【赫临译笔】通向幸福之路 - 心云驛站

说教者常说：幸福不能靠追求获得。只有当你用不明智的方式去追求幸福，这句话才是正确的。蒙特卡洛的赌徒在追求金钱，多数人反而失去了金钱，但也有其它追求金钱的方式，这些方式往往是成功的。幸福亦然，如果你用饮酒来追求幸福，你就忘记了酒后的宿醉。伊壁鸠鲁追求幸福的方式是只和志同道合的人交往，每餐只吃干面包，只在节日里补充一点奶酪。他的方式在他是成功的，但他是个体弱多病的人，多数人则需要更加精力充沛的方式。对于多数人来说，除非佐以多种方式，追求幸福太抽象，太理论化，不适合作为人生准则。但我认为，无论你选择哪一种人生准则，除非在极为罕见或英雄的事例中，都不应该与幸福相悖。

许多人拥有健康，足够的收入等全部物质方面的幸福，然而却极为不开心。似乎他们的生存理念出了问题。从某种意义上讲，任何关于生存的理念都是错的。其实我们和动物之间的区别没有我们想象的那样大。动物靠本能生存，只要外部条件适宜，就会很幸福。假如你有一只猫，它只需有食物，有温暖，偶尔有机会去屋顶上过一夜，它就会很幸福。人的需求则要比猫的复杂得多，但这些需求依然以本能为基础。在文明社会，尤其是讲英语的国家里，这种本能很容易被遗忘。人们给自己制定一个重要的生活目标，并抑制所有不利于这个目标实现的冲动。一个商人可能如此渴望致富以致于为此牺牲了健康和个人情感。当他最终成功后，除了劝戒别人效仿他的榜样使别人心生烦恼外，就再也不会有其它乐趣了。许多贵夫人，尽管老天并没有赋予她们从文学艺术当中得到与生俱来的乐趣的能力，却决定要别人认为她们有教养，花上大量无聊的时间做那些所谓正确的事情，去谈论那些让人愉悦的时尚的新书，而不能为这种自命高雅提供机会。

如果你留心一下周围被称之为幸福的人，就会发现他们有一些共同的东西。其中最重要的是有一种行为，这种行为最终逐渐累积成你乐于见之发生的东西。生性喜欢孩子的女人可以从抚养子女中得到这种满足感。那些喜欢自己工作的艺术家、作家和科学家，可以以同样的方式得到幸福。还有许多卑微的方式可以得到同样的快乐。许多在城里工作的人，周末自愿无偿地侍弄自己的花园，当春天到来时，他们就能尽情体验亲手创造的美景所带来的乐趣。

幸福这一话题，我认为，被过分严肃地对待了。人们认为离开了生活理念或是宗教，人就不可能幸福。也许那些由于错误理念而被认为不幸福的人，可以通过一个更好的理念来矫正，正如当你生病时可能需要些补药一样。但正常情况下，一个健康的人是不需要补药的，幸福也不需要理论。如果一个男人疼妻爱子，事业有成，能从日夜交替，春去秋来中得到乐趣，无论他的人生哲学是什么，他都会很幸福。相反，如果他觉得妻子是命中注定的，孩子的吵闹无法忍受，办公室是一场恶梦；如果他白天渴望夜幕降临，夜里又叹息光明不再，那他所需要的不是新的人生哲学，而是一种全新的生活方式——改变饮食习惯，多做锻炼等等。

It is a commonplace among moralists that you cannot get happiness by pursuing 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 hang-over. 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.

There are a great many people who have all the material conditions of happiness, i.e. health and a sufficient income, and who, nevertheless, are profoundly unhappy.In such cases it would seem as if the fault must lie with a wrong theory as tohow to live. In one sense, we may say that any theory as to how to live is wrong. We imagine ourselves more different from the animals than we are.Animals live on impulse, and are happy as long as external conditions are favorable. If you have a cat it will enjoy life if it has food and warmth and opportunities for an occasional night on the tiles. Your needs are more complex than those of your cat, but they still have their basis in instinct. In civilized societies, especially in English-speaking societies, this is too apt to be forgotten. People propose to themselves some one paramount objective, andrestrainall impulses that do not minister to it. A businessman may be so anxious to grow rich that to this end he sacrifices health and private affections. When at last he has become rich, no pleasure remains to him except harrying other people by exhortations to imitate his noble example. Many rich ladies, although nature has not endowed them with any spontaneous pleasure in literature or art, decide to be thought cultured, and spend boring hours learning the right thing to say about fashionable new books that are written to give delight, not to afford opportunities for dusty snobbism .

If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy, you 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 recovery, just as you may need a tonicwhen 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 convinced, would increase their happiness more by walking six miles every day than by any conceivable change of philosophy.