In my country, we're sufficiently consumed by the concept of happiness that the right to its pursuit is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. But what is happiness?
Interpretation
Happiness is a fundamental right worth pursuing, but its true essence remains elusive.
In this quote, Lionel Shriver reflects on the cultural significance of happiness, particularly how its pursuit is recognized as a fundamental right in the Declaration of Independence. She questions the very nature of happiness, suggesting that despite its societal importance, the understanding of what happiness truly is can be complex and subjective.
In practice
In a motivational speech about finding one's purpose in life.
Yet if there's no reason to live without a child, how could there be with one? To answer one life with a successive life is simply to transfer the onus of purpose to the next generation; the displacements amounts to a cowardly and potentially infinite delay. Your children's answer, presumably, will be to procreate as well, and in doing so to distract themselves, to foist their own aimlessness onto their offspring.
For pity's sake, if you don't take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it's not the author's fault. It's yours.
You were always uncomfortable with the rhetoric of emotion, which is quite a different matter from discomfort with emotion itself.
In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.
Not that happiness is dull. Only that it doesn't tell well. And of our consuming diversions as we age is to recite, not only to others but to ourselves, our own story.
Children live in the same world we do. To kid ourselves that we can shelter them from it isn't just naive it's a vanity.
Take note of the fact that I am a follower (of the religion) and not an innovator.
An election is a moral horror, as bad as a battle except for the blood; a mud bath for every soul concerned in it.
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Our most merciful Father, seeing us to be oppressed and overwhelmed with the curse of the law . . . sent his only Son into the world and laid upon him all the sins of all men, saying, 'You be Peter that denier, Paul that persecutor, blasphemer and cruel oppressor, David that adulterer, that sinner who ate the apple in Paradise, that thief who hung upon the cross, and briefly, you be the person who has committed the sins of all men. See therefore that you pay and satisfy for them.'
And it's a human need to be told stories. The more we're governed by idiots and have no control over our destinies, the more we need to tell stories to each other about who we are, why we are, where we come from, and what might be possible.
It is in life as it is in ways, the shortest way is commonly the foulest, and surely the fairer way is not much about.
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