評論
打印
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 may be in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect (and therefore static) happiness.
幸福市場上的買賣雙方似乎常常體會不到困難帶來的快樂。天知道他們在玩什么游戲，但是他們的游戲似乎是乏味的。我猜想印度的圣人對我們來說似乎是乏味的，因為他拒絕玩任何游戲。西方人的弱點在于他們幻想幸福可以買到。或許東方人的弱點在于他們相信存在一種完美的（因而也是靜止的）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.
從來就沒有完美的幸福。人類不存在盡善盡美的狀態。無論幸福可能是別的什么東西，它既不在于擁有，也不在于實現，而在于追求。我們應該牢記：開國元勛們為我們所宣布的與生俱來的權利不是享受幸福而是追求幸福假如他們能預見到幸福市場的話，他們或許會強調這個最重要的事實，即幸福在于追求本身，在于我們終生為之努力并從中獲得啟迪的有意義的追求換言之，幸福是一種過程評價一個民族的標準不是看它擁有什么或是想要擁有什么，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 home to will be your own poorhouse.
當然，只要我們掌握好一個度，或者只作為一種精神調節，不妨從幸福市場買點滿足感，甚至可以花錢買點愚蠢的東西。我既不信奉清教徒主義，也不贊成禁欲主義。但如果我們在這些市場上放棄任何真正意義上的精神財富，那么到頭來我們只能是一無所有。
