The Magic of a Little Danger
“How to Build a Life” is a weekly column by Arthur Brooks, tackling questions of meaning and happiness. Click here to listen to his podcast series on all things happiness, How to Build a Happy Life.
“You wouldn’t believe it. It’s like a wonderful nightmare.” This is how Bill Gorton, the hard-drinking veteran in Ernest Hemingway’s 1926 novel The Sun Also Rises, describes the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain. Every year at 8 a.m. on July 7, six full-grown bulls (accompanied by six oxen) chase young local men called mozos (and no small number of foreign tourists, thanks to Hemingway’s popularization of the festival) through the town’s streets to the bullring, where the animals are dispatched in bullfights later in the day.
If this ancient rite sounds dangerous, that’s because it is: Since 2005, at least 78 people have been , some fatally. Most of them are foreign
