Success is somebody else's failure. Success is the American Dream we can keep dreaming because most people in most places, including thirty million of ourselves, live wide awake in the terrible reality of poverty.
Ursula K. Le Guin
Mills College Commencement 1983, 1983
这句语录背后的故事
Le Guin's commencement address — titled 'A Left-Handed Commencement Address' — systematically inverted every convention of the genre. Where most speakers wished graduates success, Le Guin declared: 'No, I do not wish you success. I don't even want to talk about it. I want to talk about failure.' The argument was not that success was undesirable but that it was structurally dependent on others' deprivation. The American Dream required that most people never achieve it. Le Guin's alternative vision was radically modest: 'I hope you have kids — not hordes of them, a couple, enough. I hope they're beautiful. I hope you and they have enough to eat, and a place to be warm and clean in, and friends, and work you like doing.' The audience, expecting inspirational rhetoric about conquering the world, instead received a benediction of sufficiency.
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