A Private History of Happiness: Ninety-Nine Moments of Joy from Around the World
256
A Private History of Happiness: Ninety-Nine Moments of Joy from Around the World
256eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781933346892 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BlueBridge |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 958 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
TEXT EXCERPT "A PRIVATE HISTORY OF HAPPINESS" (9781933346885)
from the INTRODUCTION:
We can immediately tell when someone is happy. It shows in their eyes and becomes, at that instant, their presence in the world.
In the pages that follow, there are ninety-nine moments of happiness. Each was experienced by an individual at a specific time—a few minutes, an hour, one particular day—ranging from over four thousand years ago to the recent past. These were women and men, young and old, of various backgrounds. They lived (or traveled) in many parts of the world, including North America and Britain; Continental Europe and China; North Africa, India, and Japan. They were on city streets or by rural rivers, in gardens or on mountaintops, in cottages or mansions, on long journeys or short breaks when they had these varied moments of color and sensation, understanding and peace, contact and laughter.
These everyday experiences of happiness have remained vivid and recognizable across the centuries, even millennia. They come naturally into focus, making lives that might otherwise seem distant feel intuitively understandable. Many of these joyful moments belong to diaries, which in different forms have been kept by people since the dawn of writing. Others are from letters, another form of personal chronicles of passing time. A few were written as poems, usually rather private works. Even in the case of well-known individuals, these are generally words from their quieter side.
These focused glimpses of other lives and times add up to a bigger idea. They bring real human happiness before our eyes. We can see here the potential for joy hidden inside ordinary life. This is a surprising and renewing effect in our own complex and high-pressure time. For many of us in the twenty-first century, happiness has become a riddle, a goal that remains strangely nebulous. Politics and economics, education and psychology all have happiness as their promise or end. But we need to grasp the happiness that is a strand of everyday life if we are to make good on any of these promises. If we look at the statistics, we are, in industrialized societies, in general wealthier and healthier than our ancestors—but are we happier?
Like seeing colors or hearing a tune, feeling happy is different for each of us and in every experience. It is a sensation in the air, a depth to the horizon. These moments of joy from the past resonate and echo, prompting positive reflection. They invite us to think about particular people’s experiences of being happy and not merely about generalities or clichés or abstract puzzles that seem to need solving. Perhaps happiness is much of a riddle because we usually look for too big an answer. Here, however, we can see how ninety-nine individuals felt happy on their unique days. All of them are witnesses to some of the richest potential in our human lives. They do not embody the world, but they do help us to imagine humanity as a whole. Across our differences, people share a common capability of happiness, and it reminds us of the universal side of our being. Equally, these were all experiences of a particular place and time, since our being is always locally shaped and flavored. This is what made someone happy, these pages reveal, on one particular day in their life.
Like us, these men and women from the past may have been simply absorbed at the instant they felt good. But soon after, they must have recognized something special about those moments of happiness—and their written records can now pass like sunbeams or a breeze through our own everyday life.
People have, on ordinary days, been glad of life without triumphing over others or accumulating fortunes. Each of these preserved records brings this truth to the fore in a fresh way and with its own shades of meaning.
If human beings seem to become possessed by destructive urges at times, they also have an instinct for the joy of small things. In surprising times and places, the world has appeared like a precious gift.
Public history tends to turn the flow of time into a staccato rhythm of “big” dates: the coronations and resignations, coups and treaties, battles and conquests that supposedly changed the world. By contrast, private history introduces us to “little” days that were important because of what one unique person felt.
As these people from many ways of life wrote down their experiences, there was an inner core that said, “This was a moment when I was happy to be alive.” Reading their words now, even centuries later, we can feel immediately how their happiness filled passing moments, creating occasions that needed to be recorded.
Each text, each voice is different, full of a particular life with all its lights and shadows. We are invited by these ninety-nine individuals to share what was specific to their experiences—a place, a time, a relationship. Their ninety-nine moments of joy are arranged by common themes, connected to each other by the natural movement of time from morning to evening.
We gain both wisdom and pleasure from meeting these women and men. We learn naturally about happiness from their stories, which make us happy as well.
These experiences connect with our own lives. Feeling the passion of other people, their zest or deep peace, sudden pleasure or relish for life, their companionship or inwardness, we have new perspectives on the best moments in our own lives.
It is extraordinary how powerful real, remembered happiness is, how deep and true its source. Our happiest lived experiences have the power to help us face the real world with all its difficulties. They exercise a power that the advertised, virtual images and phrases of perfection do not possess. Celebrity and consumption melt away at the merest hint of trouble, but real happiness carries us onward toward the next dawn.
The aim of these pages is to show the enduring value and beauty of ordinary human happiness as we find it in passing moments.
Table of Contents
Introduction1) Morning
2) Friendship
3) Garden
4) Family
5) Leisure
6) Nature
7) Food and Drink
8) Wellbeing
9) Creativity
10) Love
11) Evening
End Notes
Index
The ninety-nine happiness moments featured in the book come from both famous and little-known individuals, and a number of them are Americans. Here is a partial list of the famous people whose happiness moments are featured:
James Audubon
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Marcus Aurelius
Robert Burns
Murusaki Shikibu
Michel de Montaigne
Oliver Wendell Holmes
Horace
Ouyang Xiu
Karl August Varnhagen von Ense
Robert Schumann
Matsuo Basho
Gilbert White
Ibn Battuta
Hermippus
Benjamin of Tudela
Walter Scott
George Eliot
Ptah Hotep
Niccolo Machiavelli
Sappho
Bhaskara
Fanny Burney
Ptolemy
Franceso Petrarca
Benjamin Franklin
Louisa May Alcott
Elizabeth Barrett
Honoré de Balzac
Leo Tolstoy
Mary Wollstonecraft
Sulpicia
Wang Wei
Washington Irving
Hans Christian Andersen
Walt Whitman
Dorothy Wordsworth
What People are Saying About This
"This is more than a book, it is a celebration. . . . Across the barriers of time and culture, it collects for us in the simplest, most restful, most seductive way, the goodness of what it is for us to experience life as sentient human beings." —Phyllis Tickle, compiler of The Divine Hours
"This book is about moments when we are surprised by quiet joy in the everyday wonders of the world. . . . Overflowing with the simple pleasures of life, this is a book to take with you on your travels and to bring home like a friend." —J. Edward Chamberlin, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto, author, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?
"It turns out that unpretentious, small joys have been shared by human beings across cultures and over thousands of years; in his sensitive commentaries, Myerson brings these precious past moments back to life, and into our lives." —Harry Eyres, columnist, Financial Times
"It can be said of few books that they make the world a less lonely place: this is one. Read it and be inspired, delighted and cheered; give it and create more happiness.' —Clare Brant, professor, King's College London, author, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture