Unit 9 What Is Happiness?

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.

自从呱呱坠地，美国人就被赋予了追求幸福的权利，但似乎没人确信幸福究竟在哪里。正如它发给我们狩猎证，却不给我们提供猎物。乔纳森•斯威福特似乎持此观点，他抨击幸福的想法是“鬼迷心窍的上当，”是“骗子堆中的傻瓜”的自鸣得意。因为他视社会为虚妄目标聚集的名利场。

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.

当然用傻子、骗子这样的字眼来形容是不合美国的人的风俗习惯的，然后我们似乎确实沉溺于用金钱购买幸福的想法：只要有足够的钱，我们百年后就能上天堂。

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 man’s 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 year’s models were released.

同时，美国的商业主义却又殚精竟虑故意使我们得不到幸福。广告是我们的支柱产业之一，其存在不是为了满足欲望。而是为了制造欲望——其制造速度之快，使我们的腰包应接不暇。就此而言，我们的整个经济是基于一种无法自拔的贪求无厌。我们受到的教育是“占有却为幸福”，然后我们就被迫产生贪欲。我们甚至被告知欲望是我们的义务。引用一个简单的例子为证：仅仅几年前，全国的汽车销售商还打着“你应该立即购买汽车”的横幅。他们号召美国人民：作为一种爱国主义行为，他们应该立即按揭购买他们并不真正需要的汽车，并且在次年新款汽车发布后他们会对原来这些汽车心生厌倦。

Or look at any of the women’s magazines. There, as Bernard De Voto 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.

或者任意浏览一本女性杂志。正如伯尔纳德•德•渥托曾经指出的那样，这些杂志开头几页的广告诗情画意，而最后则以类似药典和治疗手册结尾。前者是完美美女的梦想：这该是她婴儿般的股肤，这些是她无瑕的牙齿，这该是她呼出的香气，这该是她能保持到40、50、60 岁甚至永远的16 岁少女般的身材。

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.

一旦读完这些隐约让人振奋的小说和专题文章，读者在杂志最后几页就会发现梦想的真相：这是家庭主妇必须得系上的背带，以展现其完美身材。这些是她睡觉时必须带上的颚带。这是可以恢复青春的药剂和装备，这是她减肥用的缓泻药，这些是消化脂肪的药片，这些是使外表年轻的荷尔蒙，这些是掩盖静脉曲张的长袜。

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?

显而易见，即使心智不健全的人也不会完全相信这些诗境或是这些药典和矫正术。然后有人显然正在竭力购买这些广告所兜的美梦，并为此每年耗资数十亿美元。这种幸福市场无疑不会无人问津，但他们购买的究竟是什么呢？

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 man’s 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.

诚然，给“幸福”这一概念下定义远非易事：最好是尽量为这一概念确立一些极限，然后将两者折中。将幸福视为物质上的拥有和相互攀比，这就确立了其物质上的极限。将其视为一个人（比如印度的圣人）所感知的信念，则是确立了其精神上的极限。圣人的幸福是无需身外之物。无欲则无求。他静坐不动，陷入冥思，甚至脱离或者说近乎脱离自己的肉体。如果有虔诚的信徒带来食物，他硬听； 如果没有，他便淡然地饿着。有什么好牵挂的呢？对他而言，物质世界只是虚幻。宴想是他的极乐，而他通过修行来实现。这种修行要求之高，让人难以置信，其完成本身就是他内心的一种极乐。

Is he a happy man? Perhaps his happiness is only another sort of illusion.But who can take it from him? And who will daresay it is more illusory than happiness on the installment plan?

他幸福吗？或许他的幸福只是另一种虚幻。但谁又能将幸福从他身边夺走呢？又有谁敢说这种幸福比分期付款计划中得到的幸福更缥缈呢？

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.

然而，或许因为我是西方人，我对这种令人精神紧张的幸福持怀疑态度，正如我怀疑幸福市场的梦幻一样。可以确信，他这种幸福方式对几乎任何一个西方人而言都是一种折磨。尽管如此，我们仍然可以利用这些极限来划定幸福的范畴，在这一范畴内每个人都得找到某种平衡。梭罗，一个东西思想交融的人物，对这种平衡有他自己的坚定信念。他的目标是在低层次节约，在高层次上付出。

Possession 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 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.

梭罗所理解的“低层次”，即为自己而去拥有，或与邻里明争暗斗而致拥有。他心目中的“高层次”，则是这样一种积极的人生戒律，即要使自己对自己界永恒之物的感悟臻于完美。对于他从低层次上节省下来的时间和精力，他可将其致力于对高层次的追求。勿庸置疑，梭罗不赞成忍饥挨饿，但他在膳食方面投入的精力仅果腹而已，只要可以确保他能去从事更为重要的事务即可。

Effort is the gist of it. There is no happiness except as we take on life-engaging difficulties. Short of the impossible, as Yeats put it, the satisfactions we get from a lifetime depend on how high we choose our difficulties.Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of “The pleasure of taking pains.” The mortal flaw in the advertised version of happiness is in the fact that it purports to be effortless.

殚精竭虑，全力以赴，便是问题的精髓所在。除非我们愿意直面那些需要我们全身心投入的艰难困苦，否则便不会有幸福可言。正如叶芝所言，除却某些不可能的情形，我们人生中所获取的满足皆取决于我们在多高的境界中选择我们所愿意面对的艰难困苦。当罗伯特•弗罗斯特言及“以苦为乐”时，他内心所思，大体如此。商业广告中所宣扬的寻种幸福观，其致使的缺陷就在于它宣称，一切幸福皆唾手可得，不费吹灰之力。

We demand difficulty even in our games. We demand it because 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 imposition of difficulty. When the spoilsport ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free,at your pleasure, to change the wholly arbitrary rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules. No difficulty, no fun.

即使于游戏之中，我们也需要有艰难困苦。之所以需要它，是因为若没有困难，便断无游戏可言。游戏即是这样一种方式，为了享受其中的情趣而人为地使事情变得不那么轻而易举。游戏中的种种规则，便是将困难武断地强加于人。有的人将情趣摧毁殆尽，总是因为他拒不按游戏规则行事而使然。这犹如下棋，如果你随心所欲、心血来潮全然武断地去更改那些游戏规则、去赢棋当然会更加容易。但下棋的情趣则在于应在规则的限定范围内赢取胜利。一言以蔽之，没有艰难，断无情趣。

The buyers and sellers at the happiness-market seem too often to have lost their sense of the pleasure of difficulty. Heaven knows what they are playing,but it seems a dull game. And the Indian holy man seems dull to us, I suppose, because he seems to be refusing to play anything at all. The Western weakness may be in the illusion that happiness can be bought. Perhaps the Eastern weakness is in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect (therefore static ) happiness.

幸福市场上的买卖双方似乎大都体会不到挑战困难的乐趣。天知道他们在玩些什么，但似乎不外乎那些无聊的游戏。我猜印度的圣人在我们看来有些无聊，因为他似乎拒绝玩任何游戏。西方人的弱点在于他们幻想幸福可以买到。或许东方人的弱点在于他们认为存在产丰一种完美的（因而也是静止的）幸福。

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.

从来就没有过完美的幸福。人类社会不存在尽善尽美。无论人们怎样界定何谓幸福，它既不在于拥有也不在于实现，而在于追求的过程。我们应该牢记：开国元勋们为我们所宣布的与生俱来的权利，不是享受幸福而是追求幸福。假如他们当初预见到现在出现的幸福市场，他们就会强调指出这样一个基本事实：幸福在于为之奋斗的过程，在于我们终生为之努力并从中获得启迪的事业，也就是说在于追求。对于一个民族的评价不是看它拥有什么或是幸福拥有什么，而是看它想要追求什么。

By all means let the happiness-market sell us minor satisfactions and even minor follies so long as we keep them in scale and buy them out of spiritual change. I am no customer for either Puritanism or asceticism. But drop any real spiritual capital at those bazaars, and what you come to will be your own poorhouse.

当然，只要我们掌握好一个度，或者只作为一种精神调节，不妨从幸福市场买点满足感甚至可以花钱买点愚蠢的东西。我既不信奉清教徒的生活准则也不赞面禁欲主义。但如果我们在这些市场上放弃任何真正意义上的精神财富，那么到头来我们只能是一无所有。

（完整版）Unit-9-What-is-happiness课文翻译