Happiness In One Easy Step
To be
stupid,
selfish,
and have good health
are three requirements
for happiness,
though if stupidity is lacking,
all is lost.
— Gustave Flaubert
I have been a fan of “good quotes” for many years. At the prompting of a professor in grad school I began writing in a pocket-sized notebook memorable lines discovered as I read. To my sense of meaning and beauty each of these quotations was an arrow loosed, striking dead center of a bullseye. I have a half dozen or more of these notebooks, filled — as if hatchet marks, blazing the intellectual path that I have taken over the course of my adult life. Does not everyone take a distinct journey through the circumstances, relationships of their life?
The quote featured here is associated with a memory of walking across the commons area at Northwestern on a icy, blustery day in February. Walking with me was a professor in the graduate school, Department of History and Literature of Religion. Professor Yamada said to me that he thought it difficult for an educated person to be happy. That comment, as severe as the day on which it was uttered, seemed accurate to me. Many years later, I still believe that to be an accurate assessment.
Happiness, as a childish fantasy of infinite freedom, the bliss of having whatever one desires, is utterly dependent upon intellectual oblivion. One must be oblivious to all that an adult bears responsibility for, —as if one’s own well-being and the well-being of others does not register in one’s constellation of meaning.
Be ignorant so to be happy. Of course there are many approaches to ignorance. There’s a great market for ignorance. There’s profit to be made. Many entrepreneur’s will help you to that end.
