The Happiness Project: Suddenly I'm back in college -- and back in the college library.

The Happiness Project

THE HAPPINESS PROJECT is the memoir of the year I spent test-driving the wisdom of the ages, current scientific studies, and lessons from popular culture about how to be happier – happily, it was a #1 New York Times bestseller. As one of the hundreds of experiments I've conducted, I started this blog. Here, I recount my daily adventures in pursuit of happiness. –

Gretchen Rubin

What Started Me Thinking

"The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer somebody else up." Mark Twain
“There is no duty we so much underrate as the duty of being happy.” Robert Louis Stevenson
"Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her." Luke 10:41-42
“Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating.” Simone Weil
“What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.” Colette
“It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” G. K. Chesterton
“A man’s first care should be to avoid the reproaches of his own heart.” Joseph Addison
“Best is good. Better is best.” Lisa Grunwald
“Order is Heaven’s first law.” Alexander Pope

Happiness Theories I Reject

Flaubert: "To be stupid, and selfish, and to have good health are the three requirements for happiness; though if stupidity is lacking, the others are useless."
Vauvenargues: “There are men who are happy without knowing it.”
Eric Hoffer: “The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.”
Sartre: "Hell is other people."
Willa Cather: “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness; one only stumbles upon them…”
Alexander Smith: “We are never happy; we can only remember that we were so once.”
John Stuart Mill: “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

Since arriving at this biography conference, I've been flooded with memories of college. Cut off from my usual friends and family, figuring out the lay-out of a new place, eating dining-hall food three times a day, making small-talk with people I don't know as I struggle to memorize the pertinent details of their lives, deciding whether to raise my hand to make a comment during a seminar discussion...it all feels very familiar.

I feel the urge to be social, to get a fix on everyone around me, to make sure I'm not missing anything. At the same time, I want to retreat and be alone with my familiar solitary self.

At least I don't have to size up the romantic prospects.

One of my happiness resolutions is to "find an area of refuge," that is, work to find a peaceful refuge for my thoughts. I assumed I'd invented this notion (using a term I lifted from a sign near an elevator at Yale Law School, a locution that struck me as very funny), but now it occurs to me that all I've done is to give a different label to the much-mocked admonition to "find your happy place." Aaaack.

Oh well. In the area of happiness, it turns out, some of the most useful ideas are embarrassingly banal.

In any event, just as in college, I've found my area of refuge, a/k/a my happy place: the library. And this library is comfortingly similar to the library to which I retreated in college, with an intricately patterned ceiling, leather-covered chairs, and the calming smell of wood paneling.

Plus, all our talk about the challenges of biography has prompted me to call up my memories of writing Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill and Forty Ways to Look at JFK.

What a pleasure it was to work on those projects! To remember a happy time is a distinctive kind of happiness, and a refuge that always waits.

Comments

Gretchen,

I was in a Great Books program as an undergrad and lived in seminars for four years. Hearing your description of this seminar took me back. What a treat to experience those days of intellectual stimulation again!

By the way, I love your blog! Can't wait to read the book :)

Posted by: Kelsey | October 03, 2006 at 02:14 PM

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library." Jorge Luis Borges

Posted by: Jude | October 06, 2006 at 12:13 AM

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