An interesting read although I'm not sure I'd recommend it. Malouf explores the idea of the contrast between self-sufficient happiness, as discussed by everyone from Classic philosophers to the Renaissance, contrasted with how we approach happiness in an era when our basic needs are all met, and the issues facing us are diffuse and global. All done by way of exploring art and philosophy throughout the centuries.

Wonderfully intelligent, but also sometimes verbose and opaque in a way that I'm not sure is useful. Malouf will throw in a quote from "Othello" or a reference to Montaigne, assuming the reader can track all of it, without so much as the endnotes traditional in this series. Disappointing in that manner. Also, some of his thoughts are evidently those of an older person; nothing wrong with that, but when he remarks that many writers still prefer to use pen and paper rather than a computer, I think he is speaking more for his generation (who grew up without such items) than mine. Engaging, however. ( )

http://shawjonathan.wordpress.com/2011/03/29/david-malouf-and-the-happy-life/

If I ever need to be reminded of the depths of my ignorance, I need only read an essay by David Malouf, any essay. In this one, he draws for his argument on Plato, Heidegger, Jefferson, Montaigne, George Herbert, Solzhenitsyn and Condorcet, gives illustrations from Chekhov, Rembrandt and Rubens, and refers in passing to Dostoievski, Horace, Marvell, Shelley – there are cameo appearances by at least twenty writers and artists we know by a single name, that is to say, key figures in European cultural history. You know that these writers are part of his mind’s living furniture, that he needs to refer to them if he is to lay out his own thinking. But he's gracious about it, elegantly spelling out Heidegger’s interpretation of the Platonic story of Epimetheus and Prometheus, for example, or explaining Condorcet’s pivotal role in the history of ideas.

It’s not so much a thesis, a marshalling of evidence and argument to convince the reader of something, but an essay, as in the French essai, an attempt at its subject, a reflective chat with past thinkers and makers, a teasing away at a question and a stab at partial answers. Here’s the question:
'How is it, when the chief sources of human unhappiness, of misery and wretchedness, have largely been removed from our lives – large-scale social injustice, famine, plague and other diseases, the near-certainty of an early death – that happiness still eludes so many of us?'

By 'us' here, he means ‘the new privileged, those of us who live in advanced industrial societies’. (‘The truth is,’ he writes, ‘ that though we are all alive on the planet in the same moment, we are not all living in the same century.’)

He explores the question down many interesting paths – because of course the question of happiness has been addressed by great thinkers for millennia – with excursions into art history He reflects on elements of the modern world from the effect of seeing our planet photographed from space to the way we think of our bodies has changed since his childhood in the 1940s (this is as close as he gets to the personal note that is a key element of the classic personal essay). Insofar as he arrives at an answer, it seems to be that ‘we’ need to slow down, shrink our horizons, accept limits. I won’t give any more detail: it’s beautifully argued, by means of a compelling image from a great piece of fiction.

There is one major perspective that makes an appearance only by virtue of an explicit exclusion. While it’s clearly legitimate to ask a question about happiness for the ‘new privileged’, leaving the happiness of the rest of humanity for a different essay, the rest of humanity must surely figure in the answer. My crude thought is that none of us can be content while we don’t challenge and actively oppose the monstrous disparities covered by the notion that we are not all living in the same century. Someone said, ‘No one can be free until all of us are free.’ I think a corollary of that is that none of us can be happy as long as we are indifferent or ineffectual in the face of the misery of others. I can’t say I’m an unqualified fan of Alice Walker, but the banner that unfurls at the end of Possessing the Secret of Joy comes to mind: the secret of joy is resistance.