'For I Have Renounced Happiness'

“Happiness is the search for happiness.” 

I’m not so sure. My understanding is that there are no happy lives, only happy moments. Those moments seem to be the byproduct of right living. A life dedicated fulltime to achieving happiness is likely to be filled with respites of pleasure, long stretches of disappointment and much unhappiness for others, like second-hand smoke. Some people, like spoiled children, confuse happiness with getting their own way. Most of us will never learn what’s best for us and others. You can see the very human fallacy built into that effort: demands can only grow more insistent.

 

In an 1895 entry in The Journal of Jules Renard (ed. and trans. By Louise Bogan and Elizabeth Roget, 1964,) Renard writes: “I desire nothing from the past. I do not count on the future. The present is enough for me. I am a happy man, for I have renounced happiness.” Hard to say just how tongue-in-cheek that passage is intended. Renard was a master ironist. He always impresses me as a realist, a rejector of pie-in-the-sky grandiosities. Bogan writes in her preface:

 

“Renard’s passion for factual truth and stylistic exactitude, once formed, remained central to his work throughout his career. This preoccupation never hardened into obsession; one of the great pleasures of reading Renard is the certainty, soon felt by the reader, that nothing is being put down in meanness or malice.”

 

Renard died on this date, May 22, in 1910, exactly one year after writing the aphorism-like entry at the top in his journal. He was forty-six years old.

 

[The quote at the top comes from Renard’s Journal 1887-1910 (trans. Theo Cuffe, selected and introduced by Julian Barnes, riverrun, 2020).]