Three Versions of Happiness

From prolix

Can Happiness Be Bad for Your Health?

• You finally got the thing you wanted. So why does part of you feel worse, not better?
• Positive experiences are not psychologically positive for everyone.
• Research suggests that good fortune may be associated with poorer health among people with low self-esteem.
• Experiences that contradict our self-image can themselves become psychologically unsettling.

To pithy

“What would you call the highest happiness, Lewie?” he asked.

“The sense of competence,” was the answer, given without hesitation.

John Buchan - The Half-Hearted (1900)

To pragmatic

Only the fool and the very young expect happiness. The wise merely hope to be interested, at least not to be bored, in their passage through this world.

Arnold Bennett - Sacred and Profane Love (1905)

The dirty linen is collected and shamefully hurried away

UK's Burnham will pledge to be 'unashamedly Labour' as party leader

Andy Burnham will promise to be “unashamedly Labour” when he officially becomes the party’s leader on Friday before taking over from Keir Starmer as prime minister next week.

He will say in a speech that his government will have the “courage to fix the big things that politics has neglected” and the “conviction to argue for our plans”.

The former Greater Manchester mayor, who returned to Westminster last month as Makerfield member of parliament (MP), will be confirmed as Labour leader in a special conference and then enter No 10 on Monday.


Monday morning is a strenuous but somehow a glad morning in respectable households of regular habits. The clean linen is brought out in lovely white piles from the linen cupboard and distributed over the house, and the dirty linen is collected and shamefully hurried away and catalogued in a place without honour and thrown pell-mell in baskets and despatched, and then everybody has a sweet sense of relief.

Arnold Bennett - Elsie and the Child (1924)

The peculiar hard, inelastic touch of incipient decay

Ledging the lid crossways on the coffin, he placed his hand gently upon Camilla’s brow. It was colder than he had expected, and it had the peculiar hard, inelastic touch of incipient decay — that touch which communicates a shudder even to the most impassive.

Arnold Bennett - Hugo: A Fantasia on Modern Themes (1906)

A chap is bound to wonder what else has the peculiar hard, inelastic touch of incipient decay. Something a little less human, a little more abstract perhaps, such as a government.

The Preposterous Enigma

Is there after all a key to the preposterous enigma of the universe?

Arnold Bennett - Imperial Palace (1930)


The universe is impossibly vast, we know this and Bennett was right, its unimaginable vastness is an enigma. 

Yet everything we know tells us that the entire universe is governed by laws which operate from the preposterously vast, down, down, down, smaller and yet smaller, down, down down to the polymer molecules of Sir Keir Starmer’s trousers.

Now that is a preposterous enigma.

Preposterous

Is there after all a key to the preposterous enigma of the universe?

Arnold Bennett - Imperial Palace (1930)


Even the question seems mildly preposterous, but perhaps there is a preposterous aspect to the universe.

What is it for?
What's the point of it?

Where does Keir Starmer fit in?

Changing Gear

Death knell for a century-old driving skill: The rapidly dying art electric cars will kill off entirely

A driving skill the majority of motorists perfected when taking their driving test is rapidly becoming a dying art - and one that will disappear entirely when electric cars become mainstream.

The act of changing gear is 'on its way out', with vehicle manufacturers already culling manual gearboxes, according to a market review.

It found that just 96 models in showrooms today are available with a manual transmission. In contrast, there are 404 new cars to buy that come exclusively with automatic gearboxes.


Our main car is a diesel automatic which we find easy to drive especially in heavy traffic where we don't miss having to change gear manually.

Yet when I drive the MX5, I enjoy changing gear, there is something satisfying about having to do more than steer and brake while tootling along the country roads of Derbyshire. I wouldn't go back to this though -

Lucas spoke of his own car, which lay beyond in the middle of the side-street like a ship at anchor. He spoke in such a strain that Miss Wheeler deigned to ask him to drive her home in it. The two young men went to light the head-lights. George noticed the angry scowl on Everard’s face when three matches had been blown out in the capricious breeze.

Arnold Bennett – The Roll-Call (1918)

Ed's Infallible Wisdom

Ed Miliband sacks Dame Mary Archer from net zero adviser role as Energy Secretary is accused of trying to 'suppress all opposition' to his policies

Dame Mary spent more than 15 years as a lecturer at Oxford and Cambridge Universities and founded both the National Energy Foundation and the UK Section of the International Solar Energy Society.

Her vast experience in the field even saw her awarded the Energy Institute's Melchett Medal, an award given to recipients 'for outstanding contributions to the science of fuel and energy'.

But the government said the decision to remove the 80-year-old was 'part of a wider restructuring of the departmental board'.


In regard to matters upon which his instinct had not suggested a course of action, George was always ready enough to be taught; indeed his respect for an expert was truly deferential. But when his instinct had begun to operate he would consult nobody and consider nobody, being deeply sure that infallible wisdom had been granted to him. (Nor did experience seem to teach him.)

Arnold Bennett – The Roll-Call (1918)

Mr Potter - the last lone man

Probably no one in the Five Towns takes a conscious pride in the antiquity of the potter’s craft, nor in its unique and intimate relation to human life, alike civilised and uncivilised. Man hardened clay into a bowl before he spun flax and made a garment, and the last lone man will want an earthen vessel after he has abandoned his ruined house for a cave, and his woven rags for an animal’s skin. This supremacy of the most ancient of crafts is in the secret nature of things, and cannot be explained.

Arnold Bennett - Anna of the Five Towns (1902)

Pattern Makers

Chess player Magnus Carlsen has said he is an intuitive player rather than a meticulous calculator of moves and consequences. He calculates of course but he has said that calculation mostly confirms the move he has already chosen intuitively, the move which best fits the pattern of the game. 

Outside of chess we are all like this to some degree. We see the latest political appointment take a quick look at the person’s history and like Magnus Carlsen we intuitively know if it’s a good, bad or indifferent appointment. We may flip back to bolster the intuition with reasons, but intuition doesn’t work on nothing. As with chess and many other areas of life, it’s what we sometimes call pattern recognition.

We accumulate a vast repertoire of experience, but the vastness of experience isn’t something we trawl through in search of reasons, instead we recognise patterns. Ideology though - that’s another matter. Ideology imposes patterns which are not drawn from our own experience, so neither are the reasons.

Anyone unconstrained by ideology has known for some time that UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is too limited, too ideologically motivated and too evasive to be an effective political leader. Knowing this from an early stage was partly due to the pattern recognition that is intuition. The reasons came later when the painfully obvious incompetence kicked in.

For example, one problem our intuition spotted in Keir Starmer, a pattern we unerringly recognised, is not dissimilar to that terrible lack of frankness Arnold Bennett wrote about in the quote below over a century ago. Bennett depicts a very different situation, but the pattern to be recognised, that’s much the same. Different relationship, same pattern, just as damaging.

 

His terrible lack of frankness, that instinct for the devious and the underhand which governed his entire existence, struck her afresh and seemed to devastate her heart. She felt that she could have tolerated in her husband any vice with less effort than that one vice which was specially his, that vice so contemptible and odious, so destructive of every noble and generous sentiment. Her silent, measured indignation fed itself on almost nothing — on a mere word, a mere inflection of his voice, a single transient gleam of his guilty eye. And though she was right by unerring intuition, John, could he have seen into her soul, might have been excused for demanding, ‘What have I said, what have I done, to deserve this scorn?’

Arnold Bennett – Leonora (1903)

Conspicuous ritualistic waste

The great principle of conspicuous ritualistic waste had been illustrated in a manner to satisfy the most exacting standard of the leisured class; and incidentally a subject of talk was provided.

Arnold Bennett - The Roll-Call (1916)

Wind turbine maker cuts hundreds of jobs on Isle of Wight

Wind turbine maker Vestas has said 600 workers at its Isle of Wight factory are at risk of redundancy.

Employees at the Newport plant have been told at least half of its manufacturing operation will be cut amid changing demand for turbine blades.

No argument taken to a finish

The affair was at an end. Nothing interesting had been said in the general talk, and little that was sincere. No topic had been explored, no argument taken to a finish. No wit worth mentioning had glinted. But everybody had behaved very well, and had demonstrated that he or she was familiar with the usages of society and with aspects of existence with which it was proper to be familiar.

Arnold Bennett - The Roll-Call (1918)


A tediously familiar issue this one, but why do so many political actors make such extensive use of dishonest language? An obvious answer is there can be favourable political consequences from dishonest speeches and dishonest arguments. They appeal to tribal voters and allow vested interests to flourish.

The point to be made is that political policies rooted in dishonesty cannot be resolved by honest argument taken to a finish. For many educated people, a dishonest or even absurd standpoint with major practical defects may still have politically favourable consequences. It’s a no-brainer we might say.

It’s a problem which cannot be resolved by argument until unfavourable consequences arrive in force. Possibly not even then.

The unavoidable conclusion

And they were soon in the midst of one of those immense and formless conversations in which a complex subject is discussed without order interminably, and without apparent result, until there comes a moment when the speakers perceive that all the ground has been many times covered and that it is no longer possible to say anything that has not already been said; and pauses occur, and the unavoidable conclusion emerges and shapes itself and imperiously demands acceptance.

Arnold Bennett - Whom God Hath Joined (1906)


There are many cases where an unavoidable conclusion emerges and shapes itself and imperiously demands acceptance. Not necessarily the right conclusion and possibly a stupid conclusion, but an unavoidable conclusion at the time. Of course it may not seem so unavoidable in the future. There are many cases of that too. 

For example, within the UK government the first unavoidable Net Zero conclusion was that it should be pursued vigorously as government policy. It may be that a second unavoidable conclusion is emerging – a conclusion that the policy cannot possibly work or affect the climate. Sceptics saw it from the beginning and in a sense this is what sceptics do, they see the second unavoidable conclusion first.

Why didn’t the government see from the beginning that Net Zero is a stupid policy and why is the stupidity yet to be acknowledged? Governments are stuffed with supposedly intelligent people who attended university, know how to say the right thing in the right circles but push forward with stupid policies.

Perhaps governments did not see the stupidity of Net Zero from the beginning because there are not enough sceptics in government. Anyone from any social class, any level of education and any walk of life can do scepticism. For governments and the elites, something anyone can do just won’t do. 

Are MPs likely to row back on Net Zero, admit it has all been premature and return to whatever works best within the constraints of markets, engineering and the laws of physics?  Are they likely to do it now,  when the stupidity is so obvious and a general election looms? Again the unavoidable conclusion emerges and shapes itself and imperiously demands acceptance - no.

Dregs

Woman: A little more soda, please. And just a trifle less impudence. What book ought one to be reading, then?

Man: Socialism’s the thing just now. Read Wells on Socialism. It’ll be all over the theatrical world in a few years’ time.

Woman: No fear! I can’t bear Wells. He’s always stirring up the dregs. I don’t mind froth, but I do draw the line at dregs.

Arnold Bennett – Buried Alive (1908)

Our Roll-Call

He knew the idiosyncrasies of councillors and aldermen in committee; he had learnt more about mankind in the committee-rooms of the old town hall than he could have learnt in ten thousand London clubs. He could divide the city council infallibly into wire-pullers, axe-grinders, vain nincompoops, honest mediocrities, and the handful who combined honesty with sagacity and sagacity with strength.

Arnold Bennett – The Roll-Call (1918)


Things haven’t changed much, our roll-call of the political classes could be similarly divided.

Wire-pullers – yes

Axe-grinders – yes

Vain nincompoops – yes

Honest mediocrities – yes

The handful who combine honesty with sagacity and sagacity with strength – hmm. 

Quotes for 2024

She had feelings that she believed to be thoughts; she had likes and dislikes that she believed to be thoughts; she had impulses she believed to be thoughts; her mind was full of shifting and flying pictures that she believed to be thoughts; it was also full of echoes of what she had heard and read, and these she usually believed to be thoughts original with her. Words were fluent upon her lips without her knowing or wondering how they got there; yet she was sure they expressed truths and she easily became angry, or grieved, if they were challenged.

Booth Tarkington - Claire Ambler (1928)


Among the items of the suite was a three-legged milking-stool in deal covered with white enamel paint heightened by salmon-tinted bows of imitation silk. Society had recently been thunderstruck by the originality of putting a milking-stool in a drawing-room; its quaintness appealed with tremendous force to nearly all hearts; nearly every house-mistress on seeing a milking-stool in a friend’s drawing-room, decided that she must have a milking-stool in her drawing-room, and took measures to get one.

Arnold Bennett - These Twain (1915)


But there can be little doubt, I think, that if some form of Collectivism is imposed upon England it will be imposed, as everything else has been, by an instructed political class upon a people partly apathetic and partly hypnotized. The aristocracy will be as ready to “administer” Collectivism as they were to administer Puritanism or Manchesterism; in some ways such a centralized political power is necessarily attractive to them.

G. K. Chesterton – What’s Wrong With The World (1910)

Don’t you adore chocolates?

A question for Christmas - do prosperous, comfortable and easy lives entail degraded language?


She drew a cardboard box from her pocket, and offered it to Anna. ‘Here, have one.’ They were chocolate creams.

‘Thanks,’ said Anna, taking one. ‘Aren’t they very expensive? I’ve never seen any like these before.’

‘Oh! Just ordinary. Four shillings a pound. Papa buys them for me: I simply dote on them. I love to eat them in bed, if I can’t sleep.’ Beatrice made these statements with her mouth full. ‘Don’t you adore chocolates?’ she added.

‘I don’t know,’ Anna lamely replied. ‘Yes, I like them.’ She only adored her sister, and perhaps God; and this was the first time she had tasted chocolate.

Arnold Bennett - Anna of the Five Towns (1902)

Irony and softer modes of meditation

As we know, not everyone does irony and it doesn’t work with all audiences, even though it can be a powerful rhetorical device if handled well in the right context.


"A thousand pounds a week!" Lilian murmured, aghast. Her imagination resembled that of a person who, on reaching a summit which he has taken for the top of the range, sees far higher peaks beyond. And the conviction that those distant peaks were unattainable saddened her for a moment. "It's absolutely awful."

"Why awful? If you have the finest you must pay for it. A thousand a week's nothing to that fellow. Moreover, he's a British citizen, and he did splendid service for his country in the war. Among other things, he owns two of the best brands of champagne. The War Office gave him a commission and a car; and he travelled all over Europe selling his own champagne at his own price to officers' messes. After all, officers couldn't be expected to fight without the drinks they're accustomed to, could they?"

Lilian obscurely divined irony. She often wished that she could be ironical and amusing, as Felix was; but she never could. She couldn't conceive how it was done.

Arnold Bennett – Lilian (1922)


Mrs H and I both do irony and that seems to be significant as we chat about life and current affairs over coffee. Maybe there is a certain social divide between those who do irony and those who don’t. Perhaps irony can highlight a social divide which was there to begin with, because there are those who do seem to prefer a softer form of social discourse.


Irony and sarcasm — very agreeable to a certain class of newspaper readers — were just now his stock-in-trade, and he could not afford to indulge any softer mode of meditation.

George Gissing - In the Year of Jubilee (1894)

We’ve never warmed to the impersonal

‘It’s so accidental, the whole business,’ she remarked, branching off to another aspect of the case in order to mask the confusion caused by the sincere flattery in his voice. ‘It was only by chance that Milly had that particular part at all. Suppose she hadn’t had it. What then?’

‘Everything’s accidental,’ he replied. ‘Everything that ever happened is accidental, in a way — in another it isn’t. If you look at your own life, for instance, you’ll find it’s been simply a series of coincidences. I’m sure mine has been. Sheer chance from beginning to end.’

Arnold Bennett - The Old Wives' Tale (1908)


It’s strange how something so familiar yet so mysterious is intimately woven into all of our lives. It’s one of those old and impossible questions – how much of my life was accidental? How much could have been otherwise? Begin totting it up and the answer becomes impossibly daunting.

My known history could begin in the nineteenth century with my great grandfather moving from Leicestershire to Derby to work on the railway. Or my great grandmother moving from Ulverston to Derby for unknown reasons. Before that – who knows? In the seventeenth century, maybe a young Jedidiah first glanced at Mary in church, seated in a nearby pew. But for that conjectural glance I’d never have existed.

Any life is an impossibly complex matrix of events which could have been different with different outcomes. How different we’ll never know because myriad lost possibilities didn’t happen. Chance meetings, major decisions, catching the wrong train, applying for the wrong job, applying for the right job, meeting the wrong person or staying at home a rainy day. Petty incidents, a few of which may have major personal consequences.


A hundred petty crimes or petty accidents will not strike the imagination of crowds in the least, whereas a single great crime or a single great accident will profoundly impress them, even though the results be infinitely less disastrous than those of the hundred small accidents put together.

Gustave Le Bon - The Crowd; study of the popular mind (1895)


Stir in genetic speculation and it becomes even more complex. Yet it isn’t necessary to wander through the futilities of a free will debate to see the issue clearly and personally because we are all extremely familiar with it.

An overweight young woman orders a coffee shop frappé. Listed as 400 calories but maybe she has what we call a sweet tooth. Her companion is a slim young woman who orders a skinny latte. Is this two dispositions from two genetic histories reacting to commercial temptation?

A school classroom, the pupils are bored by a teacher who cannot instil even a spark of enthusiasm which might at least benefit some. Why is he there, why is he a teacher? He drifted into it because… well his father was a teacher…

Lives governed by histories and controlling influences, we see them every day, but what do we do about it? Look the other way and keep it autonomous seems to be one answer. We’ve never warmed to the impersonal. 

We made this discovery years ago

King's Speech: Charles will have to announce measures we know he is bound to dislike

The cameras will be there to record any involuntary reactions and indications of dissent - yet he has practiced all his life to ensure there won't be. It will be one of the many moments he uses to show he understands what it means to be King...

The pressure will also be on because we all know he will have to announce - without flinching - measures we remember from his time as Prince of Wales that he is bound to dislike, rolling back some environmental protections close to his heart.


And now he made the cardinal discovery, which marks an epoch in the life of every man who arrives at it, that world-celebrated persons are very like other persons.

Arnold Bennett – The Old Adam (1913)

Inside

 

Via Bing AI - "create an image of a spooky Victorian living room"

G.J. in enumerating the disadvantages of the flat had said also that it was too much and too heavily furnished. Not at all. She adored the cumbrous and rich furniture; she did not want in her flat the empty spaces of a ball-room; she wanted to feel that she was within an interior — inside something.

Arnold Bennett – The Pretty Lady (1918)


I’ve sometimes wondered why the middle class Victorian and Edwardian interior décor was so crammed with furniture, knick-knacks, pictures, photos and general clutter. No doubt there were a number of reasons but in this quote, Bennett offers the idea that some people wished to feel they were within an interior — inside something.

Yet that feeling being inside something could apply to a school, public library, garden shed, tent or even a police station. Peering out of a window at rain, snow, fog or darkness or sitting by a flickering fire can accentuate the feeling too. Doesn’t necessarily need loads of furniture, although furnishings do accentuate the difference between inside and outside.

MPs in the House of Commons must feel they are inside something and not only a large building. Inside an institution, a club, a physical and institutional interior. Inside a party within that institution within that building within that gilded interior.

Walking the hills in wet weather gear, raindrops dripping from the peak of my hood, then there is a sense of being inside and outside at the same time. Dry and comfortable inside waterproof clothing yet outside too - out there in the hills.     

Maybe the quote also indicates how much more secure we feel compared to most people a century ago, particularly with respect to accommodation. At that time accommodation was much more likely to be rented, a common source of insecurity which has since declined and in a sense migrated as an issue from the social to the political.

I'm writing this inside of course. It's cold outside this morning - the forecast says rain is on the way. But I'm inside.