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    Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
    Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
    Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

    By David Malouf

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    About this ebook

    In The Happy Life, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life?

    With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life – what it is, and what makes it possible – he returns to the “highest wisdom” of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s way with words, happiness became a “right”, and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt.

    In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he fi nds happiness in an unlikely place. This is an essay to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

    “How is it, when the chief sources of human unhappiness, of misery and wretchedness, have largely been removed from our lives … that happiness still eludes so many of us? … What is it in us, or in the world we have created, that continues to hold us back?” —David Malouf, The Happy Life
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBlack Inc. Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2011
    ISBN9781921870149
    Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
    Author

    David Malouf

    David Malouf is the author of poems, fiction, libretti and essays. In 1996, his novel Remembering Babylon was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1998 Boyer Lectures were published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. In 2000 he was selected as the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His most recent novel is Ransom.

    Read more from David Malouf

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    Reviews for Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life

    3/5

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    • 3/5
      An interesting read although I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Malouf explores the idea of the contrast between self-sufficient happiness, as discussed by everyone from Classic philosophers to the Renaissance, contrasted with how we approach happiness in an era when our basic needs are all met, and the issues facing us are diffuse and global. All done by way of exploring art and philosophy throughout the centuries.

      Wonderfully intelligent, but also sometimes verbose and opaque in a way that I'm not sure is useful. Malouf will throw in a quote from "Othello" or a reference to Montaigne, assuming the reader can track all of it, without so much as the endnotes traditional in this series. Disappointing in that manner. Also, some of his thoughts are evidently those of an older person; nothing wrong with that, but when he remarks that many writers still prefer to use pen and paper rather than a computer, I think he is speaking more for his generation (who grew up without such items) than mine. Engaging, however.
    • 3/5
      I really love the way this book prodded at me and sent me off on my own mini-pursuits of the meaning of happiness (cheese, apparently, followed by historically inaccurate but aesthetically pleasing period movies). I loved the portion in which Malouf talks about the kind of happiness one might have wanted in ye olde days, that which comes from a sense of peace, a stillness and quiet.

      Malouf makes the observation that today we seem to want the opposite, cramming every still corner with activity, perhaps to try and ignore the ultimate peace, stillness and quiet. It was a portion that led me to further grim thought, but one I enjoyed all the same (so one Nicholas Parsons point for that then).

      For a light and short read, I think there was a substantial amount of food for thought here. Also, I have a feeling that books on happiness that are too long are only going to end up making you miserable, so, nice little read.

    Book preview

    Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life - David Malouf

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    Quarterly Essay

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    CONTENTS

    THE HAPPY LIFE

    The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

    David Malouf

    CORRESPONDENCE

    Peter Martin, Andrew Leigh, Tim Dixon, Mark O’Connor, Shaun Carney, Hugh Mackay, Barry Jones, George Megalogenis

    Contributors

    THE HAPPY

    LIFE

    The Search for Contentment

    in the Modern World

    David Malouf

    THE CHARACTER OF A HAPPY LIFE

    Happiness surely is among the simplest of human emotions and the most spontaneous. There can be no one, however miserable the conditions of their daily existence, who has not at some time felt the joy of being alive in the moment; in the love of another, or the closeness of friends or fellow workers; in a baby’s smile, the satisfaction of a job well done or the first green in a winter furrow; or more simply still, bird-song or the touch of sunlight. But for the vast majority of men and women who have shared our planet in the long course of human history, these can have been no more than moments in a life that was unremittingly harsh.

    Think of a medieval farmer as he struggled to keep body and soul together, at the mercy of famine, plague and the periodic arrival over the horizon of mercenaries in search of food or plunder; or women and children in the eighteenth century who spent fifteen hours a day hauling a truck loaded with coal out of a pit; or the African slaves who endured the Middle Passage to the Americas. Think of the millions, soldiers and civilians both, caught up in the wars and social upheavals of the last century, the invasions, evacuations, forced resettlements, the daily struggle to survive the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau or Belsen or Mauthausen.

    We get some idea of what happy might mean to an inmate of the Soviet Gulags from the list of small mercies at the end of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich:

    Shukhov went off to sleep, and he was completely content. Fate had been kind to him in many ways that day: he hadn’t been put in the cells, the gang had not been sent to the Socialist Community Centre, he’d fiddled himself an extra bowl of porridge for dinner, the gang-leader had fixed a good percentage, he’d been happy building that wall, he’d slipped through the search with that bit of blade, he’d earned himself something from Tsesar in the evening, he’d bought his tobacco. And he hadn’t fallen ill – had overcome his feelings of illness in the morning.

    The day had gone by without a single cloud – almost a happy day.

    There were three thousand six hundred and fifty-three days like that in his sentence, from reveille to lights out.

    The three extra days were because of the leap years …

    The truth is that for most of our history only the few, who had the privilege of living free of long hours of hard labour and vulnerability to privation and every form of accident, enjoyed the luxury of considering what happiness of a more settled kind might be: the freedom to cultivate, outside the turmoil of daily living, their garden. Either a real one of orchards and shady walks – Horace’s Sabine farm or Voltaire’s Ferney – or the metaphorical one of Marvell’s green thought in a green shade. Or, within a life that is still engaged with contingency and dailyness, what Montaigne calls the little back-shop, all our own, entirely free, that we must set aside for our self-preservation in even the most crowded household. In this retreat, he tells us,

    we should keep up our ordinary converse with ourselves, and so private, that no acquaintance or outside communication may find a place there; there to talk and laugh, as if we had neither wife, nor children, nor worldly goods, retinue or servants; to the end that, should we happen to lose them, it may be no new thing to do without them … Since God gives us permission to arrange for our own removal, let us prepare for it; let us pack up our belongings, take leave betimes of the company, and shake off those violent holdfasts that engage us elsewhere and estrange us from ourselves. We must undo those powerful bonds, and from this day forth we may love this and that, but be wedded only to ourselves. That is to say, let the rest be ours, but not joined and glued so firmly to us that it cannot be detached without taking our skin along with it, and tearing away a piece of us. The greatest thing in the world is to know how to belong to yourself.

    Montaigne knows only too well, of course, that one needs more than God’s permission to achieve this. It helps if one is also the Seigneur de Montaigne, Chevalier de l’ordre du Roy et Gentilhomme ordinaire de sa chambre, mayor and governor of Bordeaux, a child of fortune and high privilege; though even then one will be as vulnerable as any other to the ills of the body, and to the hesitations, doubts, irrational hauntings, moods, fears that trouble our fragile consciousness; and of course no one, however protected by royal favour and titles, is safe from Death.

    Behind Montaigne’s very idiosyncratic avocation of the little back-shop of domestic retirement lies a tradition that reaches deep into the classical past: to Seneca, Cicero, Epictetus, and beyond those later writers to Epicurus, Aristotle and Plato in the fourth century BC. This is the tradition we catch a late echo of in one of the most admired of seventeenth-century English poems, Sir Henry Wotton’s Character of a Happy Life, a version of Horace’s Second Epode, Beatus ille qui – "Happy he who …":

    How happy is he born or taught

    That serveth not another’s will;

    Whose armour is his honest thought,

    And silly truth his highest skill!

    Whose passions not his masters are,

    Whose soul is still prepared for death;

    Untied unto the world with care

    Of princely love or vulgar breath;

    Who hath his life from rumours freed,

    Whose conscience is his strong retreat;

    Whose state can neither flatterers feed,

    Nor ruin make accusers great;

    Who envieth none whom chance doth raise

    Or vice; who never understood

    How deepest wounds are given with praise;

    Nor rules of state, but rules of good;

    Who God doth late and early pray

    More of his grace than gifts to lend;

    Who entertains the harmless day

    With a well-chosen book or friend;

    – This man is free from servile bands

    Of hope to rise, or fear to fall;

    Lord of himself, though not of lands;

    And having nothing, he hath all.

    Wotton, an intimate of John Donne at Oxford and later of the greatest scholar of the age, Isaac Casaubon at Geneva, is in many ways the model of a Renaissance man. The life he celebrates in his poem is his own. It strikes a balance between those opposing possibilities, as the age saw it, of the active and the contemplative life. He spent thirty years in the diplomatic service and had a wit that sometimes got him into trouble; he was responsible for the cheeky definition of a diplomat as an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country. He was for more than twenty years the British ambassador at Venice and in retirement, as Provost of Eton, spent his days, harmlessly as he puts it, in the company of his books and a few close friends, but also fishing in a bend of the Thames known as the Black Potts. His companion on these occasions was Izaak Walton, who later described their days together in his Compleat Angler.

    Wotton, as all this suggests, was a man of the world and knew only too well its ways. How high office attracts empty flatterers but also men whose chief concern is to slander and bring you down. How words that are meant to kill can disguise themselves as praise. How the man of prestige and even the smallest power can waste his spirit in dreams of greater power or fear of fall. Wotton himself is a model of Montaigne’s insistence that Solitude is more becoming and more reasonable in one who gives to the world the most active and most vigorous period of his life. Having embraced the world of action and affairs with all the energy that was in him, he also managed to hold himself apart from its temptations to corruption, both of the public and of the private sort, and, dependent neither on the approval of princes nor of the mob, remained one who, to the end, was Lord of himself, though not of lands, and having nothing, he hath all. We have no nicer statement in later times of what the various classical schools, the Aristotelean, the Epicurean, the Stoic, would have agreed was the highest form of happiness, but also the highest wisdom.

    And these days?

    One difference, at least in developed societies like our own – and it is a large one – is that something called happiness is a condition that we all

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