In the extended essay that is The Happy Life, Australian novelist, poet and playwright David Malouf wants to know why, when "chief sources of human unhappiness" such as poverty, famine and disease have been removed from our lives, "happiness still eludes so many us." He's content to pose more astute questions than he answers in exploring that dilemma, adding to his own insights those of a host of philosophers, writers and artists.
Starting with Thomas Jefferson's formulation in the Declaration of Independence, then shifting back to Plato and forward to our own time, Malouf briefly treats humankind's shifting notions of what it means to be happy. In contrast to our more contemplative forebears, for example, for us, "a lone figure in a closed and lonely room is our image now for existential dread."
Malouf's key insight is that we're living in the small slice of human history in which we are conscious that we inhabit "the Planet," instead of the constrained world that was the limit of experience for most of our ancestors. "The Planet is a thing more remote and less manageable than the Earth," he observes. In the 1970s, when we first could view a photograph of Earth from space, we realized our own insignificance in the face of such vastness, and it has inevitably contributed to our increasing discomfort. When we contemplate the impersonal geopolitical and economic forces that seem more unsettling each day, our distress only grows. "We feel like small, powerless creatures in the coils of an invisible monster," Malouf writes, "vast but insubstantial, that cannot be grasped or wrestled with."
Contrast that with Shukhov, the protagonist of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, whose definition of happiness is as elemental as an extra bowl of porridge and the chance to buy a bit of tobacco. According to Malouf, what Shukhov achieves "briefly, intermittently, is moments of self-fulfilment." Yet somehow, for many of us who live lives of almost unimaginable physical comfort, "the good life, it seems, is not enough."
The Happy Life is no self-help book, and David Malouf is not naïve enough to suggest he has any easy cure for our persistent angst. But for anyone who wants an intelligent primer to begin the process of asking some of the questions whose answers may relieve it, Malouf offers a useful starting point. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: In an extended essay, David Malouf explores some of the reasons why happiness seems to be an elusive state in modern life.