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大学英语第六册
Unit 1
Section A The Pursuit of Happiness
The right to pursue happiness is promid to Americans by the US Constitution, but no one ems quite sure which way happiness runs. It may be we are issued a hunting licen but offered no game. Jonathan Swift conceived of happiness as "the state of being well-deceived", or of being "a fool among idiots ", for Swift saw society as a land of fal goals.
It is, of cour, un-American to think in terms of fal goals. 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.
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And at the same time the forces of American business 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 than anyone's budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is bad on addicting us to greed. We are even told it is our patriotic duty to support the national economy by buying things.
Look at any of the magazines that cater to women. There advertising begins as art and slogans in the front pages and ends as pills and therapy in the back pages. The art at the front illustrates the dream of perfect beauty. This is the baby skin that must be hers. This, the perfumed breath she must breathe out. This, the sixteen-year-old figure she must display at forty, at fifty, at sixty, and forever. This is the harness into which Mother must strap herlf in order to display that perfect figure. This is the cream that restores skin, the are the tablets that melt away fat around the thighs, and the are the pills of perpetual youth.
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Obviously no reasonable person can be completely persuaded either by such art or by such pills and devices. Yet someone is obviously trying to buy this dream and spending billions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what is it they are trying to buy?
Defining the meaning of "happiness" is a perplexing proposition: the best one can do is to try to t some extremes to the idea and then work towards the middle. To think of happiness as achieving superiority over others, living in a mansion made of marble, having a wardrobe with hundreds of outfits, will do to t the greedy extreme. To think of happiness as the joy of a holy man of India will do to t the spiritual extreme. He sits completely still, contemplating the nature of reality, free even of his own body. If admirers bring him food, he eats it; if not, he starves. Why be concerned? What is physical is trivial to him. To contemplate is his joy and he achieves complete mental focus through an incredibly demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itlf a joy to him.
美酒的诗句阴阳师兵俑哪里多 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 fal than happiness paid for through an installment plan?
Although the holy man's concept of happiness may enjoy considerable prestige in the Orient, I doubt the existence of such motionless happiness. What is certain is that his way of happiness would be torture to almost anyone of Western temperament. Yet the extremes will still rve to define the area within which all of us must find some sort of balance. Thoreau had his own firm n of that balance: save on the petty in order to spend on the esntial.
Posssion for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreau's idea of the petty. The active discipline of raising one's perception of what is eternal in nature would have been his idea of the esntial. Time saved on the petty could be spent on the esntial. Thoreau certainly didn't intend to starve, but he would put into feeding himlf only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts.
楞伽经原文
Effort is the esnce of it: there is no happiness except as we take on challenges. Short of the impossible, the satisfactions we get from a lifetime depend on how high we place our difficulties. The mortal flaw in the advertid version of happiness is in the fact that it claims to be effortless.
妈妈的朋友7在线观看 We demand difficulty even in our diversions. 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 addition of difficulty. It is easier to win at chess if you are free to change the rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. If we could mint our own money, even building a fortune would become boring. No difficulty, no fun.
Tho in advertising em too often to have lost their n of the pleasure of difficulty. And the Indian holy man ems dull to us, I suppo, becau he ems to be refusing to play anything at all. The Western weakness may be in the illusion that happiness can be bought. Perhaps the oriental weakness is in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect happiness.
