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.
幸福市场上的买卖双方似乎常常体会不到困难带来的快乐。天知道他们在玩什么游戏,但是他们的游戏似乎是乏味的。我猜想印度的圣人对我们来说似乎是乏味的,因为他拒绝玩任何游戏。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相信存在一种完美的(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.
从来就没有完美的幸福。人类不存在尽善尽美的状态。无论幸福可能是别的什么东西,它既不在于拥有,也不在于实现,而在于追求。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能预见到幸福市场的话,他们或许会强调这个最重要的事实,即幸福在于追求本身,在于我们终生为之努力并从中获得启迪的有意义的追求换言之,幸福是一种过程评价一个民族的标准不是看它拥有什么或是想要拥有什么,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 home 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。我既不信奉清教徒主义,也不赞成禁欲主义。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。