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red classes that didnamp。39。t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting. 所以我決定休學(xué),相信船到橋頭自然直。當(dāng)時這個決定看來相當(dāng)可怕,可是現(xiàn)在看來,那是我這輩子做過最好的決定之一。當(dāng)我休學(xué)之后,我再也不用上我沒興趣的必修課,把時間拿去聽那些我有興趣的課。 It wasnamp。39。t all romantic. I didnamp。39。t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friendsamp。39。 rooms. I returned coke bottles for the five cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example: Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didnamp。39。t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter binations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science canamp。39。t capture, and I found it fascinating. 這一點也不浪漫。我沒有宿舍,所以我睡在友人家里的地板上,靠著回收可樂空罐的五先令退費買吃的,每個星期天晚上得走七哩的路繞過大半個鎮(zhèn)去印度教的HareKrishna神廟吃頓好料。我喜歡HareKrishna神廟的好料。追尋我的好奇與直覺,我所駐足的大部分事物,后來看來都成了無價之寶。舉例來說:當(dāng)時里德學(xué)院有著大概是全國最好的書法指導(dǎo)。在整個校園內(nèi)的每一張海報上,每個抽屜的標(biāo)簽上,都是美麗的手寫字。因為我休學(xué)了,可以不照正常選課程序來,所以我跑去學(xué)書法。我學(xué)了serif與sanserif字體,學(xué)到在不同字母組合間變更字間距,學(xué)到活版印刷偉大的地方。書法的美好、歷史感與藝術(shù)感是科學(xué)所無法捕捉的,我覺得那很迷人。 None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh puter, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first puter with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the amp。quot。Macamp。quot。 would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, itamp。39。s likely that no personal puter would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class, and personal puters might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later.