Every Wednesday is Tip Day.
This Wednesday…Tips for packing.

It’s been a long time since I’ve packed to travel outside the U.S. — or really, packed to go anywhere except Kansas City, where I can borrow anything I forget to bring. Here are some lessons I learned the hard way.

1. Don’t assume that you couldn’t possibly forget to pack an essential item — like socks.

2. Always bring a full bottle of Advil.

3. If you have a long flight, have breath mints handy.

4. If you bring an electrical converter, check to see whether it can accept three-pronged as well as two-pronged appliances. Obviously, the converter will do you no good if you can’t plug your three-pronged computer cord into its two-pronged base.

5. Squirrel away some snacks in your luggage.

6. Remember to bring your phone charger.

7. Bring far too many books, both on the plane and in your suitcase. You may run through your reading stash far more quickly than you predicted if you: a) decide you don’t like a book and won’t finish it, b) leave a book behind in the airport waiting lounge, c) finish a book more quickly than you anticipated, due to a delayed flight, or d) all of the above.

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.

I’m in Salzburg, Austria, at a conference on biography at the Salzburg Seminar.

Several months ago, when I received an email about to the conference, my impulse was to hit the delete button — Salzburg was too far away, I had too much work to do, it would take too much effort to unpeel myself from my life.

But my finger hovered for a moment over the keyboard, and various of my happiness-project resolutions pushed themselves into my mind: “Focus on books,” “Show up,” “Follow my curiosities,” “Only connect,” “Push myself,” “Take time for adventure,” “Listen.”

So…here I am in Salzburg.

Now that the conference has started, I’m astonished I hesitated even for a moment. This afternoon I sat in a seminar room with seventeen people, all absorbed in questions of biography. We’re provided with everything necessary for intellectual stimulation — everything from pens and paper, to a picturesque mountain outside our window, to plentiful coffee. We have no task except to wrestle with questions like, “Where and how do you begin the story of a life?” and “How should you think about objectivity and subjectivity?” and “Why do you decide to write a particular person’s biography?”

Fact is, in ordinary life, people rarely mention Boswell’s Life of Johnson. Here is come up in practically every conversation.

Order is Heaven’s first law.
–Alexander Pope.

On the last day of each month, I include a happiness suggested-reading list. (I’m fudging it a bit this month, because Saturday is always my day to post my favorite quotes.)

Here is a list of just a few of the key classic works on the subject of happiness — ones that I found particularly useful or interesting. It’s a stretch to include St. Therese’s memoir here, because it doesn’t really fit, but I couldn’t resist — I love Story of a Soul so much.

Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics
Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy
Cicero, On the Good Life
Epicurus, The Essential Epicurus
Plutarch, Selected Essays
Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena I and II
Seneca, Notes from a Stoic
St. Therese, Story of a Soul
Montaigne, Essays