普林斯顿大学2012毕业演讲..doc

【普林斯顿大学2012毕业演讲】 (2012-06-11 15:52:47) Dont Eat Fortunes Cookie Michael LewisJune 3, 2012 — As Prepared (NOTE: The video of Lewis speech as delivered is available on the Princeton YouTube channel.) 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. 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. 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 tell someone. God knows what Professor Childs actually thought