Read an Excerpt
Happiness
A History
By Darrin M. McMahon
Grove Atlantic, Inc.
Copyright © 2005
Marrin M. McMahonAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8021-4289-3
Chapter One
As places where fun could be had, the pleasure gardens were forbearers of our modern
amusement parks, offering games and recreation, spectacles and refreshments, music and
sanctuaries, in which lovers could stroll. They put flesh on the new endorsement of
pleasure expressed in theory by the likes of Locke, symbolizing perfectly a wider
eighteenth-century aspiration to create space for happiness on earth. To dance, to sing, to
enjoy our food, to revel in our bodies and the company of others-in short, to delight in a
world of our own making-was not to defy God's will but to live as nature had intended.
This was our earthly purpose. As the poet Alexander Pope declared in his celebrated
lines:
Oh, happiness, our being's end and aim!
Good, pleasure, ease, content! Whate'er thy name:
That something still which prompts the eternal sigh,
For which we bear to live, or dare to die ...
"Does not everyone have a right to happiness?" asked the abbé Pestré, the author of the
entry on that subject in the French encyclopedia edited by Denis Diderot. Judged by the
standards of the preceding millennium and a half, the question was extraordinary: a right
to happiness? And yet it was posed rhetorically, in full confidence of the noddingassent
of enlightened minds.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Happiness
by Darrin M. McMahon
Copyright © 2005 by Marrin M. McMahon.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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