Viewpoint: Chasing the Evanescent Glow

Happiness is not cozy. It gleams most vividly against a background of black

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    Because nobody can summon it up, nobody can say that it will never come again. But nobody can stop it from disappearing either. From one second to the next my rich balance abandons me. Rain streams down the window. I look up at the ceiling, my eyes imploring the dark. Is being happy like a current that disturbs the seabed? I was floating, and then anxiety swam up from underneath, and discontent, and regret. The old voice started crying again, Why am I not loved?

    The waiting for the next time begins.

    My great-grandfather told how during the Great Famine, when everyone around his part of the country was starving, a crow flew past with a potato in its beak, which meant it was a good potato, not diseased, and men, women and children set off after the crow, stumbling into ditches, falling, jostling each other to be the one to get the food if the bird dropped it. That's what the pursuit of happiness is like. This is one of life's mysteries there's no coming to terms with--that as long as we have breath we have no choice but to go running after happiness, our poor faces strained upward as if we cannot get enough of it, as if happy is what we were meant to be, as if without happiness we would starve.

    As we would.

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