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Students at the nation's best liberal arts colleges who majored in philosophy or English were constantly asked what they were "going to do with it," as though intellectual pursuits for their own sake had had their day, and lost it in the press of business. Reading for pleasure was replaced by reading for purpose, and a kind of dogged self-improvement: whereas an executive might learn far more from Moby-Dick, the book he was expected to have read might be The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. Reading for pleasure, spurred on by some interior compulsion, became as suspect as getting on the subway to ride aimlessly from place to place.
美国最好的文理学院哲学或英语专业的学生们总是被问道你们学了这些，打算将来干什么？”好像在商业社会的压力下，纯粹的学习与研究已经过时了。过去读书是因为乐在其中，现在变了，读书变成了某种目的，变成一种顽固的自我发展。虽然一位高级管理人员很可能从《白鲸》这本小说中学到更多的东西，但人们却认为他应该看《超级成功人士应该具有的七种习惯》。因内心某种追求乐趣的欲望而阅读，已经变得让人无法理解了，这种阅读就好像一个人进了地铁，毫无目的地从一个地方坐到另一个地方。
For many years I worked in the newspaper business. For many journalists, reading in the latter half of the twentieth century was most often couched as a series of problems to be addressed: Were children in public schools reading poorly? Were all Americans reading less? Was the printed word giving way to the spoken one? Had television and the movies supplanted books? The journalistic answer, most often, was yes, yes, yes, yes. And in circles devoted to literary criticism, among the professors of literature, the editors and authors of fiction, there was sometimes a kind of horrible exclusivity surrounding discussions of reading. There was good reading, and there was bad reading. There was the worthy, and the trivial. This was always couched in terms of taste, but it tasted, smelled unmistakably like snobbery.
我在报界工作过多年。很多新闻记者认为，在20世纪后半叶，大家总把阅读作为一系列需要解决的问题来谈论：现在公立学校的孩子们是不是很少读书了？是不是美国人都比以前读书少了？书面文字是不是被口头文字取代了？电视、电影是不是把书本都取代了？新闻工作者在大多数情况下都回答：是，是，是，是。而在文学评论界，文学教授、小说编辑、小说家在讨论阅读时，有时会带有一种令人望而生畏的排外性。他们会评论说哪些是好书，哪些是坏书，哪些值得读，哪些毫无价值。他们总是在谈品位，但这听上去很势利。
