【英文读物】The Simple Life.docx

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1、【英文读物】The Simple LifeI OUR COMPLEX LIFEAT the home of the Blanchards, everything is topsy-turvy, and with reason. Think of it! Mlle. Yvonne is to be married Tuesday, and to-day is Friday!Callers loaded with gifts, and tradesmen bending under packages, come and go in endless procession. The servants

2、are at the end of their endurance. As for the family and the betrothed, they no longer have a life or a fixed abode. Their mornings are spent with dressmakers, milliners, upholsterers, jewelers, decorators, and caterers. After that, comes a rush through offices, where one waits in line, gazing vague

3、ly at busy clerks engulfed in papers. A fortunate thing, if there be time when this is over, to run home and dress for the series of ceremonial dinnersbetrothal dinners, dinners of presentation, the settlement dinner, receptions, balls. About midnight, home again, harassed and weary, to find the lat

4、est accumulation of parcels, and a deluge of letters2congratulations, felicitations, acceptances and regrets from bridesmaids and ushers, excuses of tardy tradesmen. And the contretemps of the last minutea sudden death that disarranges the bridal party; a wretched cold that prevents a favorite canta

5、trice from singing, and so forth, and so forth. Those poor Blanchards! They will never be ready, and they thought they had foreseen everything!Such has been their existence for a month. No longer possible to breathe, to rest a half-hour, to tranquillize ones thoughts. No, this is not living!Merciful

6、ly, there is Grandmothers room. Grandmother is verging on eighty. Through many toils and much suffering, she has come to meet things with the calm assurance which life brings to men and women of high thinking and large hearts. She sits there in her arm-chair, enjoying the silence of long meditative

7、hours. So the flood of affairs surging through the house, ebbs at her door. At the threshold of this retreat, voices are hushed and footfalls softened; and when the young fiancs want to hide away for a moment, they flee to Grandmother.Poor children! is her greeting. You are worn out! Rest a little a

8、nd belong to each other. 3All these things count for nothing. Dont let them absorb you, it isnt worth while.They know it well, these two young people. How many times in the last weeks has their love had to make way for all sorts of conventions and futilities! Fate, at this decisive moment of their l

9、ives, seems bent upon drawing their minds away from the one thing essential, to harry them with a host of trivialities; and heartily do they approve the opinion of Grandmamma when she says, between a smile and a caress:Decidedly, my dears, the world is growing too complex; and it does not make peopl

10、e happierquite the contrary!I ALSO, am of Grandmammas opinion. From the cradle to the grave, in his needs as in his pleasures, in his conception of the world and of himself, the man of modern times struggles through a maze of endless complication. Nothing is simple any longer: neither thought nor ac

11、tion; not pleasure, not even dying. With our own hands we have added to existence a train of hardships, and lopped off many a gratification. I believe that thousands of our fellow-men, suffering the consequences of a too 4artificial life, will be grateful if we try to give expression to their discon

12、tent, and to justify the regret for naturalness which vaguely oppresses them.Let us first speak of a series of facts that put into relief the truth we wish to show.The complexity of our life appears in the number of our material needs. It is a fact universally conceded, that our needs have grown wit

13、h our resources. This is not an evil in itself; for the birth of certain needs is often a mark of progress. To feel the necessity of bathing, of wearing fresh linen, inhabiting wholesome houses, eating healthful food, and cultivating our minds, is a sign of superiority. But if certain needs exist by

14、 right, and are desirable, there are others whose effects are fatal, which, like parasites, live at our expense: numerous and imperious, they engross us completely.Could our fathers have foreseen that we should some day have at our disposal the means and forces we now use in sustaining and defending

15、 our material life, they would have predicted for us an increase of independence, and therefore of happiness, and a decrease in competition for worldly goods: they might even have thought that through the simplification of life thus made possible, a higher degree of morality 5would be attained. None

16、 of these things has come to pass. Neither happiness, nor brotherly love, nor power for good has been increased. In the first place, do you think your fellow-citizens, taken as a whole, are more contented than their forefathers, and less anxious about the future? I do not ask if they should find rea

17、son to be so, but if they really are so. To see them live, it seems to me that a majority of them are discontented with their lot, and, above all, absorbed in material needs and beset with cares for the morrow. Never has the question of food and shelter been sharper or more absorbing than since we a

18、re better nourished, better clothed, and better housed than ever. He errs greatly who thinks that the query, What shall we eat, and what shall we drink, and wherewithal shall we be clothed? presents itself to the poor alone, exposed as they are to the anguish of morrows without bread or a roof. With

19、 them the question is natural, and yet it is with them that it presents itself most simply. You must go among those who are beginning to enjoy a little ease, to learn how greatly satisfaction in what one has, may be disturbed by regret for what one lacks. And if you would see anxious care for future

20、 material good, material good in all its luxurious 6development, observe people of small fortune, and, above all, the rich. It is not the woman with one dress who asks most insistently how she shall be clothed, nor is it those reduced to the strictly necessary who make most question of what they sha

21、ll eat to-morrow. As an inevitable consequence of the law that needs are increased by their satisfaction, the more goods a man has, the more he wants. The more assured he is of the morrow, according to the common acceptation, the more exclusively does he concern himself with how he shall live, and p

22、rovide for his children and his childrens children. Impossible to conceive of the fears of a man established in lifetheir number, their reach, and their shades of refinement.From all this, there has arisen throughout the different social orders, modified by conditions and varying in intensity, a com

23、mon agitationa very complex mental state, best compared to the petulance of a spoiled child, at once satisfied and discontented.IF 7we have not become happier, neither have we grown more peaceful and fraternal. The more desires and needs a man has, the more occasion he finds for conflict with his fe

24、llow-men; and these conflicts are more bitter in proportion as their causes are less just. It is the law of nature to fight for bread, for the necessities. This law may seem brutal, but there is an excuse in its very harshness, and it is generally limited to elemental cruelties. Quite different is t

25、he battle for the superfluousfor ambition, privilege, inclination, luxury. Never has hunger driven man to such baseness as have envy, avarice, and thirst for pleasure. Egotism grows more maleficent as it becomes more refined. We of these times have seen an increase of hostile feeling among brothers,

26、 and our hearts are less at peace than ever.AAfter this, is there any need to ask if we have become better? Do not the very sinews of virtue lie in mans capacity to care for something outside himself? And what place remains for ones neighbor in a life given over to material cares, to artificial 8nee

27、ds, to the satisfaction of ambitions, grudges, and whims? The man who gives himself up entirely to the service of his appetites, makes them grow and multiply so well that they become stronger than he; and once their slave, he loses his moral sense, loses his energy, and becomes incapable of discerni

28、ng and practicing the good. He has surrendered himself to the inner anarchy of desire, which in the end gives birth to outer anarchy. In the moral life we govern ourselves. In the immoral life we are governed by our needs and passions. Thus little by little, the bases of the moral life shift, and th

29、e law of judgment deviates.For the man enslaved to numerous and exacting needs, possession is the supreme good and the source of all other good things. It is true that in the fierce struggle for possession, we come to hate those who possess, and to deny the right of property when this right is in th

30、e hands of others and not in our own. But the bitterness of attack against others possessions is only a new proof of the extraordinary importance we attach to possession itself. In the end, people and things come to be estimated at their selling price, or according to the profit to be drawn from the

31、m. What brings nothing is worth nothing: 9he who has nothing, is nothing. Honest poverty risks passing for shame, and lucre, however filthy, is not greatly put to it to be accounted for merit.Some one objects: Then you make wholesale condemnation of progress, and would lead us back to the good old t

32、imesto asceticism perhaps.Not at all. The desire to resuscitate the past is the most unfruitful and dangerous of Utopian dreams, and the art of good living does not consist in retiring from life. But we are trying to throw light upon one of the errors that drag most heavily upon human progress, in o

33、rder to find a remedy for itnamely, the belief that man becomes happier and better by the increase of outward well-being. Nothing is falser than this pretended social axiom; on the contrary, that material prosperity without an offset, diminishes the capacity for happiness and debases character, is a

34、 fact which a thousand examples are at hand to prove. The worth of a civilization is the worth of the man at its center. When this man lacks moral rectitude, progress only makes bad worse, and further embroils social problems.THIS 10principle may be verified in other domains than that of material we

35、ll-being. We shall speak only of education and liberty. We remember when prophets in good repute announced that to transform this wicked world into an abode fit for the gods, all that was needed was the overthrow of tyranny, ignorance, and wantthose three dread powers so long in league. To-day, othe

36、r preachers proclaim the same gospel. We have seen that the unquestionable diminution of want has made man neither better nor happier. Has this desirable result been more nearly attained through the great care bestowed upon instruction? It does not yet appear so, and this failure is the despair of o

37、ur national educators.Then shall we stop the peoples ears, suppress public instruction, close the schools? By no means. But education, like the mass of our ages inventions, is after all only a tool; everything depends upon the workman who uses it. So it is with liberty. It is fatal or lifegiving acc

38、ording to the use made of it. Is it liberty still, when it is the prerogative of criminals or heedless blunderers? Liberty is an atmosphere of the higher life, and it is only by a slow and patient inward 11transformation that one becomes capable of breathing it.All life must have its law, the life o

39、f man so much the more than that of inferior beings, in that it is more precious and of nicer adjustment. This law for man is in the first place an external law, but it may become an internal law. When man has once recognized the inner law, and bowed before it, through this reverence and voluntary s

40、ubmission he is ripe for liberty: so long as there is no vigorous and sovereign inner law, he is incapable of breathing its air; for he will be drunken with it, maddened, morally slain. The man who guides his life by inner law, can no more live servile to outward authority than can the full-grown bi

41、rd live imprisoned in the eggshell. But the man who has not yet attained to governing himself can no more live under the law of liberty than can the unfledged bird live without its protective covering. These things are terribly simple, and the series of demonstrations old and new that proves them, i

42、ncreases daily under our eyes. And yet we are as far as ever from understanding even the elements of this most important law. In our democracy, how many are there, great and small, who know, from having 12personally verified it, lived it and obeyed it, this truth without which a people is incapable

43、of governing itself? Liberty?it is respect; liberty?it is obedience to the inner law; and this law is neither the good pleasure of the mighty, nor the caprice of the crowd, but the high and impersonal rule before which those who govern are the first to bow the head. Shall liberty, then, be proscribe

44、d? No; but men must be made capable and worthy of it, otherwise public life becomes impossible, and the nation, undisciplined and unrestrained, goes on through license into the inextricable tangles of demagoguery.WHEN one passes in review the individual causes that disturb and complicate our social

45、life, by whatever names they are designated, and their list would be long, they all lead back to one general cause, which is this: the confusion of the secondary with the essential. Material comfort, education, liberty, the whole of civilizationthese things constitute the frame of the picture; but t

46、he frame no more makes the picture than the frock the monk or the uniform the soldier. Here the picture is man, and man with his most intimate possessionsnamely, his conscience, his character 13and his will. And while we have been elaborating and garnishing the frame, we have forgotten, neglected, d

47、isfigured the picture. Thus are we loaded with external good, and miserable in spiritual life; we have in abundance that which, if must be, we can go without, and are infinitely poor in the one thing needful. And when the depth of our being is stirred, with its need of loving, aspiring, fulfilling i

48、ts destiny, it feels the anguish of one buried aliveis smothered under the mass of secondary things that weigh it down and deprive it of light and air.We must search out, set free, restore to honor the true life, assign things to their proper places, and remember that the center of human progress is

49、 moral growth. What is a good lamp? It is not the most elaborate, the finest wrought, that of the most precious metal. A good lamp is a lamp that gives good light. And so also we are men and citizens, not by reason of the number of our goods and the pleasures we procure for ourselves, not through our intellectual and artistic culture, nor because of the honors and independence we enjoy; but by virtue of the strength of our moral fib