考研英语阅读的深切念怀

   从9月到11月，考研英语阅读大抵读了两百篇章，现在想想，能真正给我知识，让我有收益，值得思考的只有两篇。
   下面是第一篇《如何看待雄心壮志》——2000 part 5
If ambition is to be well regarded, the rewards of ambition — wealth, distinction, control over one's destiny — must be deemed worthy of the sacrifices made on ambition's behalf. If the tradition of ambition is to have vitality, it must be widely shared; and it especially must be highly regarded by people who are themselves admired, the educated not least among them. In an odd way, however, it is the educated who have claimed to have given up on ambition as an ideal. What is odd is that they have perhaps most benefited from ambition — if not always their own then that of their parents and grandparents. There is a heavy note of hypocrisy in this, a case of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped — with the educated themselves riding on them.
Certainly people do not seem less interested in success and its signs now than formerly. Summer homes, European travel, BMWs — the locations, place names and name brands may change, but such items do not seem less in demand today than a decade or two years ago. What has happened is that people cannot confess fully to their dreams, as easily and openly as once they could, lest they be thought pushing, acquisitive and vulgar. Instead, we are treated to fine hypocritical spectacles, which now more than ever seem in ample supply: the critic of American materialism with a Southampton summer home; the publisher of radical books who takes his meals in three star restaurants; the journalist advocating participatory democracy in all phases of life, whose own children are enrolled in private schools. For such people and many more perhaps not so exceptional, the proper formulation is, "Succeed at all costs but avoid appearing ambitious."
The attacks on ambition are many and come from various angles; its public defenders are few and unimpressive, where they are not extremely unattractive. As a result, the support for ambition as a healthy impulse, a quality to be admired and fixed in the mind of the young, is probably lower than it has ever been in the United States. This does not mean that ambition is at an end, that people no longer feel its stirrings and promptings, but only that, no longer openly honored, it is less openly professed. Consequences follow from this, of course, some of which are that ambition is driven underground, or made sly. Such, then, is the way things stand: on the left angry critics, on the right stupid supporters, and in the middle, as usual, the majority of earnest people trying to get on in life. 
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看看现在中国的富二代都是什么嘴脸，昨天在CSDN的BBS的程序人生一栏有一篇帖，说富二代直言中国做技术的是狗，那么，他们也许忘记了自己的父母是如何起家的，倒退30年，中国又有几个富人？
那时的人们面对改革开发，不断的积累自己的财富，小平慷慨激昂的推进各种改革措施，东南各省一派革新，创业的人摩肩接踵，那真是人们在众人表现大展身手的时候，那时的壮志雄心见诸于报纸周刊。
但是，现在80后们在即将扛起父辈旗帜的时候，那些在“壮志雄心”中受益最多的人却不再如当年父母那样将壮志雄心放在嘴边。而更多的是越来越见不得人的虚伪，倡导义务教育的人想法设法将自己的孩子送到私立学校，为各种公益新闻捉刀弄笔的恨不得自己能请私人保姆。
  于是，我们看见对壮志雄心三种观点的人：左边是愤怒的批评者，右边是愚蠢的支持者，而中间的这是努力工作的想出人头地的默默的人，换句话说：一个能让集体收益的激励，被暗藏于胸，涌入地下了。
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第二篇是《悲哀的艺术》
Many things make people think artists are weird and the weirdest may be this: artists' only job is to explore emotions, and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad.
This wasn't always so. The earliest forms of art, like painting and music, are those best suited for expressing joy. But somewhere in the 19th century, more artists began seeing happiness as insipid, phony or, worst of all, boring as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to Baudelaire's flowers of evil.
You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness because modern times have seen such misery. But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, disaster and the massacre of innocents. The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: there is too much damn happiness in the world today.
After all, what is the one modern form of expression almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? Advertising. The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks the emergence of mass media, and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness is not just an ideal but an ideology.
People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. They worked until exhausted, lived with few protections and died young. In the West, before mass communication and literacy, the most powerful mass medium was the church, which reminded worshippers that their souls were in peril and that they would someday be meat for worms. Given all this, they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too.
Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy. Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda--to lure us to open our wallets to make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.
What we forget--what our economy depends on is forgetting--is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air
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这是一篇思考为什么我们看见的艺术趋于表达悲哀的思想的。作者的观点有道理，最后论述的高度居然达到了生死之间，读来不胜感动，读一遍感染，两遍感人，三遍感触颇多！
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