Drop Out

退學

Jobs quickly became bored with college. He liked being at Reed, just not taking the required classes. In fact he was surprised when he found out that, for all of its hippie aura, there were strict course requirements. When Wozniak came to visit, Jobs waved his schedule at him and complained, “They are making me take all these courses.” Woz replied, “Yes, that’s what they do in college.” Jobs refused to go to the classes he was assigned and instead went to the ones he wanted, such as a dance class where he could enjoy both the creativity and the chance to meet girls. “I would never have refused to take the courses you were supposed to, that’s a difference in our personality,” Wozniak marveled.

喬布斯很快厭倦了大學生活。他喜歡待在里德學院，只是不想去上那些必修課。實際上，他驚訝地發現，盡管里德學院有著嬉皮士的氛圍，但也有非常嚴格的課程要求，學生需要閱讀《伊利亞特》這樣的作品，還要研究伯羅奔尼撒戰爭史。沃茲來訪的時候，喬布斯揮舞著自己的課程表抱怨說：“學校強迫我上這么多課程。”沃茲回答：“是的，大學就是這樣的，他們會給你指定一些課程。”喬布斯拒絕去上那些必修課，而是去上自己感興趣的課，比如舞蹈課，在那里他既可以享受藝術，還有機會見到女孩子。“我絕不會不去上必修課，這就是我們性格上的差異。”沃茲尼亞克感到十分詫異。

Jobs also began to feel guilty, he later said, about spending so much of his parents’ money on an education that did not seem worthwhile. “All of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition,” he recounted in a famous commencement address at Stanford. “I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out okay.”

喬布斯后來說，把父母的錢花在了根本不值那么多錢的教育上，他也開始有負罪感。“我那工薪階層的父母省下來的錢全花在學費上了，”他在那場著名的斯坦福大學畢業典禮演講中提到，“我不知道自己想要千什么，也不知道大學能如何幫我搞清楚自己的人生目標。但我卻在花著父母的畢生積蓄。所以我決定退學，我也相信，一切都會順利。”

He didn’t actually want to leave Reed; he just wanted to quit paying tuition and taking classes that didn’t interest him. Remarkably, Reed tolerated that. “He had a very inquiring mind that was enormously attractive,” said the dean of students, Jack Dudman. “He refused to accept automatically received truths, and he wanted to examine everything himself.” Dudman allowed Jobs to audit classes and stay with friends in the dorms even after he stopped paying tuition.

他并不是真的想離開里德學院，他只是不想再付學費，也不想再去上那些提不起他興趣的課程了。驚人的是，校方竟然容忍了這一切。“他有一顆渴求知識的心，這很讓人感興趣，”教導主任杰克·達德曼（JackDixdman）說，“他拒絕不動腦筋地接受事實，任何事情他都要親自檢驗。”即使在喬布斯停止交學費之后，達德曼還是允許他旁聽課程，并且可以繼續待在宿舍和朋友們在一起。

“The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting,” he said. Among them was a calligraphy class that appealed to him after he saw posters on campus that were beautifully drawn. “I learned about serif and sans serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.”

“我一退學，就不用去上那些我不感興趣的必修課了，我可以去上那些看起來有意思的課。”他說。這其中有一門書法課非常吸引他，因為他注意到校園里的大多數海報都畫得很漂亮。“我學到了襯線字體和無襯線字體，怎樣在不同的字母組合間調整其間距，以及怎樣作出完美的版面設計。這其中所蘊涵的美、歷史意味和藝術精妙之處是科學無法捕捉的，這讓我陶醉。”

It was yet another example of Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of the arts and technology. In all of his products, technology would be married to great design, elegance, human touches, and even romance. He would be in the fore of pushing friendly graphical user interfaces. The calligraphy course would become iconic in that regard. “If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it’s likely that no personal computer would have them.”

這也再一次證明，喬布斯總是有意識地將自己置身于藝術與科技的交匯處。在他所有的產品中，科技必定與完美的設計、外觀、手感、精致、人性化甚至是浪漫結合在一起。他是追求友好圖形用戶界面的先鋒。在這一方面，那門書法課程是意義非凡的。“如果我大學的時候從沒有上過那門課，麥金塔計算機里絕不會有那么多種字形以及間距安排合理的字體。既然是Windows抄襲了Mac，那么很有可能所有個人電腦上也不會有這些。”

In the meantime Jobs eked out a bohemian existence on the fringes of Reed. He went barefoot most of the time, wearing sandals when it snowed. Elizabeth Holmes made meals for him, trying to keep up with his obsessive diets. He returned soda bottles for spare change, continued his treks to the free Sunday dinners at the Hare Krishna temple, and wore a down jacket in the heatless garage apartment he rented for $20 a month. When he needed money, he found work at the psychology department lab maintaining the electronic equipment that was used for animal behavior experiments. Occasionally Chrisann Brennan would come to visit. Their relationship sputtered along erratically. But mostly he tended to the stirrings of his own soul and personal quest for enlightenment.

在此期間，喬布斯在里德學院作為一名邊緣人物，過著放蕩不羈的生活。他大多數時間都光腳走路，下雪天的時候穿著涼鞋。伊麗莎白·霍姆斯為他做飯，努力照顧到他過分的飲食習慣。他會拿汽水瓶去換零錢，繼續每個周日去哈雷·克里希納寺吃免費的素食，穿著羽絨服住在他以每月20美元的價格祖下的沒有供曖的車庫房間里。他需要錢的時候，就去心理學系的實驗室，維護那些用于動物行為實驗的電子設備。克里斯安·布倫南也會偶爾來訪，他們的關系時好時壞。但他的主要精力還是放在自己的心靈以及對個人覺悟的追求上了。

“I came of age at a magical time,” he reflected later. “Our consciousness was raised by Zen, and also by LSD.” Even later in life he would credit psychedelic drugs for making him more enlightened. “Taking LSD was a profound experience, one of the most important things in my life. LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it. It reinforced my sense of what was important—creating great things instead of making money, putting things back into the stream of history and of human consciousness as much as I could.”

“我當時身處一個神奇的時代，”他后來回憶說，“提升我們覺悟的是禪宗，還有迷幻藥。”即便是后來，他依然贊揚致幻劑讓自己得到了更多啟發：“使用迷幻藥是一段意義非凡的經歷，也是我一生中最重要的事情之一。迷幻藥讓你看到硬幣的另一面，當藥效退去之后你就記不清楚了，但你知道有這么一回事。它讓我更清楚什么是重要的——創造偉大的發明，而不是賺錢。應該盡我所能，將此生放回歷史和人類思想的長河。”