Unit-9-What-is-happiness课文翻译综合教程二.doc

Unit 9 What Is Happiness?John Ciardi(abridged) The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth certificates, but no one seems quite sure which way it runs. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift seemed to think so when he attacked the idea of happiness as “the possession of being well-deceived,” the felicity of being “a fool among knaves.” For Swift saw society as Vanity Fair, the land of false goals. It is, of course, un-American to think in terms of fools and knaves. We do, however, seem to be dedicated to the idea of buying our way to happiness. We shall all have made it to Heaven when we possess 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 than any mans budget can satisfy them. For that matter, our whole economy is based on a dedicated insatiability. We are taught that to possess 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 years models were released. Or look at any of the womens 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. These, 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 herself in order to display that perfect figure. These, the chin straps she must sleep in. This is the salve that restores all, this is her laxative, these are the tablets that melt away fat, these are the hormones of perpetual youth, these are the stockings that hide varicose 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. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers, but what are they trying to buy? The idea happiness, to be sure, will not sit still for easy definitions: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work in toward the middle. To think of happiness as acquisitive and competitive will do to set the materialistic extreme. To think of it as the idea one senses in, say, a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme. That holy mans ideal of happiness is in needing nothing from outside himself. 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 itself a joy within him. But, perhaps because 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 these extremes will still serve 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 sense of that balance. His aim was to save on the low levels in order to spend on the high. Possession for its own sake or in competition with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoreaus idea of the low levels. The active discipline of heightening ones perception 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 himself only as much effort as would keep him functioning for more important efforts. Happiness is never more than partial. There are no pure states of mankind. Whatever else happiness may be, it is neither in having nor in being, but in becoming. What the Founding Fathers declared for us as an inherent right, we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of happiness. What they might have underlined, could they have foreseen the happiness-market, is the cardinal fact that happiness is in the pursuit itself, in the meaningful pursuit of what is life-engaging and life-revealing, which is to say, in the idea of becoming. A nation is not measured by what it possesses or wants to possess, but by what it wants to become. 什么是幸福追求幸福是美国人与生俱来被赋予的权利，但是似乎没有人确切地知道怎样到达幸福。这就像是我们有猎物执照却无猎可捕一样。当乔纳森斯威夫特抨击这种“着迷于被欺骗的状态”，这种成为“白痴中的傻瓜”的快乐感觉时，他也是这样想的。斯威夫特把整个社会看做一个名利场，一片充满虚幻目标的土地。当然，站在傻瓜和白痴的角度看问题是非美国式思维，然而，我们似乎已经现身于用金钱购买幸福的想法中了，（我们以为）当我们拥有的足够多时，我们便一定可以去往天堂。与此同时，美国实利主义正在很大程度上致使我们不幸福。广告业是我们的主要商业之一，然而它的存在绝不是满足欲望，而是在刺激欲望的产生而且它让欲望产生的速度远超出我们挣钱满足欲望的速度，正因如此，我们的整个经济都建立在奋不顾身的贪婪之上。我们被告知幸福就是拥有，然后再让我们产生欲望。我们甚至被告知需求就是我们的责任。举个例子，仅几年前，全国上下的汽车销售行就全都挂满飘扬的横幅，上面写着“你该买辆车了。”它们在号召美国人这种爱国行为，让他们用还未到手的钱来购买本不需要的车，并在第二年新款车发布时厌恶它。或者说，再来看看女性杂志吧。这里，像伯纳德德沃托曾经提出的，开始的前几页是首诗，结束的几页变成了处方书和治疗方法。开始时的诗歌是绝世佳人的美梦。她拥有婴儿般的皮肤，洁白如玉的牙齿，芳香的气息。不管她40,50,60岁都有着16岁的身材。一旦看过这些模糊的却令人振奋的虚构及特写，读者马上就看到结尾她美梦的另一面。为了保持完美身材，这些母亲不得不用带子把自己束缚住，这是她们不得不在睡觉前佩戴的枕颌带，那是她们的万能药膏，这是她们的泻药，这是她们溶解脂肪的药片，那是她们永葆青春的激素，这是她们掩盖静脉曲张时要穿的长袜。很明显，没人会很痴狂地完全相信书上的诗情画意或被给出的处方啊整形外科啊完全说服，但每年还是有人有意花上亿去尝试买梦。很显然，幸福市场从不缺顾客，但是这些顾客要买的到底是什么？诚然，“幸福”这个词很难定义，一个人最多能做到的就是努力确定这个概念的极端情况