The Happy Life
The Search for Contentment In the Modern World
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4.1 • 11 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
What makes for a happy life?
Amid the constant chatter of today’s world, with its 24-hour news cycles, Twitter and mobile communications, David Malouf returns to the ancient question of what makes us happy.
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 contrasts joy in the flesh, as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt, with the way we view our bodies today.
In a world become ever larger and more impersonal, Malouf finds happiness in an unlikely place. This is a book to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.
“A rewarding reflection on human restlessness and the need for limits”—Age
“Entertaining and insightful”—Sydney Morning Herald
“A wonderful … reflection on happiness in the Western tradition”—Canberra Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In a world filled with devastating natural disasters and discouraging economic declines, who can be happy? As award-winning novelist and poet Malouf (Rabsin) reminds us in this yawn-inducing meditation, "happiness is surely among the simplest of human emotions and the most spontaneous." Drawing deeply from the philosophical wells of Plato, Heidegger, Jeremy Bentham, and others, he reminds us that philosophers have long distinguished the pleasures associated with material goods from the longer lasting contentment that comes from spiritual well-being. Happiness, for the ancients, lay in self-containment and self-sufficiency. Some 18th- and 19th-century thinkers promoted the idea that happiness occurs when individuals achieve certain goals, such as higher production or more land being brought under cultivation. Malouf reminds us that we often confuse the happy life with the good life, which we measure in material terms of proper food and housing, justice, civil liberty, and civil safety. In the end, after all his searching, Malouf comes to the less than profound conclusion that happiness grows out of a balanced life, and that happiness is subjective different for every person and fleeting, much like the lessons of this simplistic book.
