The right to pursue happiness is issued to us all with our birth, but no one seems quite sure what it is.

A holy man in India may think that happiness is in himself. It is in needing nothing from outside himself. In wanting nothing, he lacks nothing. He sits still there with all attention to his religious contemplation, free even of his own body, or nearly free of it. If some admirers bring him food he eats it; if not, he starves all the same. What is the outside world is nothing to him. His religious contemplation is his joy, the accomplishment of which is itself a joy within himself.

We Westerners, however, are taught that the more we have from outside ourselves, the happier we will be, and then we are made to want. We are even told it is our duty to want. Advertising, one of our major industries, exists not to satisfy these desires but to create them — and to create them faster than any man's money in his pocket can satisfy them. It was only a few years ago, for example, that car dealers across the United States were flying banners that read "Your Happiness Is Right Here! You Auto Buy Now!" They were calling upon Americans, as an act of showing the loving feelings towards the country, to buy at once, with money they did not have, automobiles they did not really need. Or watch your TV for a few minutes. Then there must be someone, a lady or a gentleman, coming up to tell you: "Try it! The everlasting beauty and happiness must be yours!"

Obviously no half-foolish person can be completely persuaded either by such flying banners in the streets or by such ads on the TV. Yet, someone is obviously trying to buy the dream of happiness as offered and spending millions upon millions every year in the attempt. Clearly the happiness-market is not running out of customers.

I doubt the holy man's idea of happiness, and I doubt the dreams of happiness-market, too. Whatever happiness may be, I believe, it is neither in having nothing nor in having more, but in changing — in changing the world and mankind into pure states.

To change is to make efforts to deal with difficulties. As Yeats, a great Irish poet, once put it, happiness we get for a lifetime depends on how high we choose our difficulties. Robert Frost, a great American poet, was thinking in almost the same terms when we spoke of "The pleasure of taking pains."

It is easy to understand. We even demand difficulty for the fun in our games. We demand it because without difficulty there can be no game. And a game is a way of making something hard for the fun of it. The rules of the game are man-made difficulties. When the player ruins the fun, he always does so by refusing to play by the rules. It is easier to win at chess if you are free, at your pleasure, to cast away all the rules, but the fun is in winning within the rules.

The same is true to happiness. The buyers and sellers at the happiness-market seem 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 dreams that happiness can be bought. Perhaps the Eastern weakness is in the idea that there is such a thing as perfect happiness in man himself. Both of them forget a basic fact: No difficulty, no happiness.

（摘自《英语阅读(一)——全国高等教育自学考试指定教材英语专业(基础科段)》）