思考” 的真正含义，是少些自大，多些对自己和自己所确信之事的 “批判意识”。因为，有许多我不假思索便确信的事，结果却是大错特错的。
- 我几经周折才终于明白这个道理，想必诸君也会如此。
- 比如，我所有的切身体验，都曾让我相信一件事：我是世界上最真实、最鲜明、最重要的人物 —— 但我们很少去思考这种自然而然出现的自我中心意识。因为从社交方面考虑，这种意识很叫人反感，但实际上，它又确确实实地存在于我们所有人的内心深处。
- 这种意识，是我们自出生起就存在的 “默认设置”。
- 想想吧，在你所有的经历当中，没有哪一个不是以自我为绝对中心的。
- 在你的经历中，世界要么在前，要么在后，要么在左，要么在右，要么在电视上，要么在监视器里，等等。虽说他人的思维和情感也以某种方式与你相交融，但你自己的思维和情感才是最直接、最迫切、最真实的。
- 但我们其实可以选择，选择以某种方式来改变或者摆脱我们与生俱来的默认配置，摆脱这种完全以自我为中心、并以自我中心的眼光看待万事万物。
- 至少对我而言，也许教育体系中最危险的事，便是它会让人喜欢上过度推理，让人迷失于抽象思维，从而忽略了眼前，甚至忽略了内心。
- 随时保持警醒与专注，而不被头脑中持续不断的独白催眠，实在困难。
- “学习如何思考”，其实是学习掌控自己思考的方式和内容。是让你以充分的自觉和警醒去选择关注的内容，选择从经验中构建意义的方式。因为，倘若你在成年生活中不能或不愿练习这种选择，那你将会被彻底打败。成年人用枪自杀时，几乎都会选择瞄准自己的脑袋，这绝非偶然巧合。实际上，大多数自杀者在扣动板机之前便早已死去。
- 接受的人文教育应当具有的实实在在的价值在于：在你们舒适、富足、体面的成年生活中，如何摆脱日复一日的重复单调，避免自己成为思维的奴隶...... 也许这听起来像是夸张抽象的谬论。那我们不妨说得具体一点。
- 说实话，即将毕业的学生们还并不知晓 “日复一日” 的真实含义。而这恰恰是成年生活中最重要的部分。其中一部分便是厌烦倦怠、例行公事和微小的挫折。
- 举个例子，假设今天是成年生活中平平常常的一天，辛苦工作 9 小时后，筋疲力尽。今天是本周的最后一个工作日，交通拥堵，在购买食物的超市里，也有着同样疲倦匆忙的人群。在收银台前排起了长长的队伍，音箱中放着吵闹的流行音乐，排在前方的老人动作缓慢，后面的小孩子打闹不断。但无论如何，你终于来到了收银台前，等着付款或刷卡，之后就会有一个声音对你说：“祝你愉快”—— 听上去绝对让你想揍他。
- 然后大包小包的把装满食物的塑料袋放进购物车，推着它穿过乱、拥挤、颠簸的停车场，再努力把这些袋子装进车子的后备箱，还要确保在回家的路上，这些东西不会从袋子里掉出来，滚得后备箱里到处都是。接着，你还得在缓慢、繁忙又挤满越野车的交通高峰时段开车回家，诸如此类。
- 当然，各位也许都有此种经历 —— 但这些还没有成为各位实际生活的一部分，各位还没有如此日复一日周复一周月复一月年复一年。
- 然而，未来确将如此，还有更多枯燥沉闷、恼人厌烦、看似毫无意义的例行公事......
- 不过，这并不是重点。
- 重点在于，像这样细微琐碎、令人厌烦的无聊破事，正是你做出选择的时机。
- 正是堵塞的交通、拥挤的过道和结账时的大排长龙，让我有时间去思考。如果我对于如何思考和思考什么都无法做出明智的决定，那就连采购这种小事，都能令我生气难过，痛苦不堪。
- 因为，我天生的默认设置就是 —— 周围一切都是针对我，针对我的饥饿、疲惫和回家的欲望，并且，似乎全世界的人都恰好挡住了我的去路，这些挡路者都他妈的是谁啊？
- 看看在这里排队结账的人多讨厌，一个个瞪着死鱼眼，蠢得像牛，一点人样都没有；有人边排队边大声讲电话，毫无礼貌，令人厌恶；我辛辛苦苦工作了一整天，又饿又累，还不能回家吃口饭、歇口气，就因为前面这些蠢货。
- 你瞧，如果我选择这么想（好吧，很多人都是这样想的）—— 但这样的想法往往都是非常简单、自然而然的，根本算不上是一种选择。这些想法就是我天生的默认设置。
- 正是这样自然而然、无意识的方式，让我体验到了成人生活中枯燥无趣、灰心丧气、繁忙劳碌的那一部分，我自然而然、无意识地有这样一种信念：我是世界的中心，我眼前的需要和我的个人感受，决定着世界运转的先后顺序。
- 但问题是，显然我们可以用不同的方式来思考这类事情。
- 比如，刚刚超我车的那辆悍马，可能是一位父亲载着自己受伤或生病的孩子，急匆匆地赶去医院，他远远比我更着急 —— 实际上，是我挡了他的路。
- 又或者，我可以勉强考虑这样一种可能性：在超市收银台前排队的每个人，或许都和我一样无聊而沮丧，甚至有些人的处境比我更艰辛、更乏味、更痛苦。
- 再次强调，我并不是在告诉你们 “应该” 这样思考，我也不是说任何人都会期望你自然而然地这么做。因为这样很难，需要意志和心力，如果你像我一样，那你在很多时候都可能无法做到这一点，或者不愿这么做。
- 但大多数时候，如果你够警醒，让自己有所选择，你就可以从不同的角度看待事物，比如面前那个冲着孩子大吼大叫的一个浓妆艳抹的肥婆 —— 或许她平时并不这样；或许她已经三天三夜没有合眼，或许她是一名不受尊重的底层员工。
- 当你真正学会了如何思考，你就会明白，你还有其他的选择。然后你将会拥有这样一种能力，把拥挤、缓慢、吵闹、地狱般的购物情景变得既充满意义，又神圣无比...... 你可以决定自己以何种视角去看待事物。
- 我认为，这，就是真正教育的自由，以及学会如何更好地适应的自由：你会有意识地决定什么有意义，什么没有。
- 如果你爱慕金钱和美食 —— 觉得这才是生活的真正意义 —— 那么，拥有多少都不足够。
- 你永远不会满足。这是真理。
- 如果迷恋身材、美貌及性感魅力，你永远都会嫌弃自己的丑陋，当岁月和年龄的痕迹开始显现，在它们将你掩埋之前，你已经死过上百万次了。
- 在某种程度上，我们都已经知晓这些事情 —— 因为它已经被编成了神话、谚语、陈词、俗套、警句、寓言 —— 成为每一个伟大故事的骨架。
- 崇拜权力，你会感到软弱与恐惧，为了逃避这样的惧怕，你将需要更多更大的权力。
- 崇拜智慧，努力在别人眼中树立智者的形象，你终将会觉得自己愚昧，欺骗了众人，随时都有可能被他人揭穿。
- 但这些不同形式信仰的阴险之处，并不在于它们有多邪恶或充满罪恶；而在于它们都是无意识的。它们是先天的默认设置。正是这些日复一日渐渐形成的信仰，使你在还没察觉自己究竟在干什么时，就对所见所闻以及价值判断充满挑剔。
- 而所谓的 “真实世界” 并不会阻止你运转默认设置，因为由人类、金钱和权力构建的 “真实世界”，在恐惧、耻辱、挫败、渴望和自我崇拜的驱使下，一路高歌。
- 我们现今的文化已经驾驭了这些力量，产出了非凡财富、舒适安逸和个人自由。这种自由，成为我们头脑王国的主宰，独立于所有创造的中心。这种自由值得推崇。当然，自由有各种不同的类型，而最宝贵那一种，在这个以胜利、成就和炫耀为基准的花花世界中，很少被人提及。
- 真正重要的那种自由，意味着专注、自觉、自律、不懈努力，以及真诚地关怀他人，并且每天都以无数琐碎微小而乏味的方式，一次又一次地为他人牺牲奉献。这便是真正的自由。这便是学习如何去思考。和这种自由相对的，则是没有自觉、默认设置、永无止境的激烈竞争，始终处于一种持续不断的拥有和失去的痛苦之中。
- 这些听起来既不轻松有趣，也不鼓舞人心、激发斗志，不像是一场毕业典礼演讲该有的样子。但据我所知，剥除空洞堆砌的修辞，才有真理。真理无关道德、信仰和教条，也不是关于死亡之后的花哨废话。
- 真正的真理，关乎你死亡之前的一生。
- 是你到了三十岁，甚至是五十岁的时候，都从没有想过自杀。
- 这关乎于教育的真正价值，与成绩无关，与学位无关，而在于一种自觉 —— 意识到什么是真实的，什么是必要的；这种自觉就隐藏在我们身边平淡无奇的生活之中，我们必须时时刻刻一遍又一遍地提醒自己：
- “这就是水。”
- “这就是水。”
- 在繁琐无聊的日常中，日复一日地保持自觉与警醒，困难得难以想象。
- 这也就印证了另一句陈词滥调：你们的教育真的是一生的事业，而且始于现在。
- 愿你们不止有好运相伴。
- 俯卧撑50个 #运动
