The Girl Who Ruled Fairyland--For a Little While (Catherynne M. Valente)

Interesting prequel. I thought the end was a little too gruesome, but don't let this discourage you. You'll find out why Queen Mallow's sword was a needle, and a couple of surprising things about the Green Wind.

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Quotes:

I am a practical girl, and a life is only so long. It should be spent in as much peace and good eating and good reading as possible and no undue excitement.

But that is a battle story, and battle stories belong to those who fight them. How a battle feels is impossible to tell, except by nonsense: It felt like a long rip. It felt like a weight landing upon me, over and over. It felt like red. It felt like a bell unringing forever.

When God Talks Back: Understanding the American Evangelical Relationship with God (T.M. Luhrmann)

A great book, and a good read. I can't think of any other book which i can recommend equally to any religious or non-religious person who is curious to understand just what really happens in a Vineyard church.

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Quotes:

This book begins with a few simple questions. How does God become real for people? How are sensible people able to believe in an invisible being who has a demonstrable effect on their lives? And how can they sustain that belief in the face of what skeptical observers think must be inevitable disconfirmation? This book answers these questions by taking an outsider’s perspective into the heart of faith through an anthropological exploration of American evangelical Christianity.

Faith is hard because it is a decision to live as if a set of claims are real, even when one doubts: in the Christian case, that the world is good; that love endures; that you should live your life as if the promise of joy were at least a possibility.

Over the last few decades, this generation of Americans has sought out an intensely personal God, a God who not only cares about your welfare but worries with you about whether to paint the kitchen table.

We know that God is experienced in the brain as a social relationship. (Put someone in the scanner and ask them about God, and the same region of the brain lights up as when you ask them about a friend.)

At its heart, this is the dilemma of all human knowledge. We reach out to grasp a world we know to be more complex than our capacity to understand it, and we choose and act despite our awareness that what we take to be true may be an illusion, a wispy misperception.

I will argue that people learn specific ways of attending to their minds and their emotions to find evidence of God, and that both what they attend to and how they attend changes their experience of their minds, and that as a result, they begin to experience a real, external, interacting living presence.

to become a committed Christian one must learn to override three basic features of human psychology: that minds are private, that persons are visible, and that love is conditional and contingent upon right behavior.

Their Jesus is deeply human and playfully, magically supernatural.

What we have seen in the last four or five decades is the democratization of God—I and thou into you and me—and the democratization of intense spiritual experience, arguably more deeply than ever before in our country’s history.

That is the invitation: to experience God as if he were real in the flesh and standing by your side, with love. The challenge is to learn how to do that.

To an observer, what is striking is how hard people work to feel confident that the God who speaks to them in their mind is also the real external God who led the Jews out from slavery and died upon the cross.

At the beginning is the yearning.

And so already, in this first step, the congregant who seeks to experience God directly and immediately begins to tolerate uncertainty.

IF THE FIRST TASK in becoming able to experience God as an intimate friend is learning to recognize God in the privacy of one’s mind, the second task is learning to relate to God as a person.

In The God Delusion, the scientist Richard Dawkins states bluntly that we cannot choose to believe. C. S. Lewis thought that this was exactly what pretending enabled us to do.

In short, the congregants set out, at the church’s invitation, to treat God like an imaginary friend. When I asked people whether they experienced God as an imaginary friend, they usually rejected the word imaginary—and then accepted the comparison.

This is play, but it is a serious play: a play that cultivates the imagination for a serious end, precisely because congregants presume the basic claim of Christianity to be unbelievable, even foolish, in a modern, secular society.

The God of the renewalist evangelical church is not this cruel judge. The Vineyard took the basic Christian narrative about the distance between a limited human and a boundless mighty God and shifted the plotline from our inadequacy to God’s extraordinary capacity.

“crying in the presence of God.”

evangelicals support an ever more thriving community of Christian therapists who described their primary task as working with someone’s inner God-concept.

(it is an odd but obdurate fact that in my years as an anthropologist, I have heard several people describe intense spiritual experiences that took place on buses)

The difference between the joy of The Velveteen Rabbit and the joy of Christ is the enormous amount of work that these Christians do to allow the individual to experience the story not as a tale for children, which is never really true, but as a story that really is true, just not in an ordinary way, not yet.

It is one of the great paradoxes of Christianity that these moments, which secular outsiders can interpret as a capitulation to peer pressure and the taking on of prescribed rules and beliefs, are experienced, by someone like Sam, as sacred moments of exquisite freedom.

Nearly a quarter of the people I interviewed systematically at the church—six out of twenty-eight—told me, sometimes with discouraged voices, that they just didn’t hear God the way other people did.

There is what you might call a technology of prayer that centers on attention.2 That is, if you put to one side the theological purpose and supernatural efficacy of prayer, prayer changes the way the person praying uses his or her mind by changing the way that person pays attention. People learn to attend in specific, structured ways when they pray, and some people—the experts—become skilled at doing so.

There are two named styles of spiritual discipline within the Christian tradition: apophatic and kataphatic prayer.

More to the point, the via negativa can lead to spiritual transformation.

for many evangelicals, prayer rich in the images and stories of Christ, the via imaginativa, seems like a more appropriate form of prayer.

the medieval historian Mary Carruthers argues that in medieval monastic culture, contemplative prayer was primarily understood as a process of crafting thought. In this culture, she says, memory was understood not as a mirror of the past, or as a record of what has happened, but as a tool to make real what God desired.

To follow the exercises as Loyola gave them in the sixteenth century (more or less as they are now done), a participant must commit a full thirty days. One must move into a retreat house for a month and spend each day in silence, except for daily meetings with a “spiritual director.” The participant is expected to spend perhaps five hours a day in prayer, following specific, structured assignments.

Loyola, however, understood that there would be times when participants would enjoy the prayer process, and feel as if they could talk to God, and times when it would make them very unhappy and they couldn’t really believe that God was there to listen.

The point of religious conviction is that the everyday world is not all there is to reality; to see beyond, one must change the way one pays attention.

In fact, the kataphatic practice seemed to give people more of what the scriptures promise those who turn to Christ: peace and the presence of God.

Even in the United States, as many as 80 percent of those who have been bereaved will hear, see, or feel the person they have lost, and often that contact gives them comfort.

There is no single experience that is in itself intrinsically religious.

The anthropologist Richard Shweder says that when you take culture seriously, you must accept that we live in plural worlds, worlds made so distinctly in the interaction of peoples with one another that the most basic elements of human lives—to whom we respond emotionally, to what we recoil in moral disgust—will shift, so that it no longer makes sense to think about a shared world seen from different vantage points but of multiple worlds.

It’s not just about the brain—god spots, peak moments, and universal insights. Knowing God involves training, and it involves interpretation. Each faith—to some extent, each church—forms its own culture, its own way of seeing the world, and as people acquire the knowledge and the practices through which they come to know that God, the most intimate aspects of the way they experience their everyday world change. Those who learn to take God seriously do not simply interpret the world differently from those who have not done so. They have different evidence

It’s not just about the brain—god spots, peak moments, and universal insights. Knowing God involves training, and it involves interpretation. Each faith—to some extent, each church—forms its own culture, its own way of seeing the world, and as people acquire the knowledge and the practices through which they come to know that God, the most intimate aspects of the way they experience their everyday world change. Those who learn to take God seriously do not simply interpret the world differently from those who have not done so. They have different evidence for what is true. In some deep and fundamental way, as a result of their practices, they live in different worlds.

To the extent that prayer techniques can help make more real a loving God, they can also make more real a leering demon.

What we carry in our minds really can become our world if we encourage it and allow it to be present. That is the promise of faith and also its curse.

But the practices of faith within this kind of evangelical church make it possible for someone in trouble to learn to experience God as an internal source of comfort, whether or not the idea of God makes coherent logical sense.

The community is crucial, snarky as its members can be.

it takes a great deal of work for the community to teach people to develop these apparently private and personal relationships with God.

At the Vineyard, the community stood in for God when God seemed distant and particularly when he seemed unreal.

religion is not about explaining reality but about transforming it: making it possible to trust that the world is good, despite ample evidence to the contrary, and to hope, despite loneliness and despair.

The evangelical Christianity that emerged out of the 1960s is fundamentally psychotherapeutic. God is about relationship, not explanation, and the goal of the relationship is to convince congregants that their lives have a purpose and that they are loved.

How are Christians able to hold on to their faith despite the frank skepticism that they encounter again and again? The answer is that they understand their God in a way that adapts to the skepticism.

These stories of doubt and the fear of being foolish are an integral part of what it means to be an evangelical Christian.

“I don’t believe it but I’m sticking with it. That’s my definition of faith.”

And there is another factor that shapes the way the individual experiences God. That is the real presence of the divine. I have said that I do not presume to know ultimate reality. But it is also true that through the process of this journey, in my own way I have come to know God. I do not know what to make of this knowing. I would not call myself a Christian, but I find myself defending Christianity. I do not think of myself as believing in a God who sits out there, as real as a doorpost, but I have experienced what I believe the Gospels mean by joy.

In the end, this is the story of the uncertainty of our senses, and the complexity of our minds and world. There is so little we know, so much we take on trust. In a way more fundamental than we dare to appreciate, we each must make our own judgments about what is truly real, and there are no guarantees, for what is, is always cloaked in mystery.

The King Thing (Neil Bastian)

Written by a friend of a friend, i got this for free on Amazon. It turned out to be funny and gripping, i read it in less than 24 hours.

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Quotes:

I know it hasn’t gone to plan, but it’s working out better than we thought. I’ve got three hundred “Likes” on Facebook now.’

Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace)

Crazy long book, uneven, sometimes very funny, sometimes irritating. The lucid and honest portrait of addiction and recovery may explain why so many people describe this book as life-changing. Despite it's flaws, a must-read.

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Quotes:

Page by page, line by line, it is probably the strangest, most distinctive, and most involved work of fiction by an American in the last twenty years.

When you exit these pages after that month of reading, you are a better person.

I’m not a machine. I feel and believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting.

Another way fathers impact sons is that sons, once their voices have changed in puberty, invariably answer the telephone with the same locutions and intonations as their fathers. This holds true regardless of whether the fathers are still alive.

Macdonald Chair in Prescriptive Usage

‘Personnes à Qui On Doit Surveiller Attentivement’ List.

an experialist and waste-exporting nation that’s forgotten privation and hardship

A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:

Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely.

It’s a herd of feral hamsters,

‘Stop her! She stole my heart!’

Marlon Brando was the archetypal new-type actor who ruined it looks like two whole generations’ relations with their own bodies and the everyday objects and bodies around them.

CHRONOLOGY OF ORGANIZATION OF NORTH AMERICAN NATIONS’ REVENUE-ENHANCING SUBSIDIZED TIME™, BY YEAR

As the one particular tough old guy or lady you’re always particularly scared of and drawn to says, nobody ever Comes In because things were going really well and they just wanted to round out their P.M. social calendar. Everybody, but everybody Comes In dead-eyed and puke-white and with their face hanging down around their knees and with a well-thumbed firearm-and-ordnance mail-order catalogue kept safe and available at home, map-wise, for when this last desperate resort of hugs and clichés turns out to be just happy horseshit, for you. You are not unique, they’ll say: this initial hopelessness unites every soul in this broad cold salad-bar’d hall. They are like Hindenburg-survivors. Every meeting is a reunion, once you’ve been in for a while.

a quotation from President Gentle’s second Inaugural: ‘Let the call go forth, to pretty much any nation we might feel like calling, that the past has been torched by a new and millennial generation of Americans,’

‘The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.’

that horrible year Hal vaguely recalls when a nation became obsessed with the state of its tongue, when people would no sooner leave home without a tongue-scraper and an emergency backup tongue-scraper than they’d fail to wash and brush and spray.

everybody from Procter & Gamble to Tom’s of Maine had its own brand’s scraper out, some of them with baroque and potentially hazardous electronic extras.

Pat told Gately that grim honesty and hopelessness were the only things you need to start recovering from Substance-addiction, but that without these qualities you were totally up the creek. Desperation helped also, she said.

Pat had said it didn’t matter at this point what he thought or believed or even said. All that mattered was what he did. If he did the right things, and kept doing them for long enough, what Gately thought and believed would magically change.

Inman Square, too, is someplace Gately rarely goes anymore, because it’s in Cambridge’s Little Lisbon, heavily Portuguese, which means also Brazilians in the antiquated bellbottoms and flare-collared leisure suits they’ve never let go of, and where there are disco-ized Brazilians can cocaine and narcotics ever be far away.

YES, I’M PARANOID—BUT AM I PARANOID ENOUGH?

Haloperidol, McNeil Pharmaceutical, 5 mg./ml. pre-filled syringes: picture several cups of Celestial Seasonings’ Cinnamon Soother tea followed by a lead-filled sap across the back of the skull.

Saying this is bad is like saying traffic is bad, or health-care surtaxes, or the hazards of annular fusion: nobody but Ludditic granola-crunching freaks would call bad what no one can imagine being without.

The point here for the best kids is to inculcate their sense that it’s never about being seen. It’s never. If they can get that inculcated, the Show won’t fuck them up, Schtitt thinks. If they can forget everything but the game when all of you out there outside the fence see only them and want only them and the game’s incidental to you, for you it’s about entertainment and personality, it’s about the statue, but if they can get inculcated right they’ll never be slaves to the statue, they’ll never blow their brains out after winning an event when they win, or dive out a third-story window when they start to stop getting poked at or profiled, when their blossom starts to fade. Whether or not you mean to, babe, you chew them up, it’s what you do.’

They become celebrities instead of players, and because they are celebrities only as long as they feed the culture-of-goal’s hunger for the make-it, the winning, they are doomed, because you cannot both celebrate and suffer, and play is always suffering, just so.’

Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy—happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love—are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation.

U.S.A. recovery from the addictions was somewhat paramilitary in nature. There were orders and the obeying of orders.

‘IL NE FAUT PLUS QU’ON PURSUIVE LE BONHEUR’

‘I know of this meaning. I am spending a day to find someone I think my friends will kill, all the time I am awaiting the chance to betray my friends, and I come here and telephone to betray them and I see this bruised person who strongly resembles my wife. I think: Rémy, it is time for many drinks.’

Our club was called the Money-Stealers’ Club. At my suggestion we went with a descriptive name as opposed to euphemistic.

It seems like Don G.’s gotten way more popular as somebody to talk to since he’s become effectively paralyzed and mute.

tries to imagine what kind of impossible leap it would take to live that way all the time, by choice, straight: in the second, the Now, walled and contained between slow heartbeats.

Abiding. No one single instant of it was unendurable. Here was a second right here: he endured it. What was undealable-with was the thought of all the instants all lined up and stretching ahead, glittering.

I could hear faint sounds of early-morning weeping in certain rooms beyond my line of sight. Lots of the top players start the A.M. with a quick fit of crying, then are basically hale and well-wrapped for the rest of the day.

"Who Could That Be at This Hour?" (All the Wrong Questions) (Lemony Snicket)

I was expecting this to be a prequel to A Series of unfotunate events, but it's not, really. Instead, it's Daniel Handler's take on noir, driven by the perplexities of the interactions between children and adults, and styled on The Maltese Falcon. Once the initial shock is over, it's a fun book. Hoping for another successful series.

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Quotes:

“Adults never tell children anything.” “Children never tell adults anything either,” I said. “The children of this world and the adults of this world are in entirely separate boats and only drift near each other when we need a ride from someone or when someone needs us to wash our hands.”

“I’m reminded of a book my father used to read me,” she said. “A bunch of elves and things get into a huge war over a piece of jewelry that everybody wants but nobody can wear.” “I never liked that kind of book,” I replied. “There’s always a wizard who’s very powerful but not very helpful.”

Adventure (Jack London)

Not Jack's best work, but notable mostly for the unconventional heroine Joan Lackland. The book itself is a weird mixture of antiquated and modern world views. A good read after you struggle past the first couple of chapters.

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Quotes:

I was brought up the way most girls in Hawaii are brought up. They live in the open, and they know how to ride and swim before they know what six-times-six is.

"Mine was a business proposition, not a marriage proposal," she interrupted, coldly angry. "I wonder if somewhere in this world there is one man who could accept me for a comrade."

There are only three things I am afraid of—bumble-bees, scarlet fever, and chaperones.

Lost Horizon (James Hilton)

I decided to read this after seeing it quoted in The Geography of Bliss. I haven't seen the movie, but i remember both my parents talking about that. It was certainly important to them and many people in their generation. It is a beautiful book, possibly the model for many Star Trek episodes and many other books that came after it.

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Quotes:

Conway found himself quite unable to restrain an admiring glance at Miss Brinklow. She was not, he reflected, a normal person, no woman who taught Afghans to sing hymns could be considered so. But she was, after every calamity, still normally abnormal, and he was deeply obliged to her for it.

And as for the war, if you'd been in it you'd have done the same as I did, learned how to funk with a stiff lip."

Chang answered rather slowly and in scarcely more than a whisper: "If I were to put it into a very few words, my dear sir, I should say that our prevalent belief is in moderation. We inculcate the virtue of avoiding excess of all kinds--even including, if you will pardon the paradox, excess of virtue itself.

I can only add that our community has various faiths and usages, but we are most of us moderately heretical about them.

"The jewel has facets," said the Chinese, "and it is possible that many religions are moderately true."

His attitude may be summed up by saying that, as he had not died at a normal age, he began to feel that there was no discoverable reason why he either should or should not do so at any definite time in the future.

"Yet it is, nevertheless, a prospect of much charm that I unfold for you--long tranquillities during which you will observe a sunset as men in the outer world hear the striking of a clock, and with far less care. The years will come and go, and you will pass from fleshly enjoyments into austerer but no less satisfying realms; you may lose the keenness of muscle and appetite, but there will be gain to match your loss; you will achieve calmness and profundity, ripeness and wisdom, and the clear enchantment of memory. And, most precious of all, you will have Time--that rare and lovely gift that your Western countries have lost the more they have pursued it.

"Laziness in doing stupid things can be a great virtue,"

There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything; when one took things for granted merely because astonishment would have been as tedious for oneself as for others.

"It is significant," he said after a pause, "that the English regard slackness as a vice. We, on the other hand, should vastly prefer it to tension. Is there not too much tension in the world at present, and might it not be better if more people were slackers?"

Although we have no bigotry on the point, it is our custom at Shangri-La to be moderately truthful, and I can assure you that my statements about the porters were almost correct.

We are a single lifeboat riding the seas in a gale; we can take a few chance survivors, but if all the shipwrecked were to reach us and clamber aboard we should go down ourselves. . . .

I suppose the truth is that when it comes to believing things without actual evidence, we all incline to what we find most attractive."

The Good Husband of Zebra Drive (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) (Alexander McCall Smith)

In which Mr J L B Matekoni tries his hand as a detective, with mixed results.

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Quotes:

we cannot always choose whose lives will become entangled with our own; these things happen to us, come to us uninvited, and Mma Ramotswe understood that well.

Their words of farewell were polite—the correct ones, as laid down in the old Botswana customs. Tsamaya sentlê: go well. To which the reply was, Sala sentlê: stay well; mere words, of course, but when meant, as now, so powerful.

Great feuds often need very few words to resolve them. Disputes, even between nations, between peoples, can be set to rest with simple acts of contrition and corresponding forgiveness, can so often be shown to be based on nothing much other than pride and misunderstanding, and the forgetting of the humanity of the other—and land, of course.

Nice cars have nice drivers; bad cars have bad drivers. A person’s gearbox revealed everything that you could want to know about that person, thought Mr J.L.B. Matekoni.

The Order of Odd-Fish (James Kennedy)

This book is weird and awesome.

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Quotes:

A giant cockroach had walked into the room,

Ken Kiang started an ambitious program to ensure that all underprivileged schoolchildren had “postmodern yet easy-to-manage” hairstyles.

A phone call from Ken Kiang had summoned his “Fleet of Fury.” Ken Kiang had engineered the planes himself—sleek, terrifying machines, bristling with spikes and weaponry, the kind of planes that left no doubt about how evil their commander was.

“HERE’S to villainy!” cried Ken Kiang, lifting his glass. “Here’s to wicked work well wrought! Here’s to outrage, injustice! Violence and venom! Marvelous murderers and cutthroat criminals! I embrace you all, brothers! I’m one of you now!”

“It’s a very honorable and pointless tradition,”

“Puttering, Muddling, and Mucking About: An Inquiry into Idleness. Quite well known in the field.”

Actually, the Belgian Prankster hung out at the Country Kitchen in Muscatine, Iowa.

ZZZ, a massive-headed Brazilian physicist.

“‘She is the Ichthala,’

“What you recognize, Jo, are just your little corners of the world. The real world, the total reality of the world, is a thousand times larger than that. What you had thought of as your world—and what people in Eldritch City think of as their world—are just small, disconnected bits of the actual entire world. According to my theory, there are thousands of these regions, all hidden from each other. Most of the world is still unexplored!”

“As an Odd-Fish, it is not my job to be right,” said Sir Oort. “It is my job to be wrong in new and exciting ways.”

Ken Kiang wasn’t a hero in the sense that he would, say, save a child from a fire—the very notion nauseated him—but he was a hero in that he was willing to stake everything on a hopeless gamble.

Fortunately, most people are not exposed to the temptations that destroy souls, and so they muddle through their small lives harmlessly, a little frustrated but more or less content, enjoying the humdrum happiness that is the lot of the common man.

Any idiot can fire a gun and kill someone. It takes real evil to ruin a soul.

“Having an enemy is a delicate art. It demands dedication and a certain style. If you handle it right, it can even be good for you.

“Your words are as empty as your sting, Sleeping Bee!” retorted Zam-Zam. “Your feast shall be of the ashes of defeat, and on those, you shall feast heartily! Your corpse shall be torn to bits by my thousand children, who shall raise each morsel to their mouths, chew your disgraced innards with contemptuous joy, and excrete them with a smirk! I have spoken!”

For Ken Kiang, it was never enough to win. It was the verve, the showmanship, above all the arrogant stunt that mattered—the crucial cherry on top that said, “Not only have I won, but I won with enough leisure to toss in this final, outrageous flourish.”

One of his languages was based on tasting patterns of spices, so that books were read by eating them, page by page;

The Belgian Prankster lounged in a booth, surrounded by fawning psychoanalysts.

Jo stopped. She didn’t know what she was feeling. It wasn’t fear or hatred or even disgust. It was a horrible tingle of joy.

“I’m Aznath, the Silver Kitten of Deceit.”

“Outstanding Schwenkmanship, old boy!” roared Colonel Korsakov, slapping Ken Kiang on the back. “Never knew you had it in you! A top-drawer Schwenkrider, eh? You must tell me your secret!”

Although a disgrace to Eldritch City in general, and the Order of Odd-Fish in particular, it will be noted the butlers all wore irreproachable ascots.”

Many times, Ken Kiang had heard the saying “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” It would be too tidy to say that for Ken Kiang, the road to heaven was paved with bad intentions. Still, his intentions had always been the worst; yet now he was as close to happiness as he was ever likely to get.

The Geography of Bliss (Eric Weiner)

I liked this. It could have easily devolved into a series of national clichés (the British are glum, the Swiss are precise like their watches, etc). But Eric Weiner is a much better writer than that, he has extensive international pedigree, and genuinely cares about the people he meets in these different places. I recommend this one.

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Quotes:

I’ve always believed that happiness is just around the corner. The trick is finding the right corner.

I had no marketable skills, a stunted sense of morality, and a gloomy disposition. I decided to become a journalist.

We humans are creatures of the last five minutes. In one study, people who found a dime on the pavement a few minutes before being queried on the happiness question reported higher levels of satisfaction with their overall lives than those who did not find a dime.

“When Americans say it was great, I know it was good. When they say it was good, I know it was okay. When they say it was okay, I know it was bad.”

Believe it or not, most people in the world say they are happy. Virtually every country in the world scores somewhere between five and eight on a ten-point scale.

Worst of all was Freud. While not technically a brooding philosopher, Freud did much to shape our views on happiness. He once said: “The intention that Man should be happy is not in the plan of Creation.” That is a remarkable statement, especially coming from a man whose ideas forged the foundation of our mental-health system.

Rusty handled a bong the way Yo-Yo Ma handles a cello.

A sense of calm sneaks up on me, a feeling so unusual that, at first, I am startled by it. I don’t recognize it. But there’s no denying its presence. I am at peace.

A lot of Switzerland works on the honor system, like the little rest huts that dot the Alps. There’s food inside. You eat the food and leave some money behind.

Or consider this statement: “In general, people can be trusted.” Studies have found that people who agree with this are happier than those who do not.

One study found that, of all the factors that affect the crime rate for a given area, the one that made the biggest difference was not the number of police patrols or anything like that but, rather, how many people you know within a fifteen-minute walk of your house.

Choice translates into happiness only when choice is about something that matters.

Karma pauses one of his pauses and then answers with a suggestion, a prescription. “You need to think about death for five minutes every day. It will cure you, sanitize you.”

Compromise is a skill, and like all skills it atrophies from lack of use.

All of the moments in my life, everyone I have met, every trip I have taken, every success I have enjoyed, every blunder I have made, every loss I have endured has been just right. I’m not saying they were all good or that they happened for a reason—I don’t buy that brand of pap fatalism—but they have been right. They have been . . . okay. As far as revelations go, it’s pretty lame, I know. Okay is not bliss, or even happiness. Okay is not the basis for a new religion or self-help movement. Okay won’t get me on Oprah. But okay is a start, and for that I am grateful.

When Ambition is your God, the office is your temple, the employee handbook your holy book. The sacred drink, coffee, is imbibed five times a day. When you worship Ambition, there is no Sabbath, no day of rest. Every day, you rise early and kneel before the God Ambition, facing in the direction of your PC. You pray alone, always alone, even though others may be present. Ambition is a vengeful God. He will smite those who fail to worship faithfully, but that is nothing compared to what He has in store for the faithful. They suffer the worst fate of all. For it is only when they are old and tired, entombed in the corner office, that the realization hits like a Biblical thunderclap. The God Ambition is a false God and always has been.

France’s most famous epicure, Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, believed that food is the mirror to our souls: “Tell me what you eat, and I’ll tell you what you are.”

I don’t believe in such miracles, but others do, and my life is richer as a result.

happiness is a choice. Not an easy choice, not always a desirable one, but a choice nonetheless.

As a rule of thumb, the more fucked-up a country, the more said country insists on crisp bills.

And what are the cultural ingredients needed for democracy to take root? Trust and tolerance. Not only trust of those inside your group—family, for instance—but external trust. Trust of strangers. Trust of your opponents, your enemies, even.

The Soviets denied God’s existence yet tried to improvize a spirituality.

“Not my problem” is not a philosophy. It’s a mental illness.

In Britain, finding out someone’s name isn’t pro forma. It’s an accomplishment.

dogs and gardens, the two pillars of English happiness. Especially dogs.

Maybe this is how enlightenment happens. Not with a thunderclap or a bolt of lightning but as a steady drip, drip, drip until one day you realize your bucket is full.

There it is again: that Hindu belief that all of life is maya, illusion. Once we see life as a game, no more consequential than a game of chess, then the world seems a lot lighter, a lot happier.

Paradise is a moving target.

only a fool or a philosopher would make sweeping generalizations about the nature of happiness. I am no philosopher, so here goes: Money matters, but less than we think and not in the way that we think. Family is important. So are friends. Envy is toxic. So is excessive thinking. Beaches are optional. Trust is not. Neither is gratitude.

I wonder if happiness is really the highest good, as Aristotle believed. Maybe Guru-ji, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, is right. Maybe love is more important than happiness. Certainly, there are times when happiness seems beside the point. Ask a single, working mother if she is happy, and she’s likely to reply, “You’re not asking the right question.”

Karma Ura, the Bhutanese scholar and cancer survivor. “There is no such thing as personal happiness,” he told me. “Happiness is one hundred percent relational.”