The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [175]
1. Montaigne’s subject here was why he was sticking with Catholicism while much of Europe at large was seduced by the “new knowledge” of Protestantism. Protestants argued that much of Catholicism was just an accumulation of mumbo-jumbo developed since Jesus. Montaigne’s position was that religion is not one of those things you can get right, it is about a completely mysterious something—if it is about anything more than custom. So why create upheaval and bloodshed over its details? Better to uphold the religion in which you were raised. The Catholic Church needed the support and promoted Montaigne’s skeptical fidelity for a century.
2. Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), 358–59.
3. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 359.
4. Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (New York: Liveright, 1930), 153.
CHAPTER 1: KNOW YOURSELF
1. Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (New York: Dover, 1997), 79.
2. Benedict Spinoza, Ethics (New York: Hafner, 1949), 227.
3. Carl Jung, “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon,” in Alchemical Studies, Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1983), 13: 109–89.
4. Aurelius, Meditations, 20; Shakespeare, Hamlet, act 3, scene 2.
5. Aurelius, Meditations, 19.
6. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “The Solitude of Self,” in History of Woman Suffrage, ed. Stanton et al. (New York, 1902), 4:189–91.
7. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 365.
8. Russell, 113–14, 123. UNESCO Institute for Statistics, Regional Adult Illiteracy Rate and Population by Gender, September 2006 assessment, unesco.org. UNESCO began keeping track in 1950, calling adult literacy the ability of those 15 years old or older to read and write a simple note in any language. The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics estimates U.S. illiteracy for 1870 at 20 percent; for 1930 at 4 percent; and 1979 at 0.6 percent. Of course race and gender matter: in 1930 the illiteracy rate for “Black and Others” was 16 percent.
CHAPTER 2: CONTROL YOUR DESIRES
1. “The Discourse of the Teaching Bequeathed by the Buddha (Just Before His Parinibbana)” was translated into the Chinese, from which it survives, by the Indian scholar Acarya Kumarajiva sometime prior to the year 956 of the Buddhist Era, around 344–413 C.E.
2. The Vatican Sayings, http://www.epicurus.info/etexts/VS.html. This is a collection of maxims, titled “The Sayings of Epicurus,” that was rediscovered in 1888 within a fourteenth-century Vatican manuscript that also contained Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations and Epictetus’s Manual.
3. Aurelius, Meditations, 20.
4. Aurelius, Meditations, 63.
5. Aurelius, Meditations, 89–90.
6. Russell, Conquest of Happiness, 91.
7. Russell, Conquest of Happiness, 91.
8. Spinoza, Ethics, 223.
9. Montaigne, “Of Experience,” in The Complete Essays of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press, 1958), 854.
10. Montaigne, Complete Essays, 855.
11. See James Atlas, “The Fall of Fun,” New Yorker, November 18, 1996; and Mark Kingwell, In Pursuit of Happiness: Better Living from Plato to Prozac (New York: Crown, 2000), 115.
CHAPTER 3: TAKE WHAT’S YOURS
1. Aurelius, Meditations, 98.
2. Aurelius, Meditations, 85.
3. For a juicy recent portrait of Alcibiades, see Lucy Hughes-Hallett, Heroes (New York: Knopf, 2005).
4. George Bernard Shaw, “Epistle Dedicatory,” in Man and Superman, http:// www.4literature.net/George_Bernard_Shaw/Man_and_Superman/8.html.
5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Essays (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1883), 1:48.
6. Emerson, Essays, 1:69.
7. Emerson, Essays, 1:69.
8. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York: New American Library), 88.
CHAPTER 4: REMEMBER DEATH
1. Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” Encounter 5 (1955): 50–51.
2. Aurelius, Meditations, 93.
3. L’Intransigeant, 1922. I take the anecdote from Alain de Botton’s sweet and useful How Proust Can Save Your Life (New York: Vintage, 1998), 6–8.
4. “Discourse of the Teaching.”
5. Shaw, “Epistle Dedicatory.”
6.