How! Are you always happy? I don’t know what to say… What you are now saying makes me feel a bit uneasy, kind of disappointed of myself…
And that’s why it necessitates – I tell you, I cannot help it – to me that feeling for you… that feeling that I so much loath… That feeling that I could never tolerate it being felt for me by anybody, and I most sincerely wish I’d neither ever feel it for anybody else, because I love humans – but I tell you, I cannot help it. What you are saying compels me to feel for you an overwhelming pity. Why, because you have never been happy.
You can indeed be certain of this. How could you possibly know what happiness is if you have nothing to distinguish it from? Don’t you grasp that the universe is composed of opposites? Think… Would there be white if there was no black? Would there be anything big if there wasn’t anything smaller to compare it to? Would there be darkness in the universe if there was no light to contrast it?
Likewise, would the human mind ever be in need, or even able at all, to perceive the feeling of satiation if not that of hunger? Would man ever conceive the idea of awakeness if he needed not to sleep? Would he ever device a name for any thing if not to be grasped separately from some other thing? Would there be happiness if there was no sorrow, pain, distress or any other feeing which is not happiness?
Imagine… If we could only perceive a bidimensional world, we would never perceive the idea of tallness or shortness, though we could possibly speculate upon and speak of it! Exactly as astrophysicists today speak of ten – or I don’t know how many – dimensions. However that doesn’t mean that they perceive them, and they definitely do not! They only speculate upon them vaguely and conventionally, hinted by an external source, namely, in this case, mathematics.
By the exact same manner, hinted by his language tutors, a born blind man will speak of white or black, bright or dark, but he definitely cannot perceive them. So you too, you speak of happiness, but only vaguely and conventionally, you are emotionally blind!
But you are not congenitally blind… Like a man whose organs of sight are perfectly functional but is his whole life imprisoned in a dark cell, you, also, out of fear and cowardice, you have confined yourself on a tiny barren island amidst the immense ocean of human emotions. You may occasionally receive hints of emotions in the form of a lifeless message in a bottle, washed ashore your narrow little beach, but you have never surfed the waves yourself… You have never experienced any emotion.
There, on your tiny little barren island, there are no emotions. There is only misery and blunt existence, barely existence at all. Out there, in the vast ocean, there is the unknown… There is emotional chaos. Out there, across the unknown ocean and along its haphazard currents lies tormenting sorrow, unbearable pain, cataclysms of tears, burdensome depression and distress of any imaginable or unimaginable kind… Out there lies hell!
It is only out there, though, you may also find your paradise. Out there, only, somewhere far beyond the horizon, after long wanderings along the unpredictable currents, and past many violent storms, a lot of scurvy suffering, Symplegades, Scylles and Charybdes, where your paradisal green island lies. There is happiness! Happiness of the real, profound kind! Such of which you have no power to imagine. Such a happiness, of which if you were to inhale a tiny bit more it’d suffocate you.
But I warn you… it may not last. Some day, all of a sudden and out of nothing, you may find your paradise submerged into the abyss of the ocean, yourself utterly alone and desolate struggling to remain afloat. But I assure you, somewhere out there lies again another paradise. And I further assure you that if you were to experience two seconds of such a happiness every fifty years, it would make it worth to live a thousand lives of torture.
There! Look! There lies a raft!
Do you want to be happy?
