I've been reading The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell. It is a brilliant book by a brilliant man, combining psychology, history, philosophy, sociology, and other disciplines to diagnose the modern, human condition. Here's an excerpt from page 114:
"The happiness of my gardener is of the same species; he wages a perennial war against rabbits, of which he speaks exactly as Scotland Yard speaks of Bolsheviks; he considers them dark, deigning and ferocious, and is of opinion that they can only be met by means of a cunning equal to their own. Like the heroes of Valhalla who spent every day hunting a certain wild boar, which they killed every evening but which miraculously came to life again in the morning, my gardener can slay his enemy one day without any fear that the enemy will have disappeared the next day. Although well over seventy, he works all day and bicycles sixteen hilly miles to and from his work, but the fount of joy is inexhaustible, and it is "they rabbits" that supply it."
and later..
"What joy can we experience in waging war on such puny creatures as rabbits? The argument, to my mind, is a poor one. A rabbit is very much larger than a yellow fever bacillus, and yet a superior person can find happiness in making war upon the latter. Pleasures exactly similar to those of my gardener so far as their emotional content is concerned are open to the most highly educated people."
Russell's inherent hedonism does keep me from subscribing wholesale to his ideas, but he is, nonetheless, insightful and instructive.
