Tuesday note: The rabbits of happiness

Russell_in_1938
Happiness is of two sorts, though, of course, there 
are intermediate degrees. The two sorts I mean 
might be distinguished as plain and fancy, or animal 
and spiritual, or of the heart and of the head. 
...............................
Perhaps the simplest way to describe the difference 
between the two sorts of happiness is to say that 
one sort is open to any human being, and the other 
only to those who can read and write. 
...............................
The happiness of my gardener is of the same species*; 
he wages a perennial war against rabbits, of which 
he speaks exactly as Scotland Yard speaks of Bolsheviks; 
he considers them dark, designing and ferocious, 
and is of opinion that they can only be met by means 
of a cunning equal to their own. Like the heroes 
of Valhalla who spent every day hunting a certain 
wild boar, which they killed every evening but which 
miraculously came to life again in the morning, 
my gardener can slay his enemy one day without any 
fear that the enemy will have disappeared the next day. 
Although well over seventy, he works all day and 
bicycles sixteen hilly miles to and from his work, 
but the fount of joy is inexhaustible, and it is 
"they rabbits" that supply it. -The Conquest of Happiness
(1930), Bertrand Russell

*of the sort open to any human being

Featured image: "Russell in 1938" by Unknown - Licensed under 
Public Domain via Commons

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s