How to be Happy — Excerpt The Conquest of Happiness (1930) often cited as
one of Bertrand Russell’s most accessible and favorite books.
'Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth, our life is part
of the life of the Earth; and we draw our nourishment from it just as the
plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter
are as essential to it as spring and summer, and rest is as essential as
motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to
preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human
body has been adapted through the ages to this rhythm, and religion has
embodied something of it in the festival of Easter.
'I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been kept in London, taken out
for the first time to walk in green country. The season was winter, and
everything was wet and muddy. To the adult eye there was nothing to cause
delight, but in the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in
the wet ground and put his face in the grass, and gave utterance to
half-articulate cries of delight. The joy that he was experiencing was
primitive, simple and massive. The organic need that was being satisfied is
so profound that those in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane.
'Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling and drink as good examples,
have in them no element of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the
instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry
for he knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can truly be
called joy. Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the
life of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they
cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their
intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more exciting
dissipations.
'The two-year-old boy whom I spoke of a moment ago displayed the most
primitive possible form of union with the life of Earth. But in a higher
form the same thing is to be found in poetry. What makes Shakespeare’s
lyrics supreme is that they are filled with this same joy that made the
two-year- old embrace the grass. Consider “Hark, hark, the lark”, or “Come
unto these yellow sands”; you will find in these poems the civilized
expression of the same emotion that in our two-year-old could only find
utterance in inarticulate cries.'
Love to all,
Mike