Idea of Happiness

Happiness memorizes ‘itself’ through certain areas from ones past belongings. It is tied to the memory of that particular place, yet happiness itself, to its core, is a wholesome category. It is an ideational object, people sought for. It is an object of random search. As it is a category of holistic pattern, its sensibilities are always in contradiction with its particular emblematic vocation. It refers to personal life. Yet, this very personal reference of happiness is in vogue over the idea of happiness, in its holistic mode of utterance. Happiness writes itself through particular nodal points of individual nomenclature. In the holistic modes of utterance of happiness, it is individual human’s nodal points through which we can delineate the idea of happiness. In the mode of human life, these nodal curvature are the precise points through which the shape of happiness appears. Yet, happiness is a mode ‘in-itself’. So, there is a fundamental aporia in the modal expression of happiness. So, the idea of happiness, being modal, in its exegetic form, contradicts itself. Particularity overwhelms the universal. There emerges a deep abyss within the notion of happiness. In our true life, happiness has its spatial connotation. We try to denote it, as we certainly think that we will find our true home of happiness as we had experienced it in past, tied to a specific place. But, the corrosive time! Time displaces the nodal exponency from the past. We delineate through it. Then we try to emulate the past, yet future arrives. The con newness strives to us. We overlook. “Where are the snows of yesteryear? “. Yesterday starts homing in the con newness which arrives at our true life. Yesterday’s modal expressivity is now agog and mingled with newness, its new nodal points of delimiting true happiness. Happiness now emerges as a conglomeration of old modes in its totality and new nodal particularity. It is now an alloy, intermingling with truth from past and future. We arrive at the gate. New curvature appears within the modal truth of happy being.

I am indebted to Gayatri C. Spivak for this article. It also refers to T.W. Adorno’s short discussion on Happiness in Negative Dialectics (1966).

Jeet Bhattacharya
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