HAPPINESS
Robert Coles
1No other country in the world has worked the notion of happiness into its Constitution, the very source of its national authority, the way the founding fathers of the United States of America cho to do when they linked the pursuit of happiness with life and with liberty as a trio of utterly inalienable rights. Not that happiness was, thereupon, defined. Anyway, a "pursuit" was specified --- perhaps a rather knowing decision, in the tradition of Don Quixote, that the journey or way is better than the inn. "Happiness," a psychoanalytic supervisor of mine ud to tell me, again and again, as I prented information to him about my patients, "is something people yearn for. " He'd st神经梅毒有什么症状
op, and after a while I'd know the next ntence: When they have it, they've redefined it, so they can keep arching. " Again, one thinks of Cervantes hero- not to mention any number of restless heroes and heroines in the novels of, say, George Eliot or Hardy or D. H. Lawrence.
2What is happiness? The word itlf only appeared in our English language during the
sixteenth century, and is etymologically and, yes, spiritually connected to the word "happen" --- which, of cour, has to do with the occurrence of an event. Happiness in Shakespeare's time, and later as well, referred to good fortune, good luck to favorable circumstances visited, somehow, on a particular person who registered such a state of affairs subjectively with a condition of good cheer, pleasurable feeling. One was satisfied with one's situation, glad to be in one's given place and time by virtue of how one's life has gone. The emphasis is, put differently, upon fate -- an almost external force. To be sure, individuals craved pleasure, money, power, territory, a certain woman, a certain man -- but "happiness" was not in itlf sought. Rather, a person's personal and workaday success was noted by that person, and thankfully acknowledged- his or hers by virtue of divine grace or the stars and their mysterious doings, or, quite simply, a ries of fortuitous events
3Without question there were different interpretations of what prompts happiness, and what constitutes it. For many devoutly religious people (to this day), a stroke of business success, a marriage 二八定律
that works, the emergence over time of strong, intelligent well-behav
ed children who em able and content with their lot in life are all signs of sorts, evidence of God's favor. For tho who don't know what to believe (about this life, and .our place or purpo on earth), happiness ems something accidental, contingent, or, at best, a feeling for which one has worked hard indeed. But now wearer a bit ahead of, ourlves, historically: years ago, there was a n of awe about happiness--as if it were visited upon some in accordance with the unfathomable workings of an inscrutable univer. It was only in more recent times, as men and women became more the center of this world (in’ their own minds, more the makers, the doers, the ones who wield and e the conquences, that happiness became, with everything el, a goal, a purpo, or, as tho hard working, ambitious rationalists who framed our Constitution put it something for which a "pursuit" is waged, No longer does happiness happen happiness is obtained.
4But again the question has to be asked: what was this "happiness" which increasingly became mentioned by people in England and America from, say, 1600 or so onward? The English poet Alexander Pope, always one to render a quotable statement, once exclaimed "Oh Happiness! Then he tried his hand at spelling the matter out: "Our being's
end and aim! Good, Pleasure, Ea, Content! Whatever thy name. ''An interesting way of regarding an elusive quality of mind and heart. First, the avowal that, the posssion of happiness is connected to our very purpo in life, to the central thrust of our human striving, to our aspirations as the peculiar creature which -- well, has just that, the capacity to have aspirations. Then, a kind of bafflement: the poet, handy with words as he was, surrenders to the puzzling variety of hope and direction and orientation among us mortals. He makes a list, a various one at that; and yes, the list still works as we consider “happiness.”
5For some, "Good" is yet what counts: happiness as the inner feeling that corresponds to a moral perception of the part of a person. "I have done my duty to God and country; I have lived as I was taught it is right to live, and I'm ready to die happy--the words of an ordinary twentieth century American working woman a nur of fifty, actually, who'd raid her two children well lived out a solid, satisfying marriage with her optometrist bus band oncologists, and, she would sometimes add, her minister. "He prays for my recovery," she once told me, and then added, "but I don't believe you can bargain with Go
d that way. I'll be dying soon and I know it. I don't pray to God that He give me more life; I pray to God that the life I've already lived not be judged too bad and too sinful when I meet Him. I think I've been a fairly decent person, and so I'm not afraid. To tell the truth, except when I'm in pain, I'm quite happy. "...
