Today the messages your average Westerner is bombarded with are not religious but commercial, and forever happy .Fast-food eaters, news anchors, text messengers, all smiling, smiling. Our magazines feature beaming celebrities and happy families in perfect homes. And since these messages have an agenda--to lure us to open our wallets to make the very idea of happiness seem unreliable. "Celebrate!" commanded the ads for the arthritis drug Celebrex, before we found out it could increase the risk of heart attacks.

　　What we forget--what our economy depends on is forgetting--is that happiness is more than pleasure without pain. The things that bring the greatest joy carry the greatest potential for loss and disappointment. Today, surrounded by promises of easy happiness, we need someone to tell us as religion once did, Memento mori: remember that you will die, that everything ends, and that happiness comes not in denying this but in living with it. Its a message even more bitter than a clove cigarette, yet, somehow, a breath of fresh air.

　　40. Which of the following is true of the text?

　　[A] Religion once functioned as a reminder of misery.

　　[B] Art provides a balance between expectation and reality.

　　[C] People feel disappointed at the realities of morality.

　　[D] mass media are inclined to cover disasters and deaths.