WHAT IS HAPPINESS
by John Ciardi
The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth certificates, but no one ems quite sure which way it ran. It may be we are issued a hunting licen but offered no game. Jonathan Swift emed to think so when he attacked the idea of happiness as “the posssion of being well-deceived,” the felicity of being “a fool among knaves.” For Swift saw society as Vanity Fair, the land of fal goals.
冬天怎么保养皮肤 It is, of cour, un-American to think in terms of fools and knaves. We do, however, em to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we posss enough.
And at the same time the forces of American commercialism are hugely dedicated to making us deliberately unhappy. Advertising is one of our major industries, and advertising exists not to satisfy desires but to create them -- and to create them faster tha财团法人
n any man’s budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is bad on a dedicated insatiability. We are taught that to posss is to be happy, and then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. It was only a few years ago, to cite a single example, that car dealers across the country were flying banners that read “You Auto Buy Now.” They were calling upon Americans, as an act approaching patriotism, to buy at once, with money they did not have, automobiles they did not really need, and which they would be required to grow tired of by the time the next year’s models were relead.
Or look at any of the women’s magazines. There, as Bernard DeVoto once pointed out, advertising begins as poetry in the front pages and ends as pharmacopoeia and therapy in the back pages. The poetry of the front matter is the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. The, the flawless teeth. This, the perfumed breath she must exhale. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever.
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Once past the vaguely uplifting fiction and feature articles, the reader finds the other face of the dream in the back matter. This is the harness into which Mother must strap herlf in order to display that perfect figure. The, the chin straps she must sleep in. This is the salve that restores all, this is her laxative, the are the tablets that melt away fat, the are the hormones of perpetual youth; the are the stockings that hide varico veins.
Obviously no half-sane person can be completely persuaded either by such poetry or by such pharmacopoeia and orthopedics. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy the dream as offered and spending billions every year in the attempt. 围什么救赵Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, 唐璧>水浒排名but what is it trying to buy?
The idea “happiness,” to be sure, will not sit still for easy definition; the best one can do is to try to t some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle.西北大学排名 To think of happiness as acquisitive and competitive will do to t the materialistic extreme. To think of it as the idea one ns in, say, a holy man of India will do to t the spiritual extreme.
That holy man’s idea of happiness is in needing nothing from outside himlf. In wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. He sits immobile, rapt in contemplation, free even of his own body. Or nearly free of it. If devout admirers bring him food he eats it; if not, he starves indifferently. Why be concerned? What is physical is an illusion to him. Contemplation is his joy and he achieves it through a fantastically demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itlf a joy within him.
Is he a happy man? Perhaps his happiness is only another sort of illusion. But who can take it from him? And who will dare say it is more illusory than happiness on the installment plan?
But, perhaps becau I am Western, I doubt such catatonic happiness, as I doubt the dreams of the happiness-market. What is certain is that his way of happiness would be torture to almost any Western man. Yet the extremes will still rve to frame the area within which all of us must find some sort of balance. Thoreau -- a creature of both Eastern and Western thought -- had his own firm n of that balance. His aim was to save on the low levels in order to spend on the high.
Posssion for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau’s idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening one’s perception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high. What he saved from the low was time and effort he could spend on the high. Thoreau certainly disapproved of starvation, but he would put into feeding himlf only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.
Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfactions we get from a lifetime depend on how high we choo our difficulties, Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of “The pleasure of taking pains.” The mortal flaw in the advertid version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to be effortless.
We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it becau without difficulty there can be no game. A game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are an arbitrary imposition of difficulty. When the spoilsport ruins the fun, he alw
ays does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun.
