因特网应该被更加积极正确地使用。 To the extent of my observation, the Internet should be put into more constructive use, especially to bring people closer to one another instead of further away from each other. It is an ugly fact in our society that far too many families and friends are disconnected because of the internet. This is because while parents may use it to conduct business conference, children ignore their peers lodging on different online chat rooms and taking to strangers. As a result, no one talks to anyone any more. A case in point would be my own family in which each member of this family owns a different world by having his or her set of computer.

我们不应该盲目偶像崇拜。 It is, in my opinion, arguable that the mindless pursuit of idols should, at all cost, stopped. It is a poor story in our society that far too many children and young adults chase after their own heroes, some from the entertainment industry and others from the sporting field. We, however, should stop this kind of pursuit due to the fact that this would only cause countless people to lose their own direction of life. A case in point would a recently publicized story that a young girl worshiping Spiderman, a character in Hollywood, committed suicide by jumping off the building immediately after she watched the film.

当代的子女应该更加孝顺自己的父母。 It is my personal conviction that the contemporary Chinese ought to shoulder the responsibility of caring for their elderly parents. It is a commonplace in China today that far too many children are the only child in their family due the “One Child Policy”. Consequently, today’s parents do not have several children to support them after entering their late years in life. Compared to previous generations, our generation carries the heaviest burden of helping our parents. A case in point would be my own family in which everyone pays the uttermost respect and attention to the opinion and complaint of the elderly. 2000 Suggest counter-measures Under the status quo, collective efforts should be joined together in combating this problem and putting forward several effective solutions. To the extent of my observation, perhaps one of the most effective ones of all is for coastline countries, especially U.S., Canada, Russia and Japan, to awaken their awareness of the seriousness of this deteriorating matter. Another recommendation would be that the world together should cease commercial fishing for a certain period of time in the hope that the number of fishes would recover a foreseeable future. To add another tack, to capping the amount of commercial fishing for different countries might help as well.

2008意义阐释段 The message hidden in this picture is, in fact, thought-provoking—no man is an island entire of itself, that is, everyone should everyone else in establishing a harmonious society. In today’s China, numerous Chinese people ignore the importance of helping and supporting one another, which has led to many significant negative effects. On the one hand, people in China have been accused of being excessively selfish and ignorant of others’ needs; on the other, the society, on the whole is becoming increasingly cruel and intolerant. In the final analysis, a world in which help is everywhere is certainly better than one in which help is luxury.

2009意义阐释段 I do not have to think twice to pinpoint what the picture is trying to express—while the Internet is supposed to bring people closer to each other it is, in fact, doing just the opposite. In contemporary China, people depend too much on the powerful devices such as the Internet but rarely on each other, which has inevitably given rise to a string of adverse effects. On the one hand, families and friends barely communicate but stare at their own computer screens doing things which hardly relate to any family member. On the other, the world we are forming is becoming gradually virtual and unreliable because we have to meet too many strangers on line and give our personal information to too many sites we do not know. On balance, what we get from the use of the Internet is not closeness but aloofness.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination

June 5, 2008

J.K. Rowling, author of the best-selling Harry Potter book series, delivers her Commencement Address, “The Fringe Benefits of Failure, and the Importance of Imagination,” at the Annual Meeting of the Harvard Alumni Association.

Text as delivered follows. 
Copyright of JK Rowling, June 2008

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates.

The first thing I would like to say is ‘thank you.’ Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I have endured at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and convince myself that I am at the world’s largest Gryffindor reunion.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can’t remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, the law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the ‘gay wizard’ joke, I’ve come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step to self improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that have expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called ‘real life’, I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These may seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that would never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension. I know that the irony strikes with the force of a cartoon anvil, now.

So they hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents’ car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all the subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person’s idea of success, so high have you already flown.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea then how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above the price of rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more than any qualification I ever earned.

So given a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone’s total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

Now you might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I personally will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working at the African research department at Amnesty International’s headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to speak against their governments. Visitors to our offices included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had left behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him back to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just had to give him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country’s regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard, and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people’s places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces leads to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people’s lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world’s only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped change. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children’s godparents, the people to whom I’ve been able to turn in times of trouble, people who have been kind enough not to sue me when I took their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom: As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.
Thank you very much.

Dan's room in Gossip Girl.

每次去外研社都是不断学习的过程。年复一年的讲课是争取要自己的学生进步，但是对自己就是不断耗尽的过程。但我也需要进步。于是外研社和CCTV这些就是我每年一次的加油站。英文的辩论，精彩的比赛，思维的碰撞，这些都对我有无法抵挡的诱惑力。今年如果能再去就是连续第四次去了。和北京联系了数次和武汉这边沟通了半天。但是武汉这边的课调不开。唉，责任和割舍是成正比的。但还是贴出来作个纪念吧。明年我还要争取去。

www.chinadebate.org

John Donne once said: no man is an island entire of itself. But what he really meant has probably been mistaken for as long as centuries because what Mr. Donne did not say is the fact that each and every one of us is indeed ON an island entire of itself, that we are also called individuals, independent existances, seperated beings, that it is wrong to not take care of our own territory in the first place, that we need to spend our whole life, every minute of it, with a person called 'self', and that we all need to adapt to, like it or not, the role of Robinson Crusoe for at least a few times. So who said we can't get through this? A holiday season all by ourselves. Who said we can't? Despite shops closed, streets empty, families apart, friends away, TV boring, house cold, and nights dark. Despite that we have 16 or so new classes requiring several months to get ready for in just 48 hours, despite that we are all exhausted from the last season's ups and downs.

Yes, we sometimes just need a voice, perhaps from another island, telling or forcing us to be okay or pretend that we are okay. Then we know we are.

So listen! This, too, shall pass. We are okay.

At the end of the day, we, however different, all want a place that gives us comfort, peace and care, so somewhere along the way we, like our parents of our age, just feel the need to finally settle down for the sake of that comfort, peace and care we don't get elsewhere. Below are several lists, the makings of which signal, I guess, how we used to define the place we call home.

the 1970s 毛主席语录，结婚棉被，铝铜，暖水壶，上海牌缝纫机，上海牌手表，水壶，搪瓷杯，中山装，五屉柜，永久牌自行车，烧水壶

the 1980s 12英寸老式黑白电视，红灯牌，电子管二波段711-3型半导体收音机，老式双人床，老式衣柜，上海牌缝纫机，上海牌手表，永久牌自行车，双卡路收音机

the 1990s VCD, 冰箱，彩电，茶几，电风扇，电话机，挂钟，金戒指，卡拉OK功放，摩托车，皮沙发，普通沙发，热水器，席梦思床垫，洗衣机

the 2000s 房子，汽车，白金钻戒，布艺沙发，冰箱，床头柜，电视柜，家庭影院，家庭发烧音，婚纱，电饭锅，苹果PC电脑，全自动滚筒洗衣机，空调，梳妆台，数码相机，微波炉，抽油烟机加灶台，洗漱台，消毒柜，液晶电视，饮水机，浴缸，整体橱柜，整体衣柜，组合卧室家具

I can't help but wonder what list the 2010s will make for us in that order? To all matters of the heart, are we happier as the list grows? Or does our happiness depend on something out of the above listed? And most importantly, despite our answers to these questions, are we still a generation that purchases happiness from the market instead of from the heart?

I believe that the longest happiness I’ve ever experienced has never been longer than a minute, nor will be those on the way in the years ahead; happiness is all boiled down into the smallest fragments; lasting happiness is either a myth or an illusion; but it is for these footprints of happiness we leave behind along the way that life has its meaning.

I believe that the greatest thing about life is that it’s nearly all uncertain and that it’s paradoxically beautiful; one would never learn how beautiful it is until one accepts its uncertainty and paradoxes.

I believe that it’s a million times harder to swallow a dream dead than to eat a frog alive.

I believe that one powerful thing that distances two young individuals to the furtherest is hard cold cash; A one-million-RMB-disparity would be ten years ahead or behind. Heaven and Earth. This is a simple, sad, old fact; it’s just that cut and dried. Then the tragic would be for those financially disadvantaged who either never manage to outgrow their grudge or just sit there and do nothing.

I’ve always had this “thing”, a weird “thing”, and I don’t know when and how it first started and developed in me—Until now I am just emotionally unable to undergo more than one major letdowns in a single day. One hit per day, there draws my line and well, fine by me! But anything beyond that comfort-zone or across that bottom-line is what I can’t take. This is especially true when I am working my ass off. Extra fragile, extra sensitive, extra anxious. That’s just me, given the hurry. I’m like this rope pulled apart---the more tense I get, the more likely I’m gonna break it off. ONe might walk in and out of my life every day thinking that I am this unbelievably industrious and perfectly obedient and nicely smiling kiddo and that nothing as dramatic could ever happen to me. But Bang! I crash…then drop like a dead fly. Just as dramatic, everything happens without the blink of an eye.

It’s one thing to know the importance to be tough and act strong and think positive and everything, yet it’s quite another to remain tough and strong and positive in face of consecutive heartbreaks. Being fragile, perhaps, is not just my “thing”; it’s, in fact, more of one inherent in human nature 'cause after all, who’s not vulnerable now and then?

Point thus proved---December isn’t easy. Get your guns ready!