普林斯顿2012毕业演讲稿.doc

Thank you. President Tilghman. Trustees and Friends. Parents of the Class of 2012. Above all, Members of the Princeton Class of 2012. Give yourself a round of applause. The next time you look around a church and see everyone dressed in black itll be awkward to cheer. Enjoy the moment.感谢Tilghman主席，各位校董和朋友们，2012年级的家长们，还有最关键的，普林斯顿2012年级的同学们。请给自己一个掌声吧。下一次你在一所教堂里看到大家都穿成黑色的时候，像这样欢呼就很尴尬了。享受这一刻吧。 Thirty years ago I sat where you sat. I must have listened to some older person share his life experience. But I dont remember a word of it. I cant even tell you who spoke. What I do remember, vividly, is graduation. Im told youre meant to be excited, perhaps even relieved, and maybe all of you are. I wasnt. I was totally outraged. Here I’d gone and given them four of the best years of my life and this is how they thanked me for it. By kicking me out.30年前，我坐在你所坐的地方。我一定也听过某位年长的人分享他的人生经历。但我已经一点都不记得了。我连是谁发言都没印象了。而在我记忆中仍栩栩如生的，是毕业。他们告诉我你应该很激动，或者感到轻松，也许你们现在就是这样。我却不同。我义愤填膺：我来到这里给了他们我人生中最好的四年，而他们就是这样报答我的——把我踢走。 At that moment I was sure of only one thing: I was of no possible economic value to the outside world. Id majored in art history, for a start. Even then this was regarded as an act of insanity. I was almost certainly less prepared for the marketplace than most of you. Yet somehow I have wound up rich and famous. Well, sort of. Im going to explain, briefly, how that happened. I want you to understand just how mysterious careers can be, before you go out and have one yourself. I graduated from Princeton without ever having published a word of anything, anywhere. I didnt write for the Prince, or for anyone else. But at Princeton, studying art history, I felt the first twinge of literary ambition. It happened while working on my senior thesis. My adviser was a truly gifted professor, an archaeologist named William Childs. The thesis tried to explain how the Italian sculptor Donatello used Greek and Roman sculpture — which is actually totally beside the point, but Ive always wanted to