Unit 9 What Is Happiness?
小猪唏哩呼噜John Ciardi
(abridged)
The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth certificates, but no one ems quite sure which way it runs. 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.
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
七色花的读后感exists not to satisfy desires but to create them — and to create them faster than 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.
椰奶咖啡 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.
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.喝酒的诗
封建土地制度 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. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what are they trying to buy? 石头拼音怎么写
The idea "happiness," to be sure, will not sit still for easy definitions: the best one can do is to try to t some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle. 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 ext
reme. That holy man’s ideal 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.7 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.
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 per
ception of what is enduring in nature would have been his idea of the high.10 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.丧宴
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