Maggie's Farm

A re-post from our dusty archives -

Lanchester in The New Yorker reviews two books on the subject of happiness. Interesting stuff. A Quote:

He (McMahon) points out that the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over every line of the Declaration, let the �pursuit of Happiness� stand unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the eighteenth-century understanding of �pursuit� was rather darker than it might seem now. Dr. Johnson�s dictionary defined it as �the act of following with hostile intention,� and McMahon adds that �if one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive . . . the �pursuit of happiness� takes on a somewhat different cast.�

The legacy of that ambiguity is with us still. We are pursuing happiness to this day, and it is by no means clear that it is a happy process. The self-help section in any bookshop is easy to mock�indeed, it sometimes seems that the titles of self-help books are almost mocking themselves�but there is nothing to mock about the people standing in front of the shelves looking for guidance. In fact, the advice in self-help books is, by and large, pretty good. The trouble is that it is very difficult to take.

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