奇速英语

一个老人，一个年轻人，和一堂人生课

Mitch Albom was intent on chronicling(按时间顺序记载) the Tuesdays he spent with Morrie Schwartz, his favorite college professor who was facing Lou Gehrig’s disease. Albom’s only goal was to write a book to pay for Schwartz’ medical bills.

But publisher after publisher rejected his book proposal. Doubleday(双日出版社) took a chance 25 years ago this month and published Tuesdays with Morrie in a limited press run. Eventually, Tuesdays with Morrie has sold nearly 18 million copies globally and has been translated into 48 languages. It’s one of the best-selling memoirs(回忆录) in the history of publishing.

At its core, the memoir is about the power of relationship — between a professor approaching his 80s and his student not yet out of his 30s, and one whose accumulated life experiences can be passed down to a former student and then to the world at large, literally.

To understand how their relationship developed, wind the clock back to the 1970s, when Albom was a freshman at Brandeis University. Arriving for sociology class, he saw a dozen or so students gathered and figured it might not be easy to cut such a small class and go unnoticed. But before he could sneak out, the professor called attendance in alphabetical order, beginning with Albom. Albom stayed in that class and took every lecture Schwartz offered during his undergraduate years. They had lunch together, and Albom visited Schwartz’ home. At graduation, he promised to stay in touch. But there was no phone call or email from Albom to Schwartz in 16 years.

Then, late one night in March 1995, Albom was channel surfing and heard Ted Koppel say something that got his attention: “Who is Morrie Schwartz, and why by the end of the night are so many of you going to care about him?” Koppel explained that Schwartz was terminally ill, who wanted to use whatever time he had left to teach about life to whoever would listen. So, he worked up the courage to call the professor he had called “Coach”. He got through to his nurse, who handed Schwartz the phone.

“I said, ‘Professor Schwartz, my name is Mitch Albom. I was a student of yours in the 70s. I don’t know if you remember me.’ And the first thing he said to me was ‘How come you didn’t call me ‘Coach’?” That’s all Albom had to hear and soon reconnected with Morrie, the start of more than a dozen Tuesday sessions.