Happiness, as is evident, depends partly upon external circumstances and partly upon oneself. It is thought by many that happiness is impossible without a creed of a more or less religious kind. It is thought by many who are themselves unhappy that their sorrows have complicated and highly intellectualized sources. However, we can find something in this movie and the specific characters and plots are yet to be discussed.
The man who is unhappy will, as a rule, adopt an unhappy creed, while the man who is happy will adopt a happy creed; each may attribute his or her happiness and unhappiness to their beliefs, while the real causation is the other way round . Take Kate for example, she is totally dedicated to the life of cuisine and seems like a cold workaholic in others' eyes. Certain things of cooking everyday stuff up her life, which may lacks the real love on others like her colleagues and Zoe, the key girl in building the bridge to Kick, the man on the opposite side of the love river, making up the solitude of hers.
Where these things are lacking, only the exceptional person can achieve happiness, but where they are enjoyed, or can be obtained by well-directed effort, the person who is still unhappy is suffering from some psychological maladjustment which, if it is very grave, may need the services of a psychiatrist, but can in ordinary cases be cured by the patient herself, provided she sets about the matter in the right way. Where outward circumstances are not definitely unfortunate, a man should be able to achieve happiness, provided that his passions and interests are directed outward but not inward. Nick is vigorous in cooking delicate foods and classical music of belcanto(I like it, too). And what is the most important is that he does not stop impacting people around him, including Kate and Zoe, both of whom have been impressed by the delicacies of him.Gradually, his outward passion fills Kate's stomach and spirit, having sparked the fire inside her.
Affection is not to be called love until the experience of ups and downs. I am not fully clear whether or not the playwright was deliberate in taking the couple apart by the end of the story. The relationship between the two is started and shifted by the mutual love for a third, cuisine and Zoe, whom is so cute and pure a girl that she has a strong affection on her mother and feels the love between Nick and Kate before the adults. She is somewhat the Cupid in this love story.
The happy life is to an extraordinary extent the same as the good life. There is another difference, somewhat more subtle, between the attitude towards a good life and that which is recommended by the traditional moralists. The traditional moralist, for example, will say that love should be unselfish. In a certain sense he is right, that is to say, it should not be selfish beyond a point, but it should undoubtedly be of such a nature that one's own happiness is bound up in its success. If a man(like Kate's downstairs) were to invite a lady to marry him on the ground that he ardently desire her happiness and at the same time considered that she would afford him ideal opportunities of self-abnegation, I think it may be doubted whether she would be altogether pleased. Undoubtedly we should desire the happiness of those whom we love,but not as an alternative to our own. In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision. All unhappiness depends upon some kind of disintegration of lack of integration; there is disintegration within the self through lack of coordination between the conscious and the unconscious mind; there is lack of integration between the self and society where the two are not knit together by the force of objective interests and affections. The happy man is the man who does not coffer from either of these failures of unity,whose personality is neither divided against itself not pitted against the world. Such a man feels himself a citizen of the universe, enjoying freely the spectacle that it offers and the joys that it affords, untroubled by the thought of death because he feels himself not really separate from those who will come after him. It is in such profound instinctive union with the stream of life that the greatest joy is to be found.
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