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Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World
By David Malouf
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
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About this ebook
In The Happy Life, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life?
With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life – what it is, and what makes it possible – he returns to the “highest wisdom” of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s way with words, happiness became a “right”, and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt.
In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he fi nds happiness in an unlikely place. This is an essay to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.
“How is it, when the chief sources of human unhappiness, of misery and wretchedness, have largely been removed from our lives … that happiness still eludes so many of us? … What is it in us, or in the world we have created, that continues to hold us back?” —David Malouf, The Happy Life
With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life – what it is, and what makes it possible – he returns to the “highest wisdom” of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s way with words, happiness became a “right”, and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt.
In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he fi nds happiness in an unlikely place. This is an essay to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.
“How is it, when the chief sources of human unhappiness, of misery and wretchedness, have largely been removed from our lives … that happiness still eludes so many of us? … What is it in us, or in the world we have created, that continues to hold us back?” —David Malouf, The Happy Life
Author
David Malouf
David Malouf is the author of poems, fiction, libretti and essays. In 1996, his novel Remembering Babylon was awarded the first International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. His 1998 Boyer Lectures were published as A Spirit of Play: The Making of Australian Consciousness. In 2000 he was selected as the sixteenth Neustadt Laureate. His most recent novel is Ransom.
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Reviews for Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
3/5
2 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5An interesting read although I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Malouf explores the idea of the contrast between self-sufficient happiness, as discussed by everyone from Classic philosophers to the Renaissance, contrasted with how we approach happiness in an era when our basic needs are all met, and the issues facing us are diffuse and global. All done by way of exploring art and philosophy throughout the centuries.
Wonderfully intelligent, but also sometimes verbose and opaque in a way that I'm not sure is useful. Malouf will throw in a quote from "Othello" or a reference to Montaigne, assuming the reader can track all of it, without so much as the endnotes traditional in this series. Disappointing in that manner. Also, some of his thoughts are evidently those of an older person; nothing wrong with that, but when he remarks that many writers still prefer to use pen and paper rather than a computer, I think he is speaking more for his generation (who grew up without such items) than mine. Engaging, however. - Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I really love the way this book prodded at me and sent me off on my own mini-pursuits of the meaning of happiness (cheese, apparently, followed by historically inaccurate but aesthetically pleasing period movies). I loved the portion in which Malouf talks about the kind of happiness one might have wanted in ye olde days, that which comes from a sense of peace, a stillness and quiet.
Malouf makes the observation that today we seem to want the opposite, cramming every still corner with activity, perhaps to try and ignore the ultimate peace, stillness and quiet. It was a portion that led me to further grim thought, but one I enjoyed all the same (so one Nicholas Parsons point for that then).
For a light and short read, I think there was a substantial amount of food for thought here. Also, I have a feeling that books on happiness that are too long are only going to end up making you miserable, so, nice little read.
Book preview
Quarterly Essay 41 The Happy Life - David Malouf
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