Happiness, Striving

A man who refuses to swim in the deep waters of the beach and thus garner all the beauty and wonder involved at the sacrifice of his immobility, his painless simplicity, for an infinitely higher happiness, but would rather admire only faintly from afar, walking on the shoreline, what his lucidity affords him, what fate has dropped at his doorstep, what serves his senses without a tinge of authentic self-assertion -- that is the man of today, of yesterday, in perpetuity. Let us weep for him; are you weeping for yourself?

Aha, this is interesting: the etymology of the word happiness carries with it the connotation of luck, from the root word hap, "chance, fortune"; happiness is luckiness. Thus the man who looks down the precipice of his own nonbeing needs something grander than happiness, for happiness technically understood has no legs in which to actualize itself, to bring itself into being. Indeed, happiness so understood implies patience, and verily the noble man is patient, but the fortune that he waits for is a whore. The idea of happiness so understood is so secondary, so inferior to not even an ideal world, but a good one, that it is the definitive argument against God if it is the only conception that fits this universe. To wait for happiness! As laughable as it is repugnant; as contemptuous as it is horrifying. Give me sin, the possibility for unhappiness as a result of my misuse of freedom, give me anything -- so long as it isn't happiness as constrained by necessity. And it is infinitely true, as Camus says, that there is no love of life without despair of life; but life ruled solely by that which is beyond my control -- this life is a mockery of decency. So long as it is possible not to be as unhappy as one could be, happiness exists. Relativity is all I ask for.