生命不息，求真不止
美國大學，尤其是名校，有一個傳統，就是在每年畢業季到來的時候，邀請優秀的校友或者其他社會名流，來給本校的精英畢業生們做一場演講，就“如何面對真實社會”這個話題，給他們一些過來人的提點和建議。
哈佛大學作為美國曆史最悠久，也是最好的大學，它歷年的畢業典禮演講，可以稱得上是“最有影響力的公眾人物與他們最有價值的人生建議”。
Natalie Portman’s Harvard University 2015 Commencement Address.
The first film I was in came out in 1994, again appallingly, the year most of you were born. I was 13 years old upon the film’s release and I can still quote what New York Times said about me verbatim. “Ms Portman poses better than she acts.” The film had a universally tepid critic response and went on to bomb commercially. That film was called The Professional, or Leon in Europe. And today, 20 years and 35 films later, it is still the film people approach me about the most to tell me how much they love it, how much it moved them, how it’s their favorite movie.I feel lucky that my first experience of releasing a film was initially such a disaster by all standards and measures. I learned early that my meaning had to be from the experience of making the film and possibility of connecting with inpiduals rather than the foremost trophies in my industry: financial and critical success. And also those initial reactions could be false predicators of your works’ ultimate legacy.I started choosing only jobs that I’m passionate about and from which I know I could glean meaningful experiences. This thoroughly confused everyone around me: agents, producers, and audiences alike. I made Goya’s Ghost, a foreign independent film and studied art history visiting the produce every day for 4 months as I read about Goya and Spanish Inquisition. I made V for Vendetta, studio action movie for which I learned everything I could about freedom fighters whom otherwise may be called terrorists from Menachem Begin to Weather Underground. I made Your Highness, a pothead comedy with Danny McBride and laughed for 3 months straight. I was able to own my meaning and not have it be determined by box office receipts or prestige.By the time I got to making Black Swan, the experience was entirely my own. I felt immune to the worst things anyone could say or write about me and to whether the audience felt like to my movie or not. It was instructive for me to see for ballet dancers. Once your technique gets to a certain level, the only thing that separates you from others is your quirks or even flaws. One ballerina was famous for how she turned slightly off balanced. You can never be the best, technically. Someone will always have a higher jump or a more beautiful line. The only thing you can be the best at is developing your own self. Authoring your own experience was very much what Black Swan itself was about. I worked with Darren Aronofsky the director who changed my last line in the movie to “It was perfect.” Because my character Nina is only artistically successful when she finds perfection and pleasure for herself not when she was trying to be perfect in the eyes of others. So when Black Swan was successful financially and I began receiving accolades I felt honored and grateful to have connected with people. But the true core of my meaning I had already established and I needed it to be independent of people’s reactions to me.People told me that Black Swan was an artistic risk. A scary challenge to try to portray a professional ballet dancer. But it didn’t feel like courage or daring that drove me to it. I was so oblivious to my own limits that I did things I was woefully unprepared to do. And so the very inexperience that in college had made me feel insecure and made me want to play by other’s rules now is making me actually take risks I didn’t even realized were risks. When Darren asked me if I could do ballet I told him I was basically a ballerina which by the way I wholeheartedly believed.When it quickly became clear in preparing for the film that I was maybe 15 years away from being a ballerina. It made me work a million times harder and of course the magic of cinema and body doubles helped the final effect. But the point is, if I had known my own limitations I never would have taken the risk. And the risk led to one of my greatest artistic and personal experiences. And that I not only felt completely free, I also met my husband during the filming.Similarly, I just directed my first film, A Tale of Love in Darkness. I was quite blind to the challenges ahead of me. The film is a period film, completely in Hebrew, in which I also act with an eight-year-old child as a costar. All of these challenges I should have been terrified of, as I was completely unprepared for them. But my complete ignorance to my own limitations looked like confidence and got me into the director’s chair. Once there, I had to figure it all out, and my belief that I could handle these things contrary to all evidence of my ability to do so was half the battle. The other half was very hard work. These experience was the deepest and most meaningful one of my career. Now clearly I’m not urging you to go perform heart surgery without the knowledge to do so.Making movies admittedly has less drastic consequences than most professions and allows for a lot of effects that make up for mistakes. The thing I’m saying is, make use of the fact that you don’t doubt yourself too much right now. As we get older, we get more realistic, and that includes about our own abilities or lack thereof. And that realism does us no favors. People always talk about ping into things you’re afraid of. That never worked for me. If I’m afraid, I run away. And I would probably urge my child to do the same. Fear protects us in many ways. What has served me is ping into my own obliviousness, being more confidence than I should be, which everyone tends to decry American kids and those of us who have been grade inflated and ego inflated. Well, it can be a good thing if it makes you try things you never might have tried. Your inexperience is an asset, and will allow you to think in original and unconventional ways，Accept your lack of knowledge and use it as your asset.I know a famous violinist who told me that he can’t compose because he knows too many pieces so when he starts thinking of the note an existing piece immediately comes to mind. Just starting out one of your biggest strengths is not knowing how things are supposed to be. You can compose freely because your mind isn’t cluttered with too many pieces. And you don’t take for granted the way how things are. The only way you know how to do things is your own way. You here will all go on to achieve great things. There is no doubt about that. Each time you set out to do something new, your inexperience can either lead you down a path where you will confirm to someone else’s values or you can forge your own path even though you don’t realize that’s what you’re doing. If your reasons are your own, your path, even if it’s a strange and clumsy path, will be wholly yours. And you will control the rewards of what you do by making your internal life fulfilling.As the risk of sounding like a Miss America contestant, the most fulfilling things I’ve experienced have truly been the human interactions: spending time with women in village banks in Mexico with FINCA microfinance organization, meeting young women who were the first and the only in their communities to attend secondary schools in rural Kenya with Free the Children group that built sustainable schools in developing countries tracking with gorilla conservationists in Rwanda. It’s a cliche because it’s true, that helping others ends up helping you more than anyone. Getting out of your own concerns and caring about someone else’s life for a while reminds you that you are not the center of the universe. And in that ways we are generous or not we can change the course of someone’s life. Even at work, a small feat of kindness crew members, directors, fellow actors have shown me have had the most lasting impact.And of course, first and foremost, the center of my world is the love I share with my family and my friends. I wish for you that your friends will be with you through it all as my friends from Harvard have been together since we graduated. My friends from school are still very close. We have nursed each other through heartaches and danced at each other’s weddings. We held each other at funerals and rocked each other’s new babies. We worked together on projects, helped each other get jobs and thrown parties for when we’ve quit bad ones. And now our children are creating a second generation of friendship as we look at them toddling together. Haggard and disheveled working parents that we are. Grab the good people around you and don’t let them go. The biggest asset this school offers you is a group of peers that will both be your family and your school for life.I remember always being pissed at the spring here in Cambridge. Tricking us into remembering a sunny yard full of laughing Frisbee throwers after 8 months of dark freezing library dwelling. It was like the school has managed to turn on the good weather as a last memory we should keep in mind that would make us want to come back. But as I get farther away from my years here I know that the power of this school is much deeper that weather control. It changed the very question that I was asking, to quote one of my favorite thinkers, Abraham Joshua Heschel: To be or not to be is not the question, the vital question is how to be and how not to be. Thank you. I can’t wait to see how you do all the beautiful things you will do.
娜塔莉·波特曼
美國著名女演員，曾出演《這個殺手不太冷》、《星球大戰》、《黑天鵝》等電影作品。
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