晨读英语美文100篇 Passage 42. The Road to Happiness
 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. |
