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What Is Happiness?
1、The right to pursue happiness is issued to Americans with their birth cetificates, but no one seems quite which way it ran. It may be we are issued a hunting license but offered no game. Jonathan Swift seemed to being welldeceived.” The felicty of being “a fool among knaves.” For Swift say 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。
2、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。
3、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 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.” There 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。
4、Or look at any of the women’s magazines. There, as Bernard De Voto once pointed out, advertising begains as poetry in the front pages and ends as pharmacopoeia and therapy in the back page. 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 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。
5、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 slave that restores all, this is her laxative, these are the tablets that melt away fat, these are the hormones of perceptual 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。
6、Obviously no half-sane person can be completely persuaded either by such poetry or 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 is 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？
7、The idea “happiness,” to be sure, will not sit still for easy definition: 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. The holy man’s idea 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. Or nearly free of it. If devout admirers bring him food he eats it; if not, he starves indifferently. Why beconcerned? What is physical is an illusion to him. Contemplation is his joy and he achieves it through afantastically 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。
8、Is he a happy man? Perhaps his happiness is only another sort of illusion.But who can take it from him? And who will dare say 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？
9、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 all of us and 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。
10、Posssession for its own sake or in competiton with the rest of the neighborhood would have been Thoureau’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, 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。
11、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 hign we choose our difficulties.Robert Frost was thinking in something like the same terms when he spoke of “The pleasure of taking pains.” The martal 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。
12、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 dificulty. 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。
13、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 anyting 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。 14、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 inherent right,we should do well to remember, was not happiness but the pursuit of 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。
15、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。
大学课堂：还有人在听吗？
Toward the middle of the semester, Fowkes fell ill and missed a class. When he returned, the professor nodded vaguely and, to Fowkes’s astonishment, began to deliver not the next lecture in the sequence but the one after. Had he, in fact, lectured to an empty hall in the absence of his solitary student? Fowkes thought it perfectly possible.
在学期中间，Fowkes 因病缺了一次课。他回到课堂的时候，教授毫无表情地向他点了点头。接着令Fowkes大吃一惊的是，教授并没有按照顺序讲下一课，而是讲了后面一课。难道他真的在他唯一的学生缺席的情况下对着空教室讲了一课？Fowkes认为这太有可能了。
Today American colleges and universities (originally modeled on German ones) are under strong attack from many quarters. Teachers, it is charged, are not doing a good job of teaching, and students are not doing a good job of learning. American businesses and industries suffer from unenterprising, uncreative executives educated not to think for themselves but to mouth outdated truisms the rest of the world has long discarded. College graduates lack both basic skills and general culture. Studies are conducted and reports are issued on the status of higher education, but any changes that result either are largely cosmetic or make a bad situation worse.
今天美国的大学（原本是以德国的大学为模型的）受到了各方面的严厉指责。人们指责老师没有教好，学生没有学好。美国的商业和工业饱受无进取心的、缺乏创造力的管理人员之苦，这些人受的教育是自己不用思考，而是说一些过时的、在世界上其他地方早已抛弃的陈词滥调。大学毕业生即没有基本技能也没有全面修养。有人对高等教育的状况做了研究并发表了报告，但由此引发的变化很大程度上不是表面的，就是使已经糟糕的情形变得更糟。
One aspect of American education too seldom challenged is the lecture system. Professors continue to lecture and students to take notes much as they did in the thirteenth century, when books were so scarce and expensive that few students could own them. The time is long overdue for us to abandon the lecture system and turn to methods that really work.
美国教育中很少被挑战的方面是讲课制度。教授不停地讲，学生不停地记笔记，就想十三世纪时的情形一样，那时因为课本缺乏又昂贵，很少有学生买得起。我们早就该舍弃讲课制度，开始使用真正有用的方法。
Some days Mary sits in the front row, from where she can watch the professor read from a stack of yellowed notes that seem nearly as old as he is. She is bored by the lectures, and so are most of the other students, to judge by the way they are nodding off or doodling in their notebooks. Gradually she realizes the professor is as bored as his audience. At the end of each lecture he asks, “Are there any questions?” in a tone of voice that makes it plain he would much rather there weren’t. He needn’t worry—the students are as relieved as he is that the class is over.
有几天玛丽坐在前排，她可以看到教授在读一叠几乎和他年纪一样老的发黄的讲义。她听课听烦了，其他大部分同学也听烦了，这从他们的行为中可以做出判断：他们要么在打盹，要么在笔记本上涂鸦。渐渐地她意识到教授和他的听众一样感到无聊。每次课结束时他都问道：“有问题吗？”他的语气明显表明他更希望没有问题。他不必担心，学生和他一样感到下课是一种解脱。
Mary knows very well she should read an assignment before every lecture. However, as the professor gives no quizzes and asks no questions, she soon realizes she needn’t prepare. At the end of term she catches up by skimming her notes and memorizing a list of facts and dates. After the final exam, she promptly forgets much of what she has memorized. Some of her follow students, disappointed at the impersonality of it all, drop out of college altogether. Others, like Mary , stick it out, grow resigned to the system and await better days when, as juniors and seniors, they will attend smaller classes and at last get the kind of personal attention real learning requires.
玛丽清楚的知道她应该在每次上课前阅读布置的作业。但是，因为教授不做小测验也不提问，她很快就认识到她不必准备。学期末她只要看看笔记，再记记一些事件、年代就可以跟上进度。期末考试后她会立刻忘掉她背下来的大部分内容。她的有些同学对这种无人情味的学习很失望，干脆辍学。其他人
像玛丽一样坚持下来，无奈地接受了这种制度，等待着到大三大四时的好日子，那时他们就会有较小的班级，最终也会得到真正的学习所需要的那种针对个人的关注。
I admit this picture is overdrawn—most universities supplement lecture courses with discussion groups, usually led by graduate students; and some classes such as first-year English and always relatively small. Nevertheless, far too many courses rely principally or entirely on lectures, an arrangement much loved by faculty and administrators but scarcely designed to benefit the students.
我承认上面的描述言过其实。大多数大学有讨论课来补充听力课，通常讨论课是由研究生主持的。而且有些班级，如一年级的英语课，也总是相对较小的。但是，还有太多的课主要或者完全依赖于讲课，这种安排受到教师和管理人员的青睐，但绝不是为学生的利益而设计的。
One problem with lectures is that listening intelligently is hard work. Reading the same material in a textbook is a more efficient way to learn because students can proceed as slowly as they need to until the subject matter become clear to them. Even simply paying attention is very difficult; people can listen at a rate of four hundred to six hundred words a minute, while the most impassioned professor talks at scarcely a third of that speed. This time lag between speech and comprehension leads to daydreaming. Many students believe years of watching television have sabotaged their attention span, out their real problem is that listening attentively is much harder than they think.
听课存在的一个问题是：会听是件很难的事。阅读课本中的相同内容是更有效的学习方法，因为学生可以根据其需要慢慢阅读直到他们理解这些内容，甚至仅仅做到专心听课都很难。人听的速度可以达到每分钟400---600个词，而最富有激情的教授说话的速度也很难达到这个速度的1/3。讲课和理解之间的时间差异导致开小差。很多学生认为多年来看电视已经削弱了他们保持注意力的能力。但是他们真正的问题是专心听课比他们认为的要难得多。
Worse still, attending lectures is passive learning, at least for inexperienced listeners. Active learning, in which students write essays or perform experiments and them have their work evaluated by an instructor, is far more beneficial for those who have not yet fully learned how to learn. While it’s true that techniques of active listening, such as trying to anticipate the speaker’s next point or taking notes selectively, can enhance the value of a lecture, few students possess such skills at the beginning of their college careers. More commonly, students try to write everything down and even bring tape recorders to class in a clumsy effort to capture every word.
更糟的是，听课是被动学习，至少对没有经验的听众如此。主动学习时学生些文章或做实验，然后由教师评价他们的作业，因此主动学习对那些还没有完全学会如何学习的学生来说益处要大得多。的确，积极听讲的技巧，如设法预测说话人的下一个要点或有选择的记笔记，能够提高听课的价值，但是很少有学生在大学学习的开始阶段就已经掌握了这些技巧。更为常见的是学生试图写下所有的内容，甚至还带着录音机去听课，以这种笨拙的方式来记录每个词。
Students need to question their professors and to have their ideas taken seriously. Only then will they develop the analytical skills required to think intelligently and creatively. Most students learn best by engaging in frequent and even heated debate, not by scribbling down a professor’s often unsatisfactory summary of complicated issues. They need small discussion classes that demand the common labors of teacher and students rather than classes in which one person, however learned, propounds his or her own ideas.
学生需要向教授提问，也需要别人重视他们的想法。只有这样他们才能开发出聪明的、创造性的思考所必需的分析能力。大多数学生通过参加频繁的、甚至激烈的辩论才会学的更好，而不是通过胡乱记下教授对复杂事件所作出的常常不能令人满意的总结，他们需要小型讨论课，这种课需要教师和学生的共同努力，他们不需要那种让一个人提出自己观点的课堂，无论这个人多么有学识。
The lecture system ultimately harms professors as well. It reduces feedback to a minimum, so that the lecturer can neither judge how well students understand the material nor benefit from their questions or comments. Questions that require the speaker to clarify obscure points and comments that challenge sloppily constructed arguments are indispensable to scholarship. Without them, the liveliest mind can atrophy. Undergraduates may not be able to make telling contributions very often, but lecturing insulates a professor
even from the beginner’s na?ve question that could have triggered a fruitful line of thought.
讲课制度最终也会危害到教授们。反馈减少到了最低点，因此讲课者既不能判断学生对材料的了解程度，也不能受益于学生的提问或评论。学生要求说话者澄清模糊论点所提出的问题，以及挑战结构松散的论据的评论，这对于学术是必不可少的。没有这些，最活跃的头脑也会萎缩。大学生也许还不能够常常做出显著的贡献，但是讲课把教授同新生天真的问题阻隔开了，而这些问题很可能会引起一系列思考。
If lectures make so little sense, why have they been allowed to continue? Administrators love them, of course. They can cram far more students into a lecture hall than into a discussion class, and for many administrators that is almost the end of the story. But the truth is that faculty members, and even students, conspire with them to keep the lecture system alive and well. Lectures are easier on everyone than debates. Professors can pretend to teach by lecturing just as students can pretend to learn by attending lectures, with no one the wiser, including the participants. Moreover, if lectures afford some students an opportunity to sit back and let the professor run the show, they offer some professors an irresistible forum for showing off. In a classroom where everyone contributes, students are less able to hide and professors less tempted to engage in intellectual exhibitionism.
如果说讲课如此不同情理，为什么还一直允许继续下去呢？当然是因为教学管理者喜欢了。他们可以把更多的学生塞进演讲厅，而无法把这么多学生塞进讨论班。对许多管理者而言，这基本上就是他们所关心的了。但是，事实上，教师，甚至学生和管理者联合起来使得这一制度继续存在，且运行的很好。对任何人来说，讲课都比辩论容易。教授可以通过讲课假装在教，就像学生可以通过听课假装在学，这一点没有人意识到，包括参与者（指老师和学生）。此外，如果听课给某些学生袖手旁观，而让老师唱主角的机会，这也给一些教授提供了炫耀其才学的不可抗拒的舞台。如果课堂上人人参与，学生就无法躲藏，教授也不太会被吸引去进行学识上的自我表现。
Smaller classes in which students are required to involve themselves in discussion put an end to students’ passivity. Students become actively involved when forced to question their own ideas as well as their instructor’s. their listening skills improve dramatically in the excitement of intellectual give-and-take with their instructors and yellow students. Such interchanges help professors do their job better because they allow them to discover who knows what—before final exams, not after. When exams are given in this type of course, they can require analysis and synthesis from the students, not empty memorization. Classes like this require energy, imagination, and commitment from professors, all of which can be exhausting. But they compel students to share responsibility for their own intellectual growth.
如果班级较小又要求学生参加讨论，这就会消除学生的被动性。学生被迫对他们自己和老师的思想表示怀疑时，他们就变得主动参与了。他们听的技巧在与老师和同学的学术交流所带来的刺激中大大得到提高。这种交替互动能够帮助教师做得更好，因为他们会发现谁知道什么---在期末考试前，而不是之后。这种形式的课程考试要求学生分析和综合，而不是空洞的记忆。这样的课程需要教授们的活力、想象力和投入，所有这些都会令人精疲力竭的。但是，这也使得学生为他们自己 的学术成长分担责任。 Lectures will never entirely disappear from the university scene both because they seem to be economically necessary and because they spring from a long tradition in a setting that values tradition for its own sake. But the lectures too frequently come at the wrong end of the students’ educational careers—during the first two years, when they most need close, even individual, instruction. If lecture classes were restrictod to juniors and seniors, who are less in need of scholarly nurturing and more able to prepare work on their own, they would be far less destructive of students’ interests and enthusiasms than the present system. After all, students much learn to listen before they can listen to learn.
讲课这一方式不会完全从大学消失。一是因为讲课似乎从经济角度考虑是必需的，二是讲课起源于悠久的传统，而且人们又把传统本身看得很重。但是，讲课通常出现在学生接受教育生涯的错误的那一端------在大学的第一和第二年。那时他们最需要密切是甚至是针对个体的辅导。如果讲课这一形式局限于三、四年级的学生，则对学生的兴趣和热情的破坏力会比目前的制度小得多，因为三、四年级的学生不太需要学科上的指导与帮助，而且更有能力自己制定学习计划。毕竟，学生在能够从听讲课中学到知识之前必须先学会去听。