Sunday, June 29, 2008

Are you happy today?

'The moments of happiness—not the sense of well-being, / Fruition, fulfilment, security or affection, / Or even a very good dinner, but the sudden illumination—'
- T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, The Dry Salvages (sorry I am too lazy to count the line numbers)
I used a different one. It was either serene bliss or a more jumpy delight. Anything else is something slightly different from happiness. Eliot took a broader view of what happiness encompassed, it seems. And his detailed dissection goes more by causes - what is at the root of the happiness, whether fruition, security, illumination, or one of the other three. The latter dichotomy is a rather more descriptive and perhaps intuitively felt one.
But, of course, happiness wasn't conceived of just to be analysed.

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