Happiness

There is a certain callousness to happiness - a brutishness, a cold indifference to the suffering and immiseration of others. Although it must be said that there is one kind of happiness that results from a repression of unpleasant feelings, and another that arises from a dissipation of those feelings, often by coming to terms with them - the latter being much more valuable, and much more "real". Those who possess this latter type of happiness seem to spread their warmth, while those who possess the former seem to abandon theirs: what started as a natural, genuine smile soon hardens into a mask, behind which is emptiness, a total lack of personality.

A poem I have mostly forgotten, by a poet whose name I don't remember, contained a couplet that has always stuck with me: "All I could do was dream of fame,/ While all the world went up in flames." In an obscure way I feel that this is related to the previous comments. Take the United States, for instance: while there are many things one can say about the problems currently plaguing this country, it seems to me that from a spiritual point of view this one is central: the pursuit of a false happiness, an empty sort of fame, that requires not just an indifference to the world around us, but an active hatred of it. We have abandoned reality - complicated, difficult reality - and established a hall of mirrors in its place.