UNHAPPINESS

1 Spoilt happiness

How much untold woe we bring on our heads by our schemes to make ourselves happy one day. We paddle madly to reach happiness. But all we do is churn the river of our misery to a more turbid froth and surge. We live in a frenzy, and die unconsoled.

What a long conglomeration of small sorrows our short lives have space for.

Happiness tastes so bland, that I keep ladling into it the spice of expectant desire, till I at last spoil it. Though I stock all the ingredients to make a rich happiness, I brew up a foul stew of misery.

We are thrust on by an unquenchable thirst for joy and by an ineradicable propensity for reducing plain gladness to seething grimness. And our desire to find happiness rides us almost as hard as our compulsion to make life insupportable.

2 Life against happiness

Even fools have the brains to make their lives simply wretched.

We are fools for improvement. There seems no point to life if it’s not getting better day by day. I have to race so frantically to make life better, how could I find the time simply to live well?

Earth’s air must contain some impalpable element, so favourable to life, so hostile to happiness. ‘Who would have thought that life could be so sad?’ asked Van Gogh out of the depths.

What life wants is not bare self-preservation. It craves the unlimited growth of life. And that entails the propagation of the direst states of distress.

3 The habit of unhappiness

If there are things that people could easily do to benefit themselves which they aren’t doing now, you can be sure that they never will do them, since they have no wish to. It would be easy for them to change their bad habits, which is why it’s clear they never will.

Some people need the courage to combat unrelenting sorrow, since they lack the resolve to retreat from the routines that have caused them such woe. We are addicted to misery, but we soon lose the frail habit of happiness.

For the denizens of hell each day is the same, and yet every morning they wake to a fresh horror.

Each day life finds some new way to torment you, and it’s not even trying. Hell may be the place where it starts trying.

Novices of despair fear that there is nothing new now that will ever come for them. Its veterans dread that there still might be.

Our own problems are the very ones that we can’t solve.

4 The plurality of hells

We build the grubby hut of our happiness on pilings sunk deep in others’ pain, and we feel no guilt since they are so far out of sight.

We judge no day wasted on which the rest of creation has had to suffer more than us.

There must be countless cells in the underworld to house the countless states of torment that we have laid up for ourselves.

We are loath to cause pain in order to make our own lot comfortable, but we are quite happy for such pain to continue.

When others suffer from the same cause as me, I take heart that there was no way I could have dodged such blows. And when they suffer from a divergent one, I brag how dexterously I have kept clear of their blunders.

You never know in what hell people might be burning, but often no more do they.

Life makes you hate all the things that you started out by loving. It dries up your heart, but fails to quench your thirst.

5 On the brink of happiness

Just when you trust that you have tamed life, it bares its fangs, and snarls, and shows you once more that it is a wolf and not a fawning cur. It’s always poised to play you some nasty trick. It would be as mad to disdain life as to turn your back on some wild beast. Each can tear you to shreds as quick as look at you. But it would be just as absurd to prize it as if it had some real value.

We are near the pinnacle of joy, and we are trembling on the verge of a precipitous crash. It’s all about to come together at last, and it’s all on the point of falling apart.

Your misery may lurk for years in remission, but it will never be cured. It may break out long years hence in a violent attack, and kill you in a few weeks. This life ends so soon, and yet, as Van Gogh wrote, ‘there is no end to anguish.’ But most of us succumb to some timely malady, before our real sadness gets the chance to do us in.

Life is either just bearable, or not. And it makes all the difference whether you know that you can bear it for one day more, or that you can’t bear it for so long as that.

Even if we solved all our problems, we would not be much better off, because they are not our real problems.

6 The tense of happiness

Pleasure seems so bright in anticipation, but so pale in possession. Joy ravishes you in prospect, dejection molests you in the present. Your expectancy has already sucked the juice from your pleasures before you reach them. And all it leaves is their dry bones to pick over. You are far more present for your pains than you are for your pleasures.

Fulfilment eludes us. As Epicurus said of death, where it is, we are not, and where we are, it is not.

Happiness is racing to a future which it will never reach. And misery is fleeing from a past which it can’t get clear of.

A moment might make you wretched for the whole of your life, but happiness is the work of each day.

Joy wants to go on for all time. It longs to be immortal. And that is why it is not joy, and joy is never here with us.

‘Stay moment,’ is the cry of a creature for whom the moment was never there. And the cry just wastes one more moment in vain regret.

7 Deferring life

I waste my days deferring happiness and galloping past pleasure. Happiness is no more than the promise of happiness. It never gives itself to us as a present possession. ‘Man never is, but always to be, blessed,’ as Pope wrote.

Our world of instant gratification is by the same token a world of indefinite deferral. We can’t wait for anything, not even the bliss that we are in the midst of. We’re always charging off after some new pleasure which we hope will at last give us all we want. Our desires are self-defeating. They no sooner transport us to some joy than they drag us out of it to chase some new quarry. We are too early for the future, and too late for the present. And we deny ourselves nothing, yet we forget to live.

We could find our happiness only in the here and now. But the prospect of happiness lures us out of the here and now.

People croon that they wait in hope, but they are now lashed on so fast by their hectic hopes, that they can’t bear to wait for a thing.

It’s because we know that everything lasts just for a moment that we see no point in living for the moment.

How many days on which we dreamt we would at last start to live have we consigned to the past.

Lord, make me live in the present moment, but not yet.

8 Greed for the future

We live as frantically as if we were to die this hour, and as negligently as if we had all the time in the world. The things of real value are the only things we are willing to wait for. We have to put off life in our rush to get our hands on the things which we think will make life worth living one day. We want it all right now, but what we want is the means to enrich or enjoy ourselves tomorrow.

Greed rides people at such a furious clip, that they postpone life from one hungry instant to the next, till they have raked up more than they could ever need. And one day when they have got hold of more than anyone could use, they will no doubt find the time to start to live.

9 Present for misery

We are never present in our life to feel its bliss, but we are close enough to it to be pierced by its shrapnel.

Anguish arrests you in the jangling now. Desire beckons you on to meet the shining future. The only people who live wholly for the moment are those in the grip of agonizing pangs. If you have to live in the moment, all you want to do is get out of it. Absorption in the here and now is one of the luxuries praised by those who have something more pleasant to do. Nature bars us from living in the present. And that may be one of the best gifts that it gives us. Most of us have good reason not to live for the present hour. Hell is the state in which you are cursed to live in the instant right here and now.

We cause ourselves so much grief by not living in the present, that it’s just as well that we are not present for our grief.

10 Time and place

When you feel sick at heart, your dear familiar haunts seem smeared with a mildew of stale misery.

How the changeless returning seasons carelessly lacerate our sad and changing hearts.

You scent the sadness behind the gladdest and shiniest things, you feel it on the most brilliant and tranquil days, you taste it in the pastness of the past and in the otherness of other people’s lives.

Happiness looks so enticing because it is always so far away from us. We are in such a whirl chasing it, that we never have time to sit still and be happy.

The future twinkles with all the tinsel trinkets that I hope to win. It’s there out in front of me glittering vast and vacant and waiting to be glutted with my tingling lusts.

11 Irresistible life

Life is a book that you can’t bear to put down, no matter how bad it gets. Who would choose to take it up? Yet who can dare to lay it aside, once they have the loathsome gift in their hands? Life is a poor thing to gain, but a great thing to lose.

Life is a gamble that is not worth the prize. And though we are so hard to please, we each end up feeling like born winners. And all that we want is for the game to go on.

Life lures us on like a person we have ceased to love but still can’t help lusting after. The world breaks your heart, but won’t snap the straps of hope and desire that keep you pinioned to it.

Our love of life is a case of Stockholm syndrome.

Life pays some people such starvation wages, why don’t they just quit? Though churlishly dissatisfied with the most opulent life, we still hug the most beggarly one. The worse it gets, the tighter I cling to it. On good days I feel almost strong enough to shuck off the burden of life. On bad days I’m too discouraged to dare so much as that. ‘Man alone,’ wrote Tocqueville, ‘displays an inborn contempt of existence yet a boundless rage to exist. He scorns life, but he dreads annihilation.’

12 To find life so sweet

To have eaten all that dirt, and still find life so sweet. We need to have the heart to go on, since we lack the nerve to give up. We can’t let go of the cheapest things, but we let drop the most precious ones. ‘The dearer a thing is,’ Butler wrote, ‘the cheaper as a general rule we sell it.’ Death has to prise from our fingers the gimcrack bauble which we clasp as if it were a priceless heirloom. The most starved of us find life so fresh and delectable, and clutch so lovingly the barbs that tear our flesh. Is it brave or stupid, to have been so battered by life, and still to deem it a blessing?

We promenade like great proprietors in a city in which we are paupers. ‘All of us are beggars here,’ as William James points out.

How sad we find it to leave the world in which all that we loved has long since left us. And how hard it is to let go of this life which our ills have made so hard to bear.

How I curse the smugness of those who are as happy as I was till yesterday. And how I wish that I could still afford to be as smug as they. We collaborate with the world to trample our way to what we want, till the world tramples on us, and we cry out at its unfairness.

13 The great swindle

Life is the great swindle. It gives you nothing that you want, but keeps you hanging on for its least prize.

Those who have lost all that they had still dread to lose the life that took it from them. Even the dying are still in love with the world which is killing them. And those who have got nothing are sure that a year or a day more will bring them all they yearn for. We have no choice but to stay in the game, the losers in the hope of recouping what they have lost, the victors to win yet more and to reap the fruits of what they have gained. And those who seem stoical in enduring the pangs that are sure to end in death may just be too attached to life to let it go.

Life gave us nothing that was worth having. And death will take from us nothing that is worth keeping.

To live is to play chess blindfold against a grandmaster who has not lost a game, and can change or break the rules at will, and makes three moves for your one.

14 The tyrant life

Life bludgeons you like a demented tyrant. It levies an onerous impost on happiness, but is too mean to disburse a cent of it to those who lack it. It’s a bully, which loves to bash those who can least bear it. Why does it load the most crushing bundles on the most enfeebled shoulders?

As soon as the world starts to maltreat you, you might as well lie down and die. You can bet that it won’t leave off till it has beaten you to a jelly. Life plasters you with filth, and then berates you for smelling so foul.

There is no justice in this world. And yet you still have to pay for all that you get and all that you fail to.

This niggardly world treats some people with malicious charity. It grants them all but the one thing that they most long for.

You can’t guess what’s in store for you, but you can be sure that it won’t be good. Even while you sleep, some indifferent doom is preparing the catastrophe that will lay you low. ‘I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet, yet trouble came.’

HAPPINESS AND SELF-IMPORTANCE

15 Too important to be happy

I’m sure that I am too important to be unhappy, and that others are not important enough. What right have they to be happy, since they lack my high purpose? And yet what reason have they to be wretched, when they don’t have to bear the weight of my grave responsibilities? My quest is so vital, that I can’t afford to be hamstrung by such blows. But their troubles count for so little, that they should be able to bear them with ease. And we are so sure of our own worth, that we feel we have no right to make such a dire rent in the world by bereaving it of our bright attendance.

I feel half jealous of others, seeing that, unlike me, none of their loves or schemes matter enough to be worth breaking their hearts for when they fail. I both envy and disdain them for their trifling bliss, as I do children or birds, the immortals or the dead.

16 The conceit of happiness

We catch happiness as a lucky symptom of the endemic malady of conceit. We might feel content with the world and our own lot, if we had a grain less presumption or a grain more, if we thought a shred better of our merits or didn’t think so well of them.

Happiness is a mild and serene self-intoxication. We are so fuddled with our own self-flattery, that we don’t feel most of the nettles that life would jab us with.

How could conceited people foresee the misery that they’re in for? They are so full of themselves, that they don’t see how foolishly they are starving their real good to feed fat their empty self-approbation.

We burn in the hell of the insignificant. But all we feel is the pleasant warmth of our self-importance.

Life is heavy enough to crush us, but it is too light to be worth our care.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown. And don’t we all wear the crown of our own self-consequence as if it were a crown of thorns?

17 The chosen and the cursed

We lapse into habits of unhappiness by inflating our own significance. Those who feel that they are chosen know what it is to be cursed. Self-importance is a yeast which leavens our happiness. But add too much, and you make it too acid to digest. Yet we can’t stay buoyantly joyful, if we are not ballasted by such a freight of it that we might well capsize. Self weighs us down, but bears us up.

There are those who know that they are chosen, because things that are forbidden to others are permitted to them. And there are those who know it, because things that are permitted to others are forbidden to them. To be cursed is one way of being chosen.

We are not important enough to be unhappy. And yet our unimportance, if we could feel it, might add the last straw to the load of our unhappiness. They are the accursed, who don’t matter enough to be cursed, but must still suffer as if they did.

I am the one person who matters enough to be happy. But I matter so much, that I can’t be happy. And others don’t matter enough to be unhappy, but if they are unhappy, their unhappiness too does not matter.

18 Competitive happiness

Happiness, which seems to be an end in itself, is in fact a comparative and competitive good. Sentimentalists claim that they can’t be happy so long as there is one person in pain. But in truth most of us would not feel so good, if we did not think that there were at least some others who felt so much worse.

My false pride sets me up for so much unhappiness, that it’s lucky that I have my false pride to tell me how happy I am.

We love to rub others’ noses in our happiness, but we don’t complain when we are unhappy, since that would be a confession of failure.

Happiness seems so fleeting and unsubstantial. So we give up the search for it, and spend all our time accreting the more solid and lasting acquirements of our greed, so as to prove to our rivals that we are happier than they are, though they don’t care a rap how happy we may be. We would rather have less, so long as they have less too, than have more, on the condition that they should have more than us. And we might be content to despair, if others weren’t so full of hope.

19 We would rather be envied than happy

We don’t want to be happy, we want to be happier than others, as Montesquieu points out. But not even that is enough for us. We want them to know it. And how wretched we are willing to make ourselves, to prove to them that we are happier than they. ‘Happiness is nothing if it is not known,’ Johnson says, ‘and very little if it is not envied.’ How pitiful we are, that one of the keenest joys we know is the pain that we think we cause our rivals by our success.

Smug people don’t mind being called smug, since they take it as an acknowledgement of how much they have to be smug about, and how much they’ve got under the skin of their rivals. It’s the nearest they come to being envied.

How much of their life people are willing to waste to get the wealth they need to keep up a lifestyle.

A lifestyle is not meant to be enjoyed but envied.

We may sense that we can’t make people envy us. But we can still heap up the solid goods which we hope will make us enviable.

HAPPY OR NOT

20 The causes of happiness

There are four keys to happiness, live on the surface, think as the world does, care for nothing but what is your own, and keep in such a hurry that you can’t tell how happy you are. So why, when each one of us holds these keys in our pocket, are we still so weary-hearted?

Happiness is as shallow as beauty and as wise as truth.

Disciplined insensitivity is one of the gifts that we would need in order to be happy. But we are not even disciplined.

You don’t need good reasons to go on living if you’re happy. It’s only the hapless who need that.

Happiness, like health, streamlines life for you, so that you can breeze through it with least resistance.

It should be such a simple thing to be happy. But we are far too clever for that.

How little it might take to make us happy. But most of us want a lot more than that.

Happiness is not an emotion but the quiescence of emotion.

21 How to please

Find your peace, and you are free of the world’s demands but more fit to please and be pleased by it. It may not improve you or set you on to help, but it will make you more useful and able to help.

In order to please, all you need do is smile and show that you are inclined to be pleased.

Most people are so pleased with themselves, that they are not hard to please. And that’s all they need to make everyone else pleased with them.

We would be much less pleasing to others, if we were not so pleased with ourselves.

22 Our happiness is in the minds of others

In order to find joy, I try to fool myself that all’s well with me, but I may feel that I need to fool others even more. Unwilling as I am to give up the lies that I live by, I’m yet more unwilling to let others know that I’ve seen through how much they have duped me. We don’t only want to seem good more than be good, we want to seem happy more than we want to be happy.

Our happiness is in great measure a creation of how happy we deem others perceive us to be. We seek the goods that others hoped would make them happy. And then we judge how happy we are by how happy they judge us to be on the strength of how many of these we have got.

We must try to make the best of our servitude by pretending that we are free.

23 The illusion of happiness

The condition of life is injustice, and the condition of happiness is untruth.

We forge our brief joys out of our vacillating fantasies, and our lasting happiness out of our lifelong illusions.

We are so wretched because we cling to such fallacious beliefs. And yet if we shook them off we would lose all chance of happiness, which is, as Swift points out, ‘a perpetual possession of being well deceived.’ It has manifold recipes, but they all share the one staple constituent of self-delusion. ‘Take away their saving lie from ordinary people,’ Ibsen says, ‘and you take away their joy as well.’ Heaven must be that state of perfect self-deception, in which you are sure that you are loved by an infinite being whom you love in return.

If happiness is our goal, we seem to have hit on the craziest route to reach it. And if we are hedonists, why do we seek our pleasures in such strange places? We seem to take more delight in tormenting ourselves and others than in simply enjoying ourselves.

Illusion frees us to act and be happy. Truth would freeze the will to act, and strand us in a stagnant swamp of despair.

If you hope to succeed, you have to lie to others. And if you fail, you have to lie to yourself.

24 Unthinking happiness

You might be more content, if you thought a jot more or a jot less. Those who never think of anything but their own selves feel sorry for themselves that they think too much.

Some people know themselves so well that they find the key to happiness, and some that they lose it. The light-hearted could afford to know who they are but have no need to, the downcast need but can’t bear to.

If you hope to find peace, you have to forswear the knowledge of your own sad heart, which would steal all the joy that your sottishness and self-infatuation gave you.

The prosperous are sure that their wisdom has earned them their prosperity. And the miserable are sure that their misery has won them their grim wisdom.

The surest way to be unhappy is to be clever. And the soundest way to be happy is to be wise. But if you can’t be either of these, it’s enough to be stupid.

25 Distracted happiness

Be sure to reserve a basket of nagging aggravations as decoys against which to explode your noxious heartsickness. Use the irritants of the day to trap and dispose of your more venomous discontents. You can’t be happy, if you don’t continue to do a few burdensome things that you trust you’d be supremely happy if you ceased to do.

Happiness showers sparks of annoyance as it steams on to some ever-receding goal. Dejection is a foul vapour that issues from the brackish bog of wretchedness.

Distraction is the blight of happiness. Concentration is the curse of misery. You can’t be happy if you’re not diverted by all the busy duties which deter you from savouring your happiness.

Try to run from your troubles, and you will need to strain all your muscles to lug them with you.

Most people love happiness because they are in love with life, but a few because they have found that this is the best way to keep life at bay. They scorn life too much to think it worth all the trouble it costs. So they use cheerfulness to hold life at arm’s length, so that it won’t sink its teeth in them and savage them. And they seek a placid joy to immunize themselves against life’s unquiet fever.

26 Busy rather than happy

Most people would rather be busy than happy, and they want their lives to be hectic rather than beautiful. They love to be doing, though they may not much like what it is that they are doing. Their bustling is proof of how much the world needs them.

We flaunt how happy we are by all the racket that we make.

The wise scorn the vacuous noise and commotion which the common run of people mistake for happiness. But they are mistaken to think that there is anything more to happiness than this.

Our dissatisfaction makes us restless, and our restless bustle yields us as much joy as we will ever get.

27 The speed of happiness

I chase joys, but they fly me. And creeping sorrows catch me, though I fly them.

People feel light and joyous, when their gadding desires jockey them so fast that they don’t sense the weight of their despair pressing down on them. How miserable they must be, that they can find their way to happiness only by beetling so giddily that they don’t have the leisure to feel how happy they are. They bolt life so ravenously, that they scarcely taste it as it goes down. Yet they’re soon hungering for more. It’s only when you’re in the dumps that you have as much time as you want. And then you wish that you had less.

We rush so madly here and there in the search for pleasure, that we are never at home when it calls.

Our bliss melts in the heat of our embrace.

Happiness needs to maintain a high velocity so as to stay airborne.

You have to chase happiness at such a breakneck pace because unhappiness is so bent on chasing you.

It’s not your past years but the years to come that your sadness makes seem long.

28 Happiness and desire

In order to be happy, it’s necessary but not sufficient to be healthy, and it’s sufficient but not necessary to be loved. And it’s more needful to love than it is to be loved, though it’s more dreadful not to be loved than not to love.

You won’t be at peace so long as you cling to your desires. But if you once ceased to desire you might as well be dead. More won’t make you happy. And yet wheresoever joy goes, it goes hand in hand with the lust for gain. Happiness, like money, won’t meet your needs, but the lack of it will wrench your soul. And though wealth won’t content you, possessing more of it than others may almost do so. Life’s a whore that smiles on none but those who can pay.

29 Buying happiness

Wealth won’t make you happy, but neither will any of the more exalted goods that you might count on to do it.

Money may not be able to buy love or happiness, but the brutal drive that can heap up money may be the force best able to seize love and happiness as well, or at least to make others believe that it can, which is the next best thing.

The poor can now afford the jaunty and hectic greed that the rich have in place of happiness. Christianity used to fob them off with the counsels of patience. Now capitalism urges them on to the same avarice as the rich.

30 The gospel of work

Most of us strive for some other goal in the hope that it might lead us to happiness. But the few seek to reach happiness because they want to be free to strive for some worthier goal. They treat living like punctuation, an unavoidable but blank pause which divides the words and sentences. It’s these that are their true work which goes on elsewhere. ‘The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about,’ Carlyle said, ‘was happiness enough to get his work done,’ though it’s the work itself that must supply this. Happiness is like a line of credit that they draw down, so that they can make the best use of their gifts.

TRIVIALITY OF HAPPINESS

31 The trivial reasons for happiness or unhappiness

Our plight is profound and tragic. But its causes are shallow and absurd.

The shallowest people have a sea of deep reasons to make them happy or unhappy. And yet even the deepest of us is happy or unhappy for reasons that are quite shallow. We feel the deepest sadness for the smallest things.

The sole contentment that you can count on to last is the result of a propitious accident of parentage and upbringing which is quite out of your control. The least chance of birth or rearing gives you a better shot at happiness than the most assiduous wisdom could have done. How happy you are is an accident of your chemistry more than an attainment of your philosophy.

In the next world, between heaven and hell there is a great gulf fixed. But in this one, a paper wall is all that keeps them apart.

32 Life the blunt instrument

How is life so void of meaning, and yet so rife with terrors? And how do its tight confines house such vast bitterness? How is it that we stay so hollow, while bursting with such swollen griefs? And how does something as blunt as life hack our souls so frightfully? Why does what counts for so little hurt us so much? How is it that such a light thing lies on us like lead? And how does what will end so soon have space for such endless sorrow?

33 Plagued by grasshoppers

It’s as dreadful to drown in a ditch as in the ocean. ‘The worst trials are visited on us by trivial things,’ said Multatuli. ‘Moses and the Lord knew what they were doing. They plagued Egypt not with tigers but with grasshoppers.’

Life doesn’t plunge us in its fathomless depths as it floods in on us. It leaves us high and dry as it recedes before us.

A deep soul stifles for lack of air in the shoals of this world. ‘Nothing,’ as Johnson says, ‘is too little for such a little being as man.’

Make your life small in the hope that the world won’t think it worth crushing you, and you make it all the easier for it to do so. ‘I asked for very little from life,’ Pessoa said, ‘and even this little was denied me.’ By shrinking your life you may shrink the sum of horror it contains, but this will still fill the same proportion of your life.

When you come to see that you are nothing, your troubles don’t weigh on you less heavily. Instead you learn that the lightest of them is enough to crush you.

How hard it is to live the smallest life, and how hard we think we have a right to make it for others, in order to make it a bit easier on ourselves.

34 The triviality of unhappiness

The mind does not have cliffs of fall, but mole hills from which you plummet as if from the most dizzying peaks. And you can go on falling for the whole of your life.

Misery makes clear to us what matters, which is nothing at all. Life is a shallow abyss. It is as low and as sheer as the plunge from the gallows.

What a big mess the smallest of us can make of our lives.

Live through an earthquake, and a dripping tap may still wear down all your hope. Sorrow fills our hearts, not because its wellsprings are so deep, but because our hearts are so small.

The lightest load can crush us, if it is brought to bear on a small enough spot. And the smallest spot in the world is our ego.

The light drizzle of small irritations will in time drench you as thoroughly as a sudden downpour of distress, though it may feel quite different.

35 Narrowing unhappiness

The heavyhearted have to trudge round in the same ever-decreasing rings of routine, since they fear the shocks that might knock them down if they stepped out of them. And yet they dread to be dragged back down memory’s sad avenues of desolation. They have no home on this earth, but they feel impelled to return day by day to the same stinking haunt which they lack the will to leave.

We don’t want to be happy. We want to be left free to keep on doing all the things that have failed to make us happy in the past.

Misery, which is all too wide for this narrow world, hems us in to a more and more constricted scene. Gaiety thrusts us on and out to chase toys and titillations. Contentment, like a tolerant commonwealth, gives scope to the whole garden of your gifts to flower. But heartache, like a vain tyrant, constrains them to turn their face to it.

Life is such a monotonous fiasco, yet it takes so long to snake through all its coiling turns of woe.

We aim so low, yet we still miss our mark. Like Madame Bovary, we dream such tawdry dreams, yet life brings even these to nought. How aridly we answer life’s lushness, and how insufficient it is to supply us with what is worth possessing. You must want something small indeed, if you trust that the world could give it to you.

36 Such small things

We need so little in order to be happy, but we need that little so much. To win your happiness, you don’t need much, but you always need more. And you could scarcely guess how slight a lack might wreck your life. ‘I have wanted only one thing to make me happy,’ Hazlitt said, ‘but wanting that have wanted everything.’ How much the ravenous heart craves, and what coarse gruel it makes its meal on.

Such small things suffice to make us happy. Yet we need such a constant stream of them, and we’re still not happy.

It needs a lot of small things to go right to make you content. But it takes just one or two to go wrong to bring it all down in a heap.

37 The triviality of happiness

Life is such small beer. But our self-delight lends it the fizz and flavour of the finest champagne.

If you lose your happiness, you learn that unhappiness is too much for you. Win through to it, and you learn that happiness is not enough. Yet it is still worth attaining, so that you won’t have to waste your years in the hunt for it. But once you have built your house of joy, however flimsy it may be, it will crush you when it collapses.

Our happiness does not reach high, and our sadness does not dive deep.

If you can’t tell from your sufferings how little life matters, you can tell from your success.

Does happiness count for nothing, because the lowest worm lusts for it? Or does the least creature have an illimitable value, because it too yearns to win joy? Even a squished bug squirms for life.

38 Vapid happiness

Happiness is perfectly proportioned. It is as low as it is short. But each year it takes up more room on the earth.

In order to succeed and be happy, all you need is vanity without pride, greed without taste, and selfishness without self-awareness. So why are so few of us happy?

Lack of taste gives you a head start in the race for happiness.

The world is too small for our cravings, but too large for our capabilities.

Happiness is the pale bourgeois surrogate for the rapture or damnation for which the princely old states squandered all their strength. In order to be damned, one would first need to have a soul. And most of us have the good luck to lack that.

39 The fear of happiness

Some trials harrow you by requiring you to act while rendering you too weak to do so, and some harrow you by making all action vain.

It is the fall and not the being down that hurts you worst. So some fear most of all to ascend once more from shade to sunshine. ‘Drowning is not so pitiful,’ Dickinson wrote, ‘as the attempt to rise.’

Some shallow people would rather feel dejected for seeming deep reasons than be cheerful for superficial ones. They cling to their heartachings, rather than grant that they could heal them with ease. They prefer to put up with a lifelong ailment than go through a quick and painless cure.

We suffer too much, and we can’t suffer enough. When our ills yield to such quack tonics, aren’t we apt to disparage even our health? The incurable has so much more dignity. We have to speak as if life gushed with horrors, so as to gain the strength we need to bear its emptiness.

40 Prosaic happiness

When you’re young, unhappiness alone may seem deep enough for life. But as you get older, you learn that life is too light to be worth such unhappiness. Aren’t most of our trials as trivial as the goals that we level at? However piercingly we suffer, we still stay buoyantly superficial. When would we think of anything serious? Not when we are young and happy, and have not felt life’s pains. And not when we are old and wretched, and we can hardly keep our heads above its miseries.

The glum years write our life in a turgid doggerel, the glad ones in a reserved and self-forgetting prose. But the quiet prose of happiness here and there breaks out in joy’s brief and causeless poetry. You breathe a sense of wellbeing as ordinary as air, but you inhale a rare glee as volatile as oxygen.

Our glad times don’t blaze like a wildfire, but gleam like a few flickering embers. Our pleasures dance like the brief spangles on the afternoon freshet as it heads out to oblivion.

41 Shallow happiness

We are neither as simply content nor as grievously stricken as we ought to be. Having created the world to wound us, the Lord in his lenity made us superficial enough to bear it. ‘Nature,’ as Voltaire wrote, ‘has made us frivolous to console us for our woes.’ And yet who is so shallow, that they can’t be pierced to the heart?

Those who have suffered from false profundity like an infection are glad to douse their sores with the antiseptic of shallowness. ‘How much good sense lies in superficiality,’ as Nietzsche said. The sole way to stay clean in this filthy world is to make yourself all smooth surface, so that its slime will slip straight off you. ‘There are,’ Montaigne writes, ‘so many awkward passages, that the surest way is to glide lightly over the surface of this world.’

Happiness is a low valley with closed horizons. Those who seek the truth must turn their backs on it.

42 The ridiculous tragedy

There ought to be a word for disasters that don’t matter. Would such a word not sum up so much of life? We act out in this world, as Swift said, ‘a ridiculous tragedy, which is the worst kind of composition.’

We are used up by all life’s sad commotion and bewildering ecstasies.

Life flows like a river, perturbed by the least cause, but unchanged by the greatest.

Life’s torpid stream now jets in rapture, now swirls in a vortex of sweltering misery.

Joy, like love, is a generous but jealous god, which inflicts a fearful beating on any who dare to scorn its gifts.

Heraclitus and Democritus. Nietzsche would drag the human ass up to the heights, where it would bray and break its neck in a grand tragic tone, even while he abuses it for having lost its thoroughbred instincts. Montaigne leaves it to graze in the muggy lowlands it was made for.

Our wings melt before we have left the ground. Yet we still break our necks when we fall. As Connolly wrote, ‘Life is a maze in which we take the wrong turning before we have learned to walk.’

God adds a pinch of the macabre and degrading to all our troubles, to rob them of the dignity that might have redeemed them and to show us what we are, as if to kick us headfirst into the mud as we stagger out the door, drunk with despair and disrepute. The last indignity that petty suffering pelts us with is to make us as petty as itself.

OPTIMISM AND PESSIMISM

43 Expensive pessimism

We use pessimism as a kind of insurance, but its premiums cost so much that they go near to send us broke. Lugubrious people pay so dear to insure against catastrophe, how could they afford plain happiness? They hope to forestall the worst by foreknowing it. But their fretting levies such costly instalments of expected anguish, that it beggars them of the serenity which they aimed to hold on to.

Fear the worst, and nothing will prepare you for how bad it will get.

A pessimist expects so little, and yet is still disappointed. An optimist expects so much, and never is. Their hopes are so blind that they won’t see when they have failed.

Life belies our hopes, but is it worth our apprehensions?

An optimist lives by the expansive egoism of hope, a croaking pessimist by the pinched egoism of fear.

44 The lie of hope

The success of optimism confirms the pessimist’s worst fears. How does such a meretricious creed win so much trust?

Optimism is one of the lies which in this world of deceit brings with it success. And that is proof enough for the optimist that it must be true.

We are now so delicate, that we can’t even swallow hopes for the future if they’re not sugared with dreams of the past. Optimism is one of the most fatuous forms of our cowardly nostalgia.

45 The huckster’s creed

Optimism is the gullible and cunning creed of crooks and hucksters, spruikers and boosters. They trumpet it, because they have so much faith in themselves, or else to inveigle their satellites to have faith in them. They know that hope sells and that we are all sold on hope. If you want to get rich, you need to have hope. And if you aim to inspire hope, you need to have faith.

Our optimism yokes the force of our naive self-belief to the cunning of our worldly self-seeking.

Few of us waste our expensive pessimism or our arduous hopes on anyone’s plight but our own.

We know how fine we look in hoping against hope when we are sure that the failure of what we hope for will not touch us.

Optimists charm us, because they signal to us that our greediest dreams will meet with success.

This is the age of the broad grin, shameless, self-delighted, on-the-make, and mesmerizing.

46 The bad news      

Pessimism may be cowardly, but who in these hopeless times is brave enough to face the bad news that all we do makes the world worse? Let go of the craven lie of hope, and what else could fire you to act courageously?

People used to cling to the illusions of faith to console them for the fact that they can’t be happy on this earth. Now they are too weak to admit so much as that.

You may be driven to optimism out of despair that your pessimism expected too much from people.

An optimist is one who trusts that things can’t get much worse. And a pessimist is one who fears that this may indeed be the best of all possible worlds, and that it’s now so bad that it can only grow more dire. This may be the best of all possible worlds, but the possibilities get worse by the day.

The optimist thinks life so good, that it can only get better. And the pessimist knows that it’s so bad, that it’s sure to go on getting worse.

We have all learnt to read our life as a plot. And we know that every plot is preordained to reach to a grand climax. Since all stories are about ourselves, we can’t stand any that don’t have a happy ending.

 

See also:       Success,        Psychology