Of Happiness

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Very Good condition. Very Good dust jacket. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain light spine creasing or a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers L11A-02937

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Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.: Preface

In writing this book on the subject of happiness, one difficulty I faced was the discovery of a style capable of expressing truths.

Clever and involved prose strikes me as a medium by means of which a man may say very little and rant much. Prose cannot be too simple in structure, vocabulary, and, therefore, tone. I will go further and say that a man should do everything in his power to write in as simple a manner as the language allows, even to the point of banality. Now, only a writer who actually has something to say will have the courage to publish his thoughts in the very simplest language possible, and not feel compelled to puff them up with an involved or clever style. On the other hand, he who has nothing to say naturally cannot afford this banality, for then his lack of ideas will be obvious to all. Difficult, involved prose or cleverly witty or erudite prose therefore is always only a product of necessity, and the recourse of those who lack ideas.

For the description of ideas, Montesquieu's extremely simple and flexible style has always appeared to me greatly preferable to Proust's or Foucault's, or for that matter Kant's or Freud's, however odd this may seem, for unlike theirs it does not allow for chicanery to creep in at every quarter under the old guise of arcane truths and yet allows for the expression of even the most difficult or delicate thought.

A book on the subject of happiness puts its reader under the unhappy obligation of examining his own heart at every moment to find there confirmations, or the lack of them, for what he is reading. In this regard, if this be not an unreasonable request, I ask the reader to do himself the favor of not permitting vanity to cloud his reasoning in forming a judgement of what he reads.He can do no greater disfavor to the author than to completely, or even to greatly, agree with him; for every careful reader of the essay itself will very soon note that if its central thesis is in fact the truth, two results necessarily follow: universally, there must be great exception taken to its chief ideas, and secondly and more interestingly, for more precisely conclusive, in every reader the illusion that the author has, at the very least, an overweening touch of the arrogant about him. The one person who would not have suffered this revelatory illusion is no longer alive; as for the rest....