放松一下，让Alain de Botton来写TWE

被人抓去，干活一天，想TWE想到口中生泡。回来翻翻Alain de Botton。你不认识他？他是个英国佬，还是个小资（听听他的书名：How Proust can change your life）。要是TWE题目是我们为什么要悲观，Alain de Botton一定地6＋。（可惜ETS的题目太健康，没法下笔啊）。

At this time of year, if a friend calls up feeling sad and wretched about the future, it's common to reach around for something cheerful to say."Oh or next year will be better", we stammer, "spring is around the corner, focus on the good things.' But it's always seemed to me that this is quite the most hopeless way of cheering anyone up. And in truth, it's liable to leave our friends even closer to despair than ever. Furthermore, and very strangely perhaps, one of the most consoling things one can hear anyone say is that everything is actually absolutely dreadful. Something like this sentence from the Roman philosopher Seneca,"What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears." Or like this from the 19th century German Arthur Schopenhauer,"Today is bad, and daily it will get worse, until the worst of all happens." Or this from the French 18th century thinker ShF."A man must swallow a toad every morning if he's to be sure of not meeting with anything more disgusting in the day ahead.' These thoughts make us feel better, because they perform that most valuable of all services. They tell us we are not alone with our darkest feelings. They echo and eloquently develop our own sadness. They spare us any feelings of persecution and even make us feel like we belong to the lucky ones, not something we're liable to think when we switch on the average TV show or pick up a magazine whose upbeat tones are a permanent reminder of an energy we can't muster. Pessimists don't always depress us, rather, they can free us from expectations which inspire bitterness. It's rather consoling when life's let us down to hear that happiness was never really part of the plan. The darkest thinkers may paradoxically be the most cheering. If a certain pessimism is especially valuable today, it's because we live in a particularly optimistic era. From the early 19th century onwards, the West assumed a bourgeois scientifically-based world view where a belief in progress and technology was united with the faith that every human problem would one day find a solution. Never before had so many people believed so many cheerfully things. The Judaic, Christian and Greek or Roman ideologies that preceded this optimistic age had placed stress on the essentially tragic, incomplete nature of human life. Humans were not accidentally unhappy; they were so by design, because their desires always outstripped their expectation, and because their knowledge was greater than their power to change things. Pessimists give us license to indulge our most misanthropic thoughts. It may seem strange to recommend pessimistic thoughts as the perfect preparation for the New Year, but we should be grateful for pessimists who can cheerfully and entertainingly bring us down to earth, pessimists who can help us to swallow "a daily toad".