E-C Translation．(上海交通大学2005研，考试科目：英语水平考试)Defining the meaning of "happiness" is a perplexing proposition: the best one can do is to try to set some extremes to the idea and then work towards the middle. To think of happiness as achieving superiority over others, living in a mansion made of marble, having a wardrobe with hundreds of outfits, will do to set the greedy extreme. To think of happiness as the joy of a holy man of India will do to set the spiritual extreme. He sits completely still, contemplating the nature of reality, free even of his own body. If admirers bring him food, he eats it: if not, he starves. Why be concerned What is physical is trivial to him. To contemplate is his joy and he achieves complete mental focus through an incredibly demanding discipline, the accomplishment of which is itself a joy to him.Is he a happy man Perhaps his happiness is only another sort of illusion. But who can take it from him And who will dare say it is more false than happiness paid for through an installment plthough the holy man"s concept of happiness may enjoy considerable prestige in the Orient, I doubt the existence of such motionless happiness. What is certain is that his way of happiness would be torture to almost anyone of Western temperament. Yet these extremes will still serve to define the area within which all of us must find some sort of balance. Thoreau had his own firm sense of that balance: save on the petty in order to spend on the essential.