歷年考研英語(yǔ)閱讀理解2006年04

[00:05.63]2006 Text4 [00:08.24]Many things make people think artists are weird. [00:11.77]But the weirdest may be this: [00:14.29]artists' only job is to explore emotions, [00:18.00]and yet they choose to focus on the ones that feel bad. [00:22.62]This wasn't always so. [00:24.64]The earliest forms of art, [00:25.90]like painting and music, [00:28.18]are those best suited for expressing joy. [00:31.92]But somewhere from the 19th century onward, [00:35.44]more artists began seeing happiness as meaningless, [00:39.69]phony or, worst of all, boring, [00:42.79]as we went from Wordsworth's daffodils to [00:45.44]Baudelaire's flowers of evil. [00:48.45]You could argue that art became more skeptical of happiness [00:52.18]because modern times have seen so much misery. [00:56.21]But it's not as if earlier times didn't know perpetual war, [01:00.56]disaster and the massacre of innocents. [01:03.68]The reason, in fact, may be just the opposite: [01:07.02]there is too much damn happiness in the world today. [01:11.15]After all, what is the one modern form of expression [01:14.88]almost completely dedicated to depicting happiness? [01:19.01]Advertising. [01:20.32]The rise of anti-happy art almost exactly tracks [01:23.65]the emergence of mass media, [01:25.88]and with it, a commercial culture in which happiness [01:28.72]is not just an ideal but an ideology. [01:33.06]People in earlier eras were surrounded by reminders of misery. [01:37.48]They worked until exhausted, [01:39.70]lived with few protections and died young. [01:43.54]In the West, before mass communication and literacy, [01:47.18]the most powerful mass medium was the church, [01:50.50]which reminded worshippers that their souls were in danger [01:54.03]and that they would someday be meat for worms. [01:58.17]Given all this, [01:59.44]they did not exactly need their art to be a bummer too. [02:03.77]Today the messages the average Westerner [02:06.79]is surrounded with are not religious but commercial, [02:10.33]and forever happy. [02:12.71]Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, [02:16.06]all smiling, smiling, smiling. [02:19.40]Our magazines feature beaming celebrities [02:21.80]and happy families in perfect homes. [02:25.41]And since these messages have an agenda [02:28.04]--to lure us to open our wallets [02:30.46]--they make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. [02:34.89]"Celebrate!" commanded the ads for [02:37.28]the arthritis drug Celebrex, [02:39.75]before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks. [02:44.49]But what we forget [02:46.12]--what our economy depends on us forgetting [02:48.72]--is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. [02:53.08]The things that bring the greatest joy [02:55.40]carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. [02:59.43]Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, [03:03.53]we need art to tell us, as religion once did, Memento mori: [03:08.60]remember that you will die, [03:10.100]that everything ends, [03:12.79]and that happiness comes not in denying this [03:15.90]but in living with it. [03:18.44]It's a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, [03:22.20]yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

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