121. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism, consecrated by the blood of martyrs (烈士) ; he is provided with comport and leisure by the most productive economy ever known to mankind; science has penetrated the secrets of nature in order to provide him with the marvellous, life like electronic sound and image reproductions he is enjoying.
122. Each highbrow did and does congratulate himself on being unique in his unlikeness to other men; and conversely each lowbrow now congratulate himself on being in some mystical way unique in his likeness—on being, so to say, outstandingly average and extraordinarily ordinary.
123. As for the lowbrows’ claim to be specially “human”, I for one have never been able to understand why it should be “inhuman” to use the faculties that distinguish us from pigs and geese and “human” to use those which we share with the lower animals.
124. There is no disputing, says the proverb, about taste—though, in fact, human beings spend at least half their leisure doing nothing else—and if highbrowism and lowbrowism were exclusively ( as it is certain that they are in great part) matters of individual taste, there would be no more to say about them than what I have said in the preceding lines.
125. Thus I desire a great deal less pleasure from jazz and thrillers than from the music, let us say, of Beethoven(贝多芬) or the novels, for example, of Dostoievsky; and the sex appeal of the girls on the covers of magazines seems to me less thrilling than the more complicated appeal to a great variety of feelings made by a Rubens, an EI Greco, a Constable, a Seurat.
126. One need only ask first-year university students what music they listen to , how much of it and what it means to them, in order to discover that the phenomenon is universal in America, that it begins in adolescence or a bit before and continues through the college years.
127. They start, like the pharisee in the parable , by thanking God that the are not as other men are, and proceed to paint a picture of those other men, hardly more flattering than that which Swift painted of the Yahoos.
128. Each time the dream was a promise out of our ancient articles of faith, phrases from the constitution, lines from the great anthem of the nation, guarantees from the Bill of Rights, all ending with a vision that they might one day all come true
129. For many the day seemed an adventure, a long outing in the late summer sun—part liberation from home, part Sunday school picnic, part political convention, and part fish fry.
130. It may not “look to it” at once, since it is looking to so many things, but it will be a long time before it forgets the melodious(悦耳的) and melancholy (忧郁的) voice of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther Jr., crying out his dreams to the multitude(大众).
