Dialogue: Pursuit of happiness is a fool's errand

By JOE BENNET

The constitution of the United States grants every citizen the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I know little of life and nothing of liberty, but the pursuit of happiness intrigues me.

People have hunted happiness since Adam set foot in the orchard feeling peckish. They have hunted happiness in drink and drugs, in work and play, in love and money and in God. They have chased it along the shelves of books of self-improvement. They have pursued it in time-management seminars, in lotteries and yoga, and they have scoured for it among the bleached bones of philosophy whose wreckage has washed up on the shores of their lives.

People have sensed happiness in the past and in the future but it seems that happiness is an eel which few have held and hugged in the mess we call the present.

Though many of the ancients have warned us that the hunt is hopeless, we have persevered. "Call no man happy until he is dead," wrote Aeschylus, but no one hears his voice. The hunt for happiness goes on.

I am writing just after dawn in air as crisp as glass, and although the sun has yet to crawl over the hills, the port below me is waking to the day. The first cars creep like turtles along its roads, their wipers clearing the night's moisture. The fluorescent lights of the supermarket have hesitated into life.

Forklifts scuttle about the quays and the strange cranes that lift and load containers on to ships slide silently about like giant crabs.

The moving, the buying and the selling have begun. The pursuit is on once more.

I have yet to read Alain de Botton's The Consolations of Philosophy, but yesterday I read an article by de Botton. It told me that Schopenhauer was a philosopher. I had thought he was a pianist. According to Herr Schopenhauer, "there is only one inborn error and that is the notion that we exist in order to be happy."

And de Botton recommended Seneca's advice that each day before breakfast we should reflect on all the things in the day ahead which could go wrong. For thus we would be fortified against the worst that could occur and strength would come to us.

This morning, I have followed Seneca's advice. The mind is a fertile thing. If the dogs and I survive the day, I shall be grateful and perhaps I shall be happy.

We have images of happiness. We say happy as a sandboy, or as a pig in mud, or as a lark. The pig and the lark and the boy in the sand are alike only in that they are unaware they are happy. They do not know the word happy. They do not pursue happiness. On their shoulders sits no burden of self-consciousness, nor knowledge of tomorrow nor any hint of wisdom.

My own image of happiness is my dogs. When I pull on shoes to go walking, the dogs dance. When they chase a rabbit, joy makes one of them whimper as he runs. When I go to the fridge for their food, their tails thump the walls. When I come home, whether I have been away a minute or a month, they greet me like Christmas. And when none of those things are happening, they sleep.

The truth of happiness lies in the word itself, a word whose meaning has been skewed. Happiness derives from hap, an Anglo-Saxon word, as brief and simple as an Anglo-Saxon life. Hap permeates our language. Mishaps, perhaps, may happen. We live haphazardly and some live hapless lives. And hap, of course, means chance.

So happy and lucky are the same thing. To say someone is happy-go-lucky is to repeat oneself. We are the playthings of that obsolete deliciousness, happenstance. We are bound upon the wheel of fortune and we know only that it spins. The best place to be is at the bottom. From there is only up.

Life, said Larkin, is what happens to happen. Lady Luck is on her throne and though we may bow and curtsy, though we may cross our fingers and avoid walking under ladders and toss no end of salt over our shoulders, she is unmoved. The pursuit of happiness is a fool's errand.

I stopped five minutes ago for toast. I have marmalade on my computer mouse. In my Senecan list of the day's ills I did not think of marmalade on the mouse.

But if that is the worst the day holds in store, all manner of things shall be well. I think I'll take the dogs for a walk.