Felix qui potuit rerum cognoscere causas
Happy is he who understands the causes of things.
To be happy is difficult, yet happiness is the end we pursue. Every movement seeks fulfillment in happiness, yet movement seldom delivers what can satisfy. Now and again we are happy today, only to wake up tomorrow unhappy. Now and again we are unhappy for a moment, when an idle word strikes a new bounty. The spirit endures such confusion when it is beholden to whim. But it has never grown rich in itself.
Still the ambitious spirit seeks riches, power, fame, position and pleasure. If grasped they are a snare and an illusion. One who values wealth alone will never acquire enough. Amassing power or position leads to insecurity, as nothing is so susceptible to intrigue as a throne. Fame gratifies as it is acquired, but the inevitable lapse is intolerable. Pleasure perhaps approximates true happiness the best, for it alone is under the self’s control and gratifies the self alone, yet no one is so withered and used up as the selfish pleasure-seeker past his day.
To be happy is difficult, and to be happy we must know both what it is to be happy and how to tell when one is happy. In this inquiry, as it so often is, we can easiest understand what happiness is not. Happiness is not something found or something done, for things can be lost and actions can be frustrated. The objective study of things will not uncover happiness because the world as object is neither happy nor unhappy. And the world understood as an object is often what ails us. The world rightly apprehended is the exterior wall of our subjectivity. When this is understood, happiness can be found in things, rightly apprehended.
Again this paradox can be best understood only in the negative, by comtemplating the reverse. There are men who cultivate the flower of unhappiness and acquire taste for the sick sweetness of pity. Luckily, they are few. Our milder perversity is to strike out to win happiness in full, only to dispossess oneself of happiness by grasping it, by holding it in private. That is the true fruit of riches, power, fame, position and pleasure. The world is not just an object, but also a subject.
An individual never truly possesses a thing as long as he keeps his possession private. He will spend time guarding his store and counting his coins. Yet all worldly goods are possessed privately, for if the one possesses part of a worldly good, no other can possess the whole. Moreover, whenever we possess a part of the world, we must inevitably relinquish it, for we inevitably perish. The many have thought they would be ready when this time came. The few knew they could never be. This is the reason for the monastery. It is also the reason for community. It is also the reason for communion.
An eye can be made to open, but it cannot be made to see, nor can an ear be made to hear. Even if it opens, there is much in the world to distract. We mistake that which sustains us for our sustenance. Man does not live by bread alone, but by that noble pearl which to the children of wisdom is everything. He who has eyes should see. He who has ears should hear.