Against Happiness

Blake believes that the sublime arises from a sensual scrutiny so intense that it penetrates to an unbounded energy at the heart of distinct forms.

people with “something eating at them” are more interesting than those who are merely content.

Through their exuberant melancholia, Adam and Eve indeed apprehended the difficult joys of earning redemption. Through their absence from literal Eden, they found the invisible Eden dwelling in their own hearts. Through their nakedness and solitude, they came to weave beautiful and attractive tapestries. Without their hunger for the sorrowful knowl

Percy argues that most go through life witnessing not the actual world but their preconceptions of it.

melancholy connects us to our fundamental being.

We try to embrace, then, the sad fact that the world most wants to forget: we all die, and in our dying is, paradoxically, our living.

The greatest tragedy is to live without tragedy.

mortis? We wonder, then, if the obsession with happiness is, at the end of the day, a kind of unknowing necrophilia. We wonder if the desire for security is a hope for permanence, and we wonder if this hope for unchangeableness is a yen for death, the ultimate security blanket.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center shows that almost 85 percent of Americans believe that they are very happy or at least happy.