英语美文欣赏：幸福之路
It is a commonplace among moralists that you cannot get happiness bypursuing it. This is only true if you pursue it unwisely. Gamblers at Monte
Carlo are pursuing money, and most of them lose it instead, but there are other
ways of pursuing money, which often succeed. So it is with happiness. If you
pursue it by means of drink, you are forgetting the hangover.
Epicurus pursued it by living only in congenial society and eating only dry
bread, supplemented by a little cheese on feast days. His method proved
successful in his case, but he was a valetudinarian, and most people would need
something more vigorous.
For most people, the pursuit of happiness, unless supplemented in various
ways, is too abstract and theoretical to be adequate as a personal rule of life.
But I think that whatever personal rule of life you may choose it should not,
except in rare and heroic cases, be incompatible with happiness.If you look
around at the men and women whom you can call happy, will see that they all have
certain things in common. The most important of these things is an activity
which at most gradually builds up something that you are glad to see coming into
existence.
Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children can get this kind
of satisfaction out of bringing up a family. Artists and authors and men of
science get happiness in this way if their own work seems good to them. But
there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure. Many men who spend
their working life in the city devote their weekends to voluntary and
unremunerated toil in their gardens, and when the spring comes, they experience
all the joys of having created beauty.
The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion, been treated too
solemnly. It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life
or a religion. Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory may
need a better theory to help them to recover, just as you may need a tonic when
you have been ill. But when things are normal a man should be healthy ]without a
tonic and happy without a theory. It is the simple things that really
matter.
If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work, and finds
pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn, he will be
happy whatever his philosophy may be. If, on the other hand, he finds his wife
fateful, his children’s noise unendurable, and the office a nightmare; if in the
daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day, then what
he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen—a different diet, or more
exercise, or what not.
Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he
likes to think. This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve
it. Unhappy businessmen, I am would increase their happiness more by walking six
miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.
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