Bertrand Russell
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How to be Happy — Excerpt The Conquest of Happiness (1930) often cited as one of Bertrand Russell’s most accessible and favorite books.
“Whatever we may wish to think, we are creatures of Earth, our life is part of the life of the Earth; and we draw our nourishment from it just as the plants and animals do. The rhythm of Earth life is slow; autumn and winter are as essential to it as spring and summer, and rest is as essential as motion. To the child, even more than to the man, it is necessary to preserve some contact with the ebb and flow of terrestrial life. The human body has been adapted through the ages to this rhythm, and religion has embodied something of it in the festival of Easter.
I have seen a boy of two years old, who had been kept in London, taken out for the first time to walk in green country. The season was winter, and everything was wet and muddy. To the adult eye there was nothing to cause delight, but in the boy there sprang up a strange ecstasy; he kneeled in the wet ground and put his face in the grass, and gave utterance to half-articulate cries of delight. The joy that he was experiencing was primitive, simple and massive. The organic need that was being satisfied is so profound that those in whom it is starved are seldom completely sane.
Many pleasures, of which we may take gambling and drink as a good examples, have in them no element of this contact with Earth. Such pleasures, in the instant when they cease, leave a man feeling dusty and dissatisfied, hungry for he knows not what. Such pleasures bring nothing that can truly be called joy. Those, on the other hand, that bring us into contact with the life of the Earth have something in them profoundly satisfying; when they cease, the happiness that they have brought remains, although their intensity while they existed may have been less than that of more exciting dissipations.
The two-year-old boy whom I spoke of a moment ago displayed the most primitive possible form of union with the life of Earth. But in a higher form the same thing is to be found in poetry. What makes Shakespeare’s lyrics supreme is that they are filled with this same joy that made the two-year- old embrace the grass. Consider “Hark, hark, the lark”, or “Come unto these yellow sands”; you will find in these poems the civilized expression of the same emotion that in our two-year-old could only find utterance in inarticulate cries.
Or, again, consider the difference between love and mere sex attraction. Love is an experience in which our whole being is renewed and refreshed as is that of plants by rain after drought. In sex intercourse without love there is nothing of this. When the momentary pleasure is ended, there is fatigue, disgust, and a sense that life is hollow. Love is part of the life of Earth; sex without love is not. The special kind of boredom from which modern urban populations suffer is intimately bound up with their separation from the life of Earth. It makes life hot and dusty and thirsty, like a pilgrimage in the desert. A happy life must be to a great extent a quiet life, for it is only in an atmosphere of quiet that true joy can live.“
— Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness (1930), Ch. VI: Envy, p. 51
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The Conquest of Happiness (1930) pre-dates the modern genre of self-help and popular philosophy by decades. This work lays out Bertrand Russell's rationalist prescription for living a happy life, mainly the importance of cultivating interests outside oneself and the dangers of passive and base pleasure. Russell attempts to diagnose the myriad causes of unhappiness in modern life and chart a path out of the seemingly inescapable malaise so prevalent even in safe and prosperous modern societies.
Image: Bertrand Russell and John Conrad Russell (son of Bertrand Russell and Dora Black) vintage snapshot by Lady Ottoline Morrell, 1923.
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Blind Pigeon ·
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The best of all self-help books, in my opinion… so much in modern therapy is a recipe for self-absorption, when by contrast, forgetting oneself is what brings happiness, especially when one can work at what one likes.
Sreela Baruah
Such a profound analysis of a life of fulfilment & futility
Simon Azzopardi
The child Russell mentioned had just experienced the exhilaration of seeing something for the first time. Russell realised that to be happy, we adults must see nature through childlike eyes.
Avadhanam Raghu Kumar ·
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Excellent excerpt from Russell's thoughts. Russell was something different from many philosophers. A great intellectual who could yet retain the human being in him.
