音频下载[点击右键另存为][00:00.65]Passage 42. The Road to Happiness

[00:06.56]If you look around at the men and women whom you can call happy,

[00:12.47]you will see that they all have certain things in common.

[00:15.86]The most important of these things is an activity which at most gradually builds up something

[00:22.21]that you are glad to see coming into existence.

[00:25.70]Women who take an instinctive pleasure in their children

[00:29.21]can get this kind of satisfaction out of bringing up a family.

[00:33.48]Artists and authors and men of science get happiness in this way

[00:39.28]if their own work seems good to them.

[00:42.12]But there are many humbler forms of the same kind of pleasure.

[00:46.17]Many men who spend their working life in the city

[00:49.99]devote their weekends to voluntary and unremunerated toil in their gardens,

[00:55.90]and when the spring comes, they experience all the joys of having created beauty.

[01:01.82]The whole subject of happiness has, in my opinion,been treated too solemnly.

[01:08.16]It had been thought that man cannot be happy without a theory of life or a religion.

[01:14.17]Perhaps those who have been rendered unhappy by a bad theory

[01:18.22]may need a better theory to help them to recovery,

[01:22.05]just as you may need a tonic when you have been ill.

[01:25.34]But when things are normal a man should be healthy without a tonic

[01:30.37]and happy without a theory.

[01:32.89]It is the simple things that really matter.

[01:35.00]If a man delights in his wife and children, has success in work,

[01:39.59]and finds pleasure in the alternation of day and night, spring and autumn,

[01:45.28]he will be happy whatever his philosophy may be.

[01:49.00]If, on the other hand, he finds his wife fateful, his children’s noise unendurable,

[01:55.89]and the office a nightmare;

[01:57.75]if in the daytime he longs for night, and at night sighs for the light of day,

[02:03.22]then what he needs is not a new philosophy but a new regimen

[02:08.15]—a different diet, or more exercise, or what not.

[02:12.08]Man is an animal, and his happiness depends on his physiology more than he likes to think.

[02:19.41]This is a humble conclusion, but I cannot make myself disbelieve it.

[02:25.10]Unhappy businessmen, I am convinced,would increase their happiness more

[02:30.61]by walking six miles every day

[02:33.31]than by any conceivable change of philosophy.