Chapter 1 Excitement : Seasons of Love
心动：爱恋绽放的季节
Dawning of Love
The Note
Speak Out Your Love
Love Is a Fallacy Ⅰ
Love Is a Fallacy Ⅱ
My Very First Love
Will You Go Out With Me
Apple Skin
The Love in Summer
A Different Kind of Homework for Singapore Students: Get a Date
情窦初开
纸条情
勇敢说出你的爱
爱是谬误（1）
爱是谬误（2）
我的初恋
你愿意和我约会吗
苹果皮
夏日情愫
我们约会吧——新加坡学生的另类作业
Chapter 2 Prospect: Courage and Dream
追梦：梦想的袅袅回音
A Dream of Green Grass
Don’t Work for Money
To a Different Drummer
One Bite at a Time
Hani
Never Say Never
Mr. Washington
Ode to Schoollife
Ten Wise Lessons: What I Wish I Knew When I Was Younger
绿茵梦
不做有才华的穷人
击出我天地
一口一口地吃
汉妮
别说不可能
华盛顿先生
【美丽诗情】校园生活颂歌
【阅读课堂】十句箴言：年轻的时候懂这些就好了
Chapter 3 Gratitude: Friendship and Kindness
感恩：与青春一路同行
The List
An Unlikely Hero
Compassion Is in the Eyes
Do You Have Your Wallet
A Gift From God
Reunited
People Come Into Your Life
Warm Delights to Rekindle a Lost Friendship
Deck the Halls
A Grandfather’s Touch
A New Attitude to Gratitude
Forever Friends
How to Get Along With People
一份名单
另类英雄
眼里的同情
你有钱包吗
上帝的礼物
重聚
你生活中的人们
用情牵故知
装点圣诞
感受异国的阳光
对待感激的新态度
【美丽诗情】永远的朋友
【阅读课堂】如何与他人相处
Chapter 4 Change: Sentiment and Growth
勇气：改变一生的力量
Broken Wings, Flying Heart
To Tell the Truth
Everyone Is Important
Life Is a Test
Do One Thing Every Day That Scares You
No One Will Ever Know
Growing Up
The Paradox of Happiness
Change
翅膀断了，我心飞翔
选择诚实
每个人都重要
生活是一场测试
每天做一件自己害怕的事
无人知晓
成长的代价
幸福的悖论
【美丽诗情】改变
Chapter 5 Success: Go Beyond Oneself
超越：一切奇迹在自己
Minnesota Dreamer
Are You Ignoring That Little Thought
One Girl Changed My Life
Overcoming Shyness
The Power of Determination
Chain of Love
We Are on a Journey
Dreams Are the Stuff Life Is Made of
Always Remember These Things
明尼苏达州的梦想家
你在忽略那些小想法吗
改变我一生的女孩
战胜胆怯
意志的力量
爱的锁链
人在旅途
梦想构造生活
【美丽诗情】常记在心的二十四行
Chapter 6 Future: Reborn and Bright
未来：重遇更好的自己
My Graduation Trip
A Lesson on Mental Clutter
Sow the Seed, See the Harvest
Why Should You Forgive Yourself
The Grass Is Always Green Right Under Your Feet
The Old Man and the Rose
A Letter to My Future Self
Letting Go, Moving on
What the “ABC” Tell Us
毕业旅行
如何清理心灵垃圾
撒下种子，期盼收获
为什么你必须原谅自己
脚下的草地才是最绿的
老人与玫瑰
写给未来自己的一封信
放手过去，放眼未来
【阅读课堂】26个字母的哲理
內容試閱：
爱是谬误（1）
Love Is a Fallacy Ⅰ
◎Max Shulman／马克斯?舒尔曼
【美丽语录】
The God only arranges a happy ending. If it is not happy, it means that it is not the final result.
上天只会安排快乐的结局。如果不快乐，说明还没到最后。
Cool was I and logical. Keen, calculating, perspicacious, acute and astute—I was all of these. My brain was as powerful as a dynamo, precise as a chemist’s scales, as penetrating as a scalpel. And—think of it!—I only eighteen.
It is not often that one so young has such a giant intellect. Take, for example, Petey Bellows, my roommate at the university. Same age, same background, but dumb as an ox. A nice enough fellow, you understand, but nothing upstairs. Emotional type. Unstable. Impressionable. Worst of all, a faddist. Fads, I submit, are the very negation of reason. To be swept up in every new craze that comes along, to surrender oneself to idiocy just because everybody else is doing it—this, to me, is the acme of mindlessness. Not, however, to Petey.
One afternoon I found Petey lying on his bed with an expression of such distress on his face that I immediately diagnosed appendicitis. “Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t take a laxative. I’ll get a doctor.”
“Raccoon,” he mumbled thickly.
“Raccoon?” I said, pausing in my flight.
“I want a raccoon coat,” he wailed.
I perceived that his trouble was not physical, but mental. “Why do you want a raccoon coat?”
“I should have known it,” he cried, pounding his temples. “I should have known they’d come back when the Charleston came back. Like a fool I spent all my money for textbooks, and now I can’t get a raccoon coat.”
“Can you mean,” I said incredulously, “that people are actually wearing raccoon coats again?”
“All the Big Men on Campus are wearing them. Where’ve you been?”
“In the library,” I said, naming a place not frequented by Big Men on Campus.
He leaped from the bed and paced the room. “I’ve got to have a raccoon coat,” he said passionately. “I’ve got to!”
“Petey, why? Look at it rationally. Raccoon coats are unsanitary. They shed. They smell bad. They weigh too much. They’re unsightly. They—”
“You don’t understand,” he interrupted impatiently. “It’s the thing to do. Don’t you want to be in the swim?”
“No,” I said truthfully.
“Well, I do,” he declared. “I’d give anything for a raccoon coat. Anything!”
My brain, that precision instrument, slipped into high gear. “Anything?” I asked, looking at him narrowly.
“Anything,” he affirmed in ringing tones.
I stroked my chin thoughtfully. It so happened that I knew where to get my hands on a raccoon coat. My father had had one in his undergraduate days; it lay now in a trunk in the attic back home. It also happened that Petey had something I wanted. He didn’t have it exactly, but at least he had first rights on it. I refer to his girl, Polly Espy.
I had long coveted Polly Espy. Let me emphasize that my desire for this young woman was not emotional in nature. She was, to be sure, a girl who excited the emotions, but I was not one to let my heart rule my head. I wanted Polly for a shrewdly calculated, entirely cerebral reason.
I was a freshman in law school. In a few years I would be out in practice. I was well aware of the importance of the right kind of wife in furthering a lawyer’s career. The successful lawyers I had observed were, almost without exception, married to beautiful, gracious, intelligent women. With one omission, Polly fitted these specifications perfectly. Beautiful she was. Gracious she was. Intelligent she was not. In fact, she veered in the opposite direction. But I believed that under my guidance she would smarten up. At any rate, it was worth a try. It is, after all, easier to make a beautiful dumb girl smart than to make an ugly smart girl beautiful.
“Petey,” I said, “are you in love with Polly Espy?”
“I think she’s a keen kid,” he replied, “but I don’t know if you’d call it love. Why?”
“Do you,” I asked, “have any kind of formal arrangement with her? I mean are you going steady or anything like that?”
“No. We see each other quite a bit, but we both have other dates. Why?”
“Is there,” I asked, “any other man for whom she has a particular fondness?”
“Not that I know of. Why?”
I nodded with satisfaction. “In other words, if you were out of the picture, the field would be open. Is that right?”
“I guess so. What are you getting at?”
“Nothing, nothing,” I said innocently, and took my suitcase out the closet.
“Where are you going?” asked Petey.
“Home for weekend.” I threw a few things into the bag.
“Look,” I said to Petey when I got back Monday morning. I threw open the suitcase and revealed the huge, hairy, gamy object that my father had worn in his Stutz Bearcat in 1925.
“Holy Toledo!” said Petey reverently. He plunged his hands into the raccoon coat and then his face. “Holy Toledo!” he repeated fifteen or twenty times.
“Would you like it?” I asked.
“Oh yes!” he cried, clutching the greasy pelt to him. Then a canny look came into his eyes. “What do you want for it?”
“Your girl.” I said, mincing no words.
“Polly?” he said in a horrified whisper. “You want Polly?”
“That’s right.”
He flung the coat from him. “Never,” he said stoutly.
I shrugged. “Okay. If you don’t want to be in the swim, I guess it’s your business.”
I sat down in a chair and pretended to read a book, but out of the corner of my eye I kept watching Petey. He was a torn man. First he looked at the coat with the expression of a waif at a bakery window. Then he turned away and set his jaw resolutely. Then he looked back at the coat, with even more longing in his face. Then he turned away, but with not so much resolution this time. Back and forth his head swiveled, desire waxing, resolution waning. Finally he didn’t turn away at all; he just stood and stared with mad lust at the coat.
“It isn’t as though I was in love with Polly,” he said thickly. “Or going steady or anything like that.”
“That’s right,” I murmured.
“What’s Polly to me, or me to Polly?”
“Not a thing,” said I.
“It’s just been a casual kick—just a few laughs, that’s all.”
“Try on the coat,” said I.
He complied. The coat bunched high over his ears and dropped all the way down to his shoe tops. He looked like a mound of dead raccoons. “Fits fine,” he said happily.
I rose from my chair. “Is it a deal?” I asked, extending my hand.
He swallowed. “It’s a deal,” he said and shook my hand.
I had my first date with Polly the following evening. This was in the nature of a survey; I wanted to find out just how much work I had to do to get her mind up to the standard I required. I took her first to dinner. “Gee, that was a delish dinner,” she said as we left the restaurant. Then I took her to a movie. “Gee, that was a marvy movie,” she said as we left the theatre. And then I took her home. “Gee, I had a sensaysh time,” she said as she bade me good night.
I went back to my room with a heavy heart. I had gravely underestimated the size of my task. This girl’s lack of information was terrifying. Nor would it be enough merely to supply her with information. First she had to be taught to think. This loomed as a project of no small dimensions, and at first I was tempted to give her back to Petey. But then I got to thinking about her abundant physical charms and about the way she entered a room and the way she handled a knife and fork, and I decided to make an effort.
冷静如我，长于逻辑。敏捷、精明、睿智、尖刻、机灵，这些词汇构成了我的全部。我的大脑像电机一样发达，像化学家的天平一样精准，像手术刀一样犀利。想想看吧！我才18岁而已。
年纪轻轻就智力超群的人可不常有。就拿我的大学室友彼蒂?贝勒斯来说吧，同样的年龄相同的经历，却笨得像头牛。从外表看上去，小伙子无可挑剔，可惜脑子里却空空如也。意气用事，反复无常，缺乏主见。更要命的是，爱赶时髦。时髦这东西，在我看来毫无理智可言。不管流行什么，都一股脑地跟风，大家怎样自己就怎样，完全没脑子——要我说，这简直愚不可及。但是，彼蒂可不这么想。
一天下午，我看见彼蒂躺在床上，脸上一幅痛苦不堪的表情，我立马断定他是得了阑尾炎。“别动弹，”我说，“也别吃什么泻药，我这就叫医生来。”
“浣熊。”他依稀咕哝着。
“浣熊？”我重复了一声，连忙刹住脚步。
“我要浣熊皮大衣。”他大声嚎啕。
我明白了，他不是身体不适，而是精神痛苦。“要浣熊皮大衣干吗？”
“我早该知道，”他哭喊着，不住地捶打太阳穴，“查尔斯顿舞卷土重来时我就该知道它们又会时兴起来。可我却像个傻瓜把钱都花在了课本上，现在我拿什么买浣熊皮大衣啊。”
“你是说，”我表示怀疑地问道，“人们真的又开始穿浣熊皮大衣了？”
“没看见校园里那些潮人都在穿嘛。你都去哪儿混了？”
“泡图书馆。”我交代了个貌似不受潮人欢迎的地方。
他从床上一跃而起，在房间里踱来踱去。“我一定得弄到一件浣熊皮大衣，”他显得很激动，“非到手不可！”
“彼蒂，这又何必呢？理智地想想看。浣熊皮大衣不太卫生，还掉毛，还有味道，还很笨重，还不怎么好看，还……”
“你根本不懂，”他不耐烦地打断了我，“现在的法宝就是它。难道你不想跟上潮流吗？”
“不想。”我实话实说。
“好吧，我可想着呢，”他肯定地说，“我愿意拿一切来换一件浣熊皮大衣。一切！”
我的大脑如同精密仪器，即刻高速运转起来。“一切？”我仔细打量着他。
“一切。”回答干脆响亮。
我若有所思地抚了抚下巴。巧了，我知道上哪儿能弄到一件浣熊皮大衣。我父亲读大学时穿过那么一件，现在正躺在我家阁楼的衣箱底呢。更巧的是，彼蒂刚好也有我想要的。尽管他还不算是拥有，但至少他是有优先权的。我说的是他的女朋友波莉?埃斯皮。
我觊觎波莉?埃斯皮已经很久了。我得强调下，我向往这位妙龄女郎可不是出于动了感情。的确，她是那种会让人心动的姑娘，但我绝不是那种会让情感占据理智的人。我想得到波莉是经过了深思熟虑、完全理智的衡量。
我现在是法学院一年级学生，过不了几年就要独当一面。我深知，一个合适的妻子对律师的前途来说至关重要。据我观察，凡事业有成的律师大都会找一位美丽优雅而又聪慧的妻子来辅助自己。抛开一点不看，波莉堪称最佳人选。美丽非她莫属。优雅她亦兼备。唯独缺乏智慧。事实上她完全背道而驰。但我相信，假以我的调教，她会开窍的。不管怎么说，这都值得一试，毕竟，改造一个有姿色的笨女人，要比让一个有脑子的丑女人变漂亮来得容易吧。
“彼蒂，”我开口了，“你在和波莉?埃斯皮谈恋爱吗？”
“我觉得这姑娘很迷人，”他回答，“但我不知道这是不是你所谓的恋爱。干吗？”
“那么，”我接着问，“你和她之间有认真吗？我是说，你们有没有确定关系或类似这种？”
“没有，我们只是常常见面，但我们各自也都有别的约会。干吗？”
“有没有，”我兀自问下去，“某个她特别钟情的人？”
“据我所知是没有的。干吗？”
我满意地点了点头。“那也就是说，一旦你让位，她身边就没人了。对吧？”
“我想是吧。你到底要干吗？”
“没，没什么。”我若无其事地应着，从壁橱里拖出手提箱。
“你去哪儿啊？”彼蒂问我。
“回家度周末。”我草草地往提箱里塞了点东西。
“快看。”周一上午一回来，我就找到彼蒂。我飞快地拉开提箱，把眼前这件硕大的还在散发怪味的毛茸茸的东西展示给他。这件浣熊皮大衣还是我父亲在1925年开着斯图兹勇士跑车时穿的。
“太好了！”彼蒂崇敬地叹道。他把手插进浣熊皮毛里感受着，随之把脸也埋了进去，嘴里不断说着，“太好了！”如此重复了一二十遍。
“想要吗？”我问他。
“想啊！”他大喊着把那副油滑的皮毛揽入怀中。紧接着，他的眼里露出一丝警惕的神色：“你要从我这换什么呢？”
“你的女朋友。”我直言不讳。
“波莉？”他惊恐地喃喃。“你想要波莉？”
“正是。”
他把大衣撇弃一边。“没门。”他显得很决绝。
我耸耸肩：“好吧。要是你不想跟所谓的潮流的话，我也没什么好勉强你的。”
我搬过一把椅子，假装坐下来看书，眼角的余光却一直瞟着彼蒂。他陷入了极度的不安中。他先是垂涎地望着这件皮大衣，神情像极了流浪儿驻足于面包店橱窗前的馋样。接着，他扭过头去，下巴坚决地一沉。可没过一会儿，他又回过头去把目光投向那件皮大衣，脸上露出更加渴望的神情。等他再扭过头去时，显然没有刚才那么坚决了。他的头就这么扭过来转过去，越看越爱不释手，决心越来越不足。最后他干脆死死地盯住皮大衣，一动不动，眼中噙满贪婪。
“好像我和波莉算不上是在恋爱吧，”他有些含混地说，“也没有确定关系或类似这种。”
“这才对嘛。”我小声附和道。
“波莉对我算得了什么？我对波莉又算得了什么？”
“不算什么。”
“只不过是玩玩罢了——在一起寻开心，如此而已。”
“可以试穿了。”我说。
他照做。大衣高高地隆起盖住了耳朵，下摆则一直曳到脚面，整个人看上去活像一具浣熊尸体堆在那里。他高兴地说：“挺合适的。”
我从椅子上站起身来。“可以成交了吗？”边说边向他伸出了手。
他轻易地就答应了。“成交。”说着握了握我的手。
第二天晚上，我就和波莉第一次约会了。约会的目的其实是考察她，我想先摸清到底我有多少工作要做，才能把她的大脑训练到我的标准。我先带她去吃饭，离开餐馆时，她嗲声说：“哇噻，好好吃啊。”然后我又带她去看了场电影，走出影院时她又嗲声说：“哇噻，好好看哪。”再然后我送她回家，临别道晚安时她还是嗲声说：“哇噻，玩得好好呀。”
我心情沉重地回到寝室。我严重低估了整个任务的艰巨性。这姑娘知识贫乏得不是一点两点，以至于光给她灌输知识也是无济于事的。首先得教会她思考才行。这可绝非易事，浩大工程赫然摆在面前，我都想把这烫手山芋还给彼蒂算了。可转念我又想到她举手投足间的无穷魅力，想到她走进房间时的款款步态，想到她运用刀叉时的娴熟仪态，我还是决定下番功夫。
……
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