Human dimensions

Saturday, 14th May 2011

For some people, poor souls, freedom from anxiety is the highest happiness.

The Happy Life: The Search For Contentment In The Modern World, Quarterly Essay 41
By David Malouf
Black Inc, $35, pp. 320
ISBN 9781863955195

For some people, poor souls, freedom from anxiety is the highest happiness. For others, happiness consists in the Collingwood Football Club not winning. That the state is frequently known in this negative way, apophatically, is no coincidence. Happiness is as ineffable, its marks and signs as uncommon, as the schedule of divinity. We hope we will not miss it. At times we feel happiness cannot pass unnoticed. Yet, when it is here, we often do not know its grace; and in enquiry afterwards, we can only confirm its absence now.

Sure, there is big happiness. We remember great joy in childhood or at some momentous life event. Still, the rare glimpse is more likely, especially as we age. The black dog, as Winston Churchill called unhappiness, seems to many more common. It is a most faithful, if unwelcome, companion.

By contrast, happiness is a cat. It minds its own business, and keeps a separate clock.

For David Malouf, happiness is ‘the simplest of human emotions’. Yet it is elusive. He attempts to distinguish the good life, measurable and concerned with ‘material fortune’, from the happy life, which he describes as an ‘interior state’. He claims happiness is ‘singular; each case speaks only for itself’, and embodied: ‘a man can be happy in even the most miserable conditions if the world he is in, and has to deal with, still has what he feels to be “human” dimensions’.

It is a subtle confection, which Malouf unpacks with elegant, sympathetic prose.

He starts from the assumption that the human condition, in modernity, is different — radically changed. On the material scale we are doing very well, but happiness cannot just be getting on. In Malouf’s view, we have to feel it too.

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