古话说，笑一笑，十年少。这个“少”字，可能要换一种读法了，应该改第三声，少，多少的“少“。有研究称，快活的人死得早，一个最为简单的解释，是因为他们低估了生活的危险。这种研究总是让人将信将疑，以至于对人毫无价值。只是最近倒真是看到《傻儿司令》刘德一死了。尔后，George Carlin也死了。Carlin吸毒多年，71岁死掉，算是长寿了。刘德一才上六十，几年前还娶了个年轻大学毕业生当老婆，人生无常，唉！我想起亨廷顿于教授的一句话来：人生在世，没有吃不了的苦，只有享不了的福。

根据这些研究，我这种冲动、焦虑外加害羞的人，容易得胃溃疡和淋巴病，且容易受到病毒感染。但由于我骨子里是个十分悲观的人，什么事情都往坏处想，能够规避很多不必要的风险，另外也不炒股，不看足球，所以活到一百多岁不成问题。

我看很多快活的人，背后很悲惨，比如乐呵呵的崔永元，据说有忧郁症。我怀疑赵本山会不会是神经，不然哪里老想着公鸡下蛋，老母猪以80迈的时速撞树这些问题呢？莫里哀出狱后，据说一心想写悲剧，因为写那种搞笑闹剧（farce）很被人瞧不起，可惜他的大金主不愿意他写悲剧，因为人家要消费喜剧，就这么一来，一个伟大的喜剧作家诞生了。悲剧写不成，为生计被迫写喜剧，让他痛苦地大醉了一场。因为喜剧写的是小丑，是比我们普通人小一号的人，悲剧说的是英雄，比我们大一号的人。姚明摔跤就是悲剧。潘长江摔跤就是喜剧。莫里哀一开始不想写闹剧，就是怕自己老写小丑，以至于近丑者丑了。

回到快活、快乐这些话题上。美国的独立宣言中说到追求幸福（the pursuit of happiness）是天赋人权。但是你去看看四周，究竟有几个人去追求happiness的时候得到了happiness? 比如我以前抽烟，追求happy,  结果总是越抽越痛苦，越痛苦越抽，这不是pursuit of happiness, 整个就是找抽。happiness是副产品，是你在努力，痛苦，熬夜之后，把你的苦给熬干了，你就在那儿没事偷着乐了。这种苦后的乐才是真乐。为了快乐而快乐，轻者最后不快乐，重者最后生活不幸。

操心太多的人，为别人着想的人，往往是痛苦的，可是辩证的一面是，痛苦完了，我们往枕头上一倒，很快就睡着了，因为每日分给我们的担忧，我们都担忧过了。在无边的黑夜，我们的内心反倒是轻飘飘的，虽然这听起来很像悖论。通常，没心没肺活着的人最快活。福楼拜说幸福生活有三要素：“愚蠢、自私、身体好，最重要的是愚蠢。”每个人生活中可能都会遇到这样一些人，他们唯一的爱好是他们自己，唯一的热情是健康，唯一的乐趣是寻欢作乐。他们不看书不思考，不关心国家大事，生命的真谛，人生的使命等等。他们俗并自豪着。他们容忍不了与其相反的人，因为这些人可能是他们生活的底片。

对快乐怀有戒心的作家有很多。他们更多提到的是如何得到了挑战，在挑战之下得到了满足感。帕慕克在To be happy一文的开头问道：Is it vulgar to be happy? I've often wondered about this. （ 快乐俗吗？我常想这个问题。）这能叫问题吗？也只能有这样的作家才能想得出来。可是等他一提出来之后，读的人不禁要去思考了，一思考，发笑的只有上帝。

happiness中文翻译为幸福，也可以翻译为快乐。快乐和幸福在英文中混为一谈，恐怕这正是很多人追求happiness 而不happy的一大原因。所以套用帕慕克的话：快乐能让我们幸福吗？我常想这个问题。

LINK: http://family.mblogger.cn/berlinf/posts/140224.aspx

周末晚上去夜店，同去某人第一回去，于是我觉得有义务给他解释解释，酒吧里那些男怪兽女怪兽。PUB高昂的酒水费用除了让你享受冷气，享受头被震翻的DISCO，还包括寻找ONS，勾搭小帅哥的费用，如果你情比金坚命比天高坚决不乱搞，看别人乱搞也算是额外加场表演。首先可以观看标准夜店生物，一群妞一看就知道天天晚上都准时来报道，所以一到这个点头晃得跟鸡啄米。其次可以观赏奸情，正好旁边坐着一桌男的加一女的，女的有点年纪貌似走淑女路线，男的年纪偏小全是四眼仔加小胖哥，疑似一桌同事。过了一会来了个猥琐中年男，黑胖矮挫四丑俱全，但是油嘴滑舌哄得那妞好不开心，一只啤酒功夫我们再转头，人家都抱上了，某男说是不是认识啊？我说肯定不是，刚勾搭上，因为女的还挺矜持，两手护着包。喝了两杯我去洗手间，经过时一看，女的也已伸出双手张开怀抱，指点某男：看见没看见没，奸情告捷，一会就抱着开房去了。某男很震惊。

我绝没有贬低猥琐男的意思，一个女的独自跟一帮男的来酒吧，又这么容易被勾搭，她必然也抱着去睡一个的想法，睡不着就是出征失败，睡不着个高大威猛玉树临风的，睡个甜言蜜语会哄人的也算凑合。男人会疑问，女人也有睡男人的想法吗？这个傻问题好比几世纪前教会讨论：女人真的有灵魂吗？

谁都是人，并非女人这个种类就存在着坚贞不屈纯洁美好，那不过是男人的遐想。北京那些骨肉皮女粉丝誓把乐队主唱都睡上床，也有人攒星座睡，攒血型睡，再彪悍点的，攒种族攒国家攒地区睡，其实不是什么惊世骇俗的事，不过就是睡多了想睡出点趣味来，不像男人捡能上的就上，但也的确不是什么夸人的话。别把这些姑娘当成什么迷途羔羊，她们其实很清楚自己在做什么，有些就是当成一项运动，有些是不想再受感情的累，有些就是玩，如果哪个男人义愤填膺说上两句，你真TM滥，她们也懒得搭理你，因为知道男人就是那么回事，使点小计策还不照样乖乖上钩，女人的谎言起码让半个地球实现和平。从卫慧的上海宝贝，到棉棉的糖，这种姑娘层出不穷，甚至还会互相炫耀起来，比如今天睡了个明星，昨天是名校博士，好像跟不错的人同床睡过，自己也倍有面儿。

这一区域里最牛的一个妞，是英国女记者坎贝尔，睡了三国总统，分别是赫鲁晓夫，肯尼迪，卡斯特罗，无疑是最牛逼的阴道。但就像男人的小JJ再牛B也没什么值得大书特书，只能暗爽，我一向也觉得，上过许多人的床，并不能说明此女牛B，除非你能跟坎贝尔一样，因为这事专门写本书，大家看了都竖拇指。

很多女人都是，上了一张不该上的床，睡了一个混蛋，就觉得阴道尝过最坏的，不介意多交流几次。这种人，我们通常称为烂人。就算你睡的人都很牛B，也没什么好骄傲。去过夜店的都知道，在里面勾搭ONS是成功率最高的把戏，三好学生四有青年都有一条丑陋的小JJ，就算比尔盖茨，他的下体也不会镶钻石。去那就是找个乐，谁管睡的是谁，看上去是个异性就行。

转自 看上去很猛

http://www.hikersblog.com/blog/user1/3186/27640.shtml

这一理论由来自世界各国的专家组成的研究小组得出，它被记录在一本名为《自学练脑》的新书中。研究发现，黑巧克力在增加大脑灰质的食物排行榜上名列第一。其中的镁和抗氧化剂黄酮醇，能增加供给大脑的氧气量，让脑筋转得更快。

规律的性生活则是另一大健脑方法。该书列出了性生活过程中，大脑经历的7种不同化学反应。结果表明，性生活时，催产激素水平会相应增加，从而提高了人思考、解决问题的能力；而性生活后，5-羟色胺水平的升高也能增强人的创造力和逻辑判断能力。

而微笑也是保持大脑活力的好办法。它在让自己思维变得敏捷的同时，还能激发对方的大脑活力。研究人员发现，看见一个微笑可以达到一个短时间的情感高潮，它甚至比“性爱”、“巧克力”和“购物”所带给人们的能量还要高。此外，专家们认为，抱抱小孩、朗读和在大学学经济，也有益于提高大脑的敏锐程度。而看肥皂剧、和情绪低落的人在一起，则可能让人变得迟钝。

专家们因此推出了一个新概念——“BLISS”（身体快乐、笑、参与、满足和性生活的英文缩写）。此外，该书作者之一、英国中兰开夏大学商学教授特里·霍尼表示，要避免让孩子独自做功课，父母或同学的陪伴会让他们更有兴趣；成年人要锻炼脑力，则可以每天连续3次大声从1数到99。“此外，还要多和有幽默感的人交往，而不要总和爱抱怨的人在一起，因为他们的消极情绪会把你同化。”

霍尼表示：“数十年来，我们一直认为人脑的认知能力取决于遗传，但现在看来，我们吃什么、喝什么、有什么样的情绪，都是智力的决定因素。一些生活方式不仅能延缓17岁后出现的认知能力衰弱，甚至能增强人们的认知能力。”

Original Link

Harvard University Commencement Address

J.K. Rowling

Copyright June 2008

As prepared for delivery

President Faust, members of the Harvard Corporation and the Board of Overseers, members of the faculty, proud parents, and, above all, graduates,

The first thing I would like to say is 'thank you.' Not only has Harvard given me an extraordinary honour, but the weeks of fear and nausea I've experienced at the thought of giving this commencement address have made me lose weight. A win-win situation! Now all I have to do is take deep breaths, squint at the red banners and fool myself into believing I am at the world's best-educated Harry Potter convention.

Delivering a commencement address is a great responsibility; or so I thought until I cast my mind back to my own graduation. The commencement speaker that day was the distinguished British philosopher Baroness Mary Warnock. Reflecting on her speech has helped me enormously in writing this one, because it turns out that I can't remember a single word she said. This liberating discovery enables me to proceed without any fear that I might inadvertently influence you to abandon promising careers in business, law or politics for the giddy delights of becoming a gay wizard.

You see? If all you remember in years to come is the 'gay wizard' joke, I've still come out ahead of Baroness Mary Warnock. Achievable goals: the first step towards personal improvement.

Actually, I have wracked my mind and heart for what I ought to say to you today. I have asked myself what I wish I had known at my own graduation, and what important lessons I have learned in the 21 years that has expired between that day and this.

I have come up with two answers. On this wonderful day when we are gathered together to celebrate your academic success, I have decided to talk to you about the benefits of failure. And as you stand on the threshold of what is sometimes called 'real life', I want to extol the crucial importance of imagination.

These might seem quixotic or paradoxical choices, but please bear with me.

Looking back at the 21-year-old that I was at graduation, is a slightly uncomfortable experience for the 42-year-old that she has become. Half my lifetime ago, I was striking an uneasy balance between the ambition I had for myself, and what those closest to me expected of me.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do, ever, was to write novels. However, my parents, both of whom came from impoverished backgrounds and neither of whom had been to college, took the view that my overactive imagination was an amusing personal quirk that could never pay a mortgage, or secure a pension.

They had hoped that I would take a vocational degree; I wanted to study English Literature. A compromise was reached that in retrospect satisfied nobody, and I went up to study Modern Languages. Hardly had my parents' car rounded the corner at the end of the road than I ditched German and scuttled off down the Classics corridor.

I cannot remember telling my parents that I was studying Classics; they might well have found out for the first time on graduation day. Of all subjects on this planet, I think they would have been hard put to name one less useful than Greek mythology when it came to securing the keys to an executive bathroom.

I would like to make it clear, in parenthesis, that I do not blame my parents for their point of view. There is an expiry date on blaming your parents for steering you in the wrong direction; the moment you are old enough to take the wheel, responsibility lies with you. What is more, I cannot criticise my parents for hoping that I would never experience poverty. They had been poor themselves, and I have since been poor, and I quite agree with them that it is not an ennobling experience. Poverty entails fear, and stress, and sometimes depression; it means a thousand petty humiliations and hardships. Climbing out of poverty by your own efforts, that is indeed something on which to pride yourself, but poverty itself is romanticised only by fools.

What I feared most for myself at your age was not poverty, but failure.

At your age, in spite of a distinct lack of motivation at university, where I had spent far too long in the coffee bar writing stories, and far too little time at lectures, I had a knack for passing examinations, and that, for years, had been the measure of success in my life and that of my peers.

I am not dull enough to suppose that because you are young, gifted and well-educated, you have never known hardship or heartbreak. Talent and intelligence never yet inoculated anyone against the caprice of the Fates, and I do not for a moment suppose that everyone here has enjoyed an existence of unruffled privilege and contentment.

However, the fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure. You might be driven by a fear of failure quite as much as a desire for success. Indeed, your conception of failure might not be too far from the average person's idea of success, so high have you already flown academically.

Ultimately, we all have to decide for ourselves what constitutes failure, but the world is quite eager to give you a set of criteria if you let it. So I think it fair to say that by any conventional measure, a mere seven years after my graduation day, I had failed on an epic scale. An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.

Now, I am not going to stand here and tell you that failure is fun. That period of my life was a dark one, and I had no idea that there was going to be what the press has since represented as a kind of fairy tale resolution. I had no idea how far the tunnel extended, and for a long time, any light at the end of it was a hope rather than a reality.

So why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had already been realised, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.

Failure gave me an inner security that I had never attained by passing examinations. Failure taught me things about myself that I could have learned no other way. I discovered that I had a strong will, and more discipline than I had suspected; I also found out that I had friends whose value was truly above rubies.

The knowledge that you have emerged wiser and stronger from setbacks means that you are, ever after, secure in your ability to survive. You will never truly know yourself, or the strength of your relationships, until both have been tested by adversity. Such knowledge is a true gift, for all that it is painfully won, and it has been worth more to me than any qualification I ever earned.

Given a time machine or a Time Turner, I would tell my 21-year-old self that personal happiness lies in knowing that life is not a check-list of acquisition or achievement. Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's total control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.

You might think that I chose my second theme, the importance of imagination, because of the part it played in rebuilding my life, but that is not wholly so. Though I will defend the value of bedtime stories to my last gasp, I have learned to value imagination in a much broader sense. Imagination is not only the uniquely human capacity to envision that which is not, and therefore the fount of all invention and innovation. In its arguably most transformative and revelatory capacity, it is the power that enables us to empathise with humans whose experiences we have never shared.

One of the greatest formative experiences of my life preceded Harry Potter, though it informed much of what I subsequently wrote in those books. This revelation came in the form of one of my earliest day jobs. Though I was sloping off to write stories during my lunch hours, I paid the rent in my early 20s by working in the research department at Amnesty International's headquarters in London.

There in my little office I read hastily scribbled letters smuggled out of totalitarian regimes by men and women who were risking imprisonment to inform the outside world of what was happening to them. I saw photographs of those who had disappeared without trace, sent to Amnesty by their desperate families and friends. I read the testimony of torture victims and saw pictures of their injuries. I opened handwritten, eye-witness accounts of summary trials and executions, of kidnappings and rapes.

Many of my co-workers were ex-political prisoners, people who had been displaced from their homes, or fled into exile, because they had the temerity to think independently of their government. Visitors to our office included those who had come to give information, or to try and find out what had happened to those they had been forced to leave behind.

I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in his homeland. He trembled uncontrollably as he spoke into a video camera about the brutality inflicted upon him. He was a foot taller than I was, and seemed as fragile as a child. I was given the job of escorting him to the Underground Station afterwards, and this man whose life had been shattered by cruelty took my hand with exquisite courtesy, and wished me future happiness.

And as long as I live I shall remember walking along an empty corridor and suddenly hearing, from behind a closed door, a scream of pain and horror such as I have never heard since. The door opened, and the researcher poked out her head and told me to run and make a hot drink for the young man sitting with her. She had just given him the news that in retaliation for his own outspokenness against his country's regime, his mother had been seized and executed.

Every day of my working week in my early 20s I was reminded how incredibly fortunate I was, to live in a country with a democratically elected government, where legal representation and a public trial were the rights of everyone.

Every day, I saw more evidence about the evils humankind will inflict on their fellow humans, to gain or maintain power. I began to have nightmares, literal nightmares, about some of the things I saw, heard and read.

And yet I also learned more about human goodness at Amnesty International than I had ever known before.

Amnesty mobilises thousands of people who have never been tortured or imprisoned for their beliefs to act on behalf of those who have. The power of human empathy, leading to collective action, saves lives, and frees prisoners. Ordinary people, whose personal well-being and security are assured, join together in huge numbers to save people they do not know, and will never meet. My small participation in that process was one of the most humbling and inspiring experiences of my life.

Unlike any other creature on this planet, humans can learn and understand, without having experienced. They can think themselves into other people's minds, imagine themselves into other people's places.

Of course, this is a power, like my brand of fictional magic, that is morally neutral. One might use such an ability to manipulate, or control, just as much as to understand or sympathise.

And many prefer not to exercise their imaginations at all. They choose to remain comfortably within the bounds of their own experience, never troubling to wonder how it would feel to have been born other than they are. They can refuse to hear screams or to peer inside cages; they can close their minds and hearts to any suffering that does not touch them personally; they can refuse to know.

I might be tempted to envy people who can live that way, except that I do not think they have any fewer nightmares than I do. Choosing to live in narrow spaces can lead to a form of mental agoraphobia, and that brings its own terrors. I think the wilfully unimaginative see more monsters. They are often more afraid.

What is more, those who choose not to empathise may enable real monsters. For without ever committing an act of outright evil ourselves, we collude with it, through our own apathy.

One of the many things I learned at the end of that Classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.

That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people's lives simply by existing.

But how much more are you, Harvard graduates of 2008, likely to touch other people's lives? Your intelligence, your capacity for hard work, the education you have earned and received, give you unique status, and unique responsibilities. Even your nationality sets you apart. The great majority of you belong to the world's only remaining superpower. The way you vote, the way you live, the way you protest, the pressure you bring to bear on your government, has an impact way beyond your borders. That is your privilege, and your burden.

If you choose to use your status and influence to raise your voice on behalf of those who have no voice; if you choose to identify not only with the powerful, but with the powerless; if you retain the ability to imagine yourself into the lives of those who do not have your advantages, then it will not only be your proud families who celebrate your existence, but thousands and millions of people whose reality you have helped transform for the better. We do not need magic to change the world, we carry all the power we need inside ourselves already: we have the power to imagine better.

I am nearly finished. I have one last hope for you, which is something that I already had at 21. The friends with whom I sat on graduation day have been my friends for life. They are my children's godparents, the people to whom I've been able to turn in times of trouble, friends who have been kind enough not to sue me when I've used their names for Death Eaters. At our graduation we were bound by enormous affection, by our shared experience of a time that could never come again, and, of course, by the knowledge that we held certain photographic evidence that would be exceptionally valuable if any of us ran for Prime Minister.

So today, I can wish you nothing better than similar friendships. And tomorrow, I hope that even if you remember not a single word of mine, you remember those of Seneca, another of those old Romans I met when I fled down the Classics corridor, in retreat from career ladders, in search of ancient wisdom:

As is a tale, so is life: not how long it is, but how good it is, is what matters.

I wish you all very good lives.

Thank you very much.

“我们必须全盘接受以下可靠的教导：耶稣基督到这个世界上来拯救罪人。......耶稣基督向那些将信他并获永生的人显示了无限的耐心。永恒的、永生的、不可见的王，唯一的上帝，他的荣耀与世长存。”以上是美国威斯康辛州臭名昭著的系列吃人杀手杰菲里·达莫1992年2月17日在法庭上的宣言。