伯恩斯在华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校毕业典礼上的英语演讲稿
Chancellor Wrighton, members of the Board of Trustees and the Administration, distinguished faculty, Class of 1965, hard-working staff, my fellow honorees, proud and relieved parents, calm and serene grandparents, distracted but secretly pleased siblings, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, graduating students, good morning. I am deeply honored that you have asked me here to say a few words at this momentous occasion, that you might find what I have to say worthy of your attention on so important a day at this remarkable institution.
It had been my intention this morning to parcel out some good advice at the end of theseremarks – the "goodness" of that being of course subjective in the extreme – but then Irealized that this is the land of Mark Twain, and I came to the conclusion that anycommentary today ought to be framed in the sublime shadow of this quote of his: "It's notthat the world is full of fools, it's just that lightening isn't distributed right." … More on Mr.Twain later.
I am in the business of history. It is my job to try to discern some patterns and themes fromthe past to help us interpret our dizzyingly confusing and sometimes dismaying present.Without a knowledge of that past, how can we possibly know where we are and, mostimportant, where we are going? Over the years I've come to understand an important fact, Ithink: that we are not condemned to repeat, as the cliché goes and we are fond of quoting,what we don't remember. That's a clever, even poetic phrase, but not even close to the truth.Nor are there cycles of history, as the academic community periodically promotes. The Bible,Ecclesiastes to be specific, got it right, I think: "What has been will be again. What has beendone will be done again. There is nothing new under the sun."
What that means is that human nature never changes. Or almost never changes. We havecontinually superimposed our complex and contradictory nature over the random course ofhuman events. All of our inherent strengths and weaknesses, our greed and generosity, ourpuritanism and our prurience parade before our eyes, generation after generation aftergeneration. This often gives us the impression that history does repeat itself. It doesn't. Itjust rhymes, Mark Twain is supposed to have said…but he didn't (more on him later).
Over the many years of practicing, I have come to the realization that history is not a fixedthing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes)that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious andmalleable thing. And each generation rediscovers and re-examines that part of its past thatgives its present, and most important, its future new meaning, new possibilities and new power.
Listen. For most of the forty years I've been making historical documentaries, I have beenhaunted and inspired by a handful of sentences from an extraordinary speech I came acrossearly in my professional life by a neighbor of yours just up the road in Springfield, Illinois. InJanuary of 1838, shortly before his 29th birthday, a tall, thin lawyer, prone to bouts ofdebilitating depression, addressed the Young Men's Lyceum. The topic that day was nationalsecurity. "At what point shall we expect the approach of danger?" he asked his audience. "…Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant to step the Earth and crush us at a blow?"Then he answered his own question: "Never. All the armies of Europe, Asia, and Africa … couldnot by force take a drink from the Ohio [River] or make a track on the Blue Ridge in a trial of athousand years … If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As anation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." It is a stunning,remarkable statement.
That young man was, of course, Abraham Lincoln, and he would go on to preside over theclosest this country has ever come to near national suicide, our Civil War – fought over themeaning of freedom in America. And yet embedded in his extraordinary, disturbing andprescient words is a fundamental optimism that implicitly acknowledges the geographicalforce-field two mighty oceans and two relatively benign neighbors north and south haveprovided for us since the British burned the White House in the War of 1812.
We have counted on Abraham Lincoln for more than a century and a half to get it right whenthe undertow in the tide of those human events has threatened to overwhelm and capsize us.We always come back to him for the kind of sustaining vision of why we Americans still agree tocohere, why unlike any other country on earth, we are still stitched together by words and, mostimportant, their dangerous progeny, ideas. We return to him for a sense of unity, conscienceand national purpose. To escape what the late historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., said is ourproblem today: "too much pluribus, not enough unum."
【伯恩斯在华盛顿大学圣路易斯分校毕业典礼上的英语演讲稿】相关文章：