Is there a place for happiness in all this? There certainly should be. It can’t be ignored that happiness exists; too many people have experienced happiness for themselves and seen it in others. But once Schopenhauer admits that happiness exists, there is a risk that his pessimism will start to unravel. Even if it’s true that every living thing must encounter suffering, this suffering might be offset by finding some amount of happiness too. Some suffering might be the means to a happiness worth having or even a part of such happiness. If this is so, then Schopenhauer hasn’t yet given us a good reason not to want to exist. Happiness might make life worth living after all.
Textbooks were designed to distribute essential curriculum under any circumstances. This is “any circumstances.” During normal schooling, textbooks are one tool of many that a skilled teacher can draw upon, but right now, with so many other tools difficult or impossible to implement, they are essential.
“Summer” is a prose poem in praise of memory, forgiveness, getting the joke and seizing the moment. “Whatever age you are,” one character comments, “you still die too young.”
Set over a long summer’s weekend in a university town in the US midwest, Brandon Taylor’s crisply narrated first novel – one of eight debuts up for this year’s Booker prize – dramatises the blind (and not so blind) prejudice endured by its class-crossing black protagonist, Wallace, a gay postgraduate biochemist raised in the deep south.
It is a paradox of social media that although we are inundated at all times with the thoughts and opinions and activities of everyone we’ve ever known, we can never unequivocally know why. What a person is thinking, why they said what they did, why they chose that exact punctuation, what their hope was for this small bit of output. Emma Jane Unsworth’s new novel, “Grown Ups,” grants you precisely that voyeuristic look into the hideous unseen machinations behind the posts. And it is deeply unsettling.
In the language of flowers // I am the one who says // fuck you
I won’t be anyone’s nosegay // this Mary is her own // talking bouquet