Happiness Writes White
Or: twenty-five aphorisms about happiness.
This is the ninth round of aphorisms being published here. Others have been about philosophy, tech, poetry, work, the avant-garde, philosophy again, progress, and human evil.
I wrote about happiness in a less aphoristic way in my piece ‘You Are Now Under Exam Conditions’.
Even in the midst of summer my invincible winter rages on…
All unhappiness is alike: every happiness is happy in its own way. There are any number of lies, after all, but only one truth.
Whenever a man says that he has decided there are more important things in life than happiness, we know that on the contrary he believes he has discovered some new way of obtaining happiness.
Happiness is a language that cannot be translated: books that teach happiness demand your happiness in the same way that books written in English demand that you read English.
The self-pity of the unhappy knows no bounds. Those two famous sentiments—‘I myself am Hell’ and ‘L’enfer, c’est les autres’—in fact express exactly the same thing.
‘Are they pessimistic because they are ill?’ asked Cyril Connolly of Pascal and Leopardi. ‘Or does their illness act as a short cut to reality—which is intrinsically tragic?’ But the choice is a false one: the answer to both questions is yes.
Reading books about the best way to live is a bad way to live.
A teenage dream, after Catherine of Genoa: if but one drop of what I feel were to rise up to Heaven, it would forthwith transform Heaven into Hell…
But what do you mean, the purpose of life is happiness? That’s like saying the purpose of milk is cheese.
He never says: the world is meaningless, is nothing but pain, because this morning my intestinal tract is not absorbing water. Nor: the world is awash with glorious multicoloured meaning and the presence of the divine because last night I went down on her.
—Why are you depressed?
—You may as well ask why I have brown hair.
‘Because it makes you happy’ is a good reason to do almost anything—or would be, if it were ever true.
So many sad people are made sadder by the knowledge that their unhappiness must end.
‘The question,’ said the moral philosopher, ‘is whether happiness would deserve our praise even if it existed…’
Being right is unimportant, being good is unimportant. If you can forget, forget; if you can make a leap of faith, leap!—enivrez-vous!
She broke up with me and, suddenly, I lost the happiness that I had never had.
My unmentionable health problems continue, and I find myself now playing much the same role as I have played all my life: Man with Toothache, suffering, writhing, wincing, utterly convinced in spite of all the available evidence that he would, finally, be happy, if only he didn’t have toothache.
Only unhappy people know how to be happy.
Happiness (noun): a positive state of mind, distinguishable in some very ill-defined way from joy, which exists for all of us in the future, some of us in the past, and none of us in the present.
‘I shall stop reading books about happiness,’ she said, ‘and perhaps then…’
‘What would make you happy?’ the therapist asked. This is like asking someone who has just gone bankrupt how he will spend his lottery winnings.
Happiness is not some state of permanent ecstasy: believing that happiness is possible is happiness. It is not an illusion, any more than it is an illusion that I am suffering in this moment.
Falsely telling people that you are happy so as to calm and console them is a good way of making yourself sadder. But don’t let that stop you: so is telling people that you are unhappy.
I hope you sleep well tonight. Only the most foolish of the optimists would think this hope counts as some kind of rebuttal of my pessimism—and yet how much more foolish am I when I think it counts for nothing.
He is pessimistic because he is sad and he is sad for good reasons. (Where would Cioran have been without his insomnia, or Nietzsche without his migraines?) And that is true, of course, though just as true for the optimists. Camus was a handsome footballer, a literary sensation, and a world-class fornicator: if he had not been, do you really think he would have imagined Sisyphus happy?
Superb as always.
Excellent. A happy comparison.
Happiness begins where comparison loses its jurisdiction.