Scraps: "A Number of Days"

Ecstasy, low happiness, joy, exultation, satisfaction.

I sought the sky tonight. I sought the clearer darkness away from the city, to find stars more distant, and there I found myself in a broad sky looking up, thinking that in ecstacy there is need for such vastness. Around my teeth and tongue I rolled the new knowledge, what soon after moving I had suspected would be: that I am now happier than I have ever been in my life. Though still lonely, still a creature whose paths traverse emptiness. I should fill that void by traversing its entirety, but a needed rotation intervenes. I am sorry you stars my friends, but I need the daytime as well!

...that my triumph is not mine alone: that this is a happiness of the time after an end, after a landing. I cannot claim it as mine because I am already beyond it.

...finding a place of beauty, to prowl there... I can only rediscover joy.

Scraps: "Happiness"

Note: I'm just grabbing the most interesting and/or coherent parts from these abandoned text files and deleting the rest. Don't expect it all to be stuff I still believe... or even, for that matter, stuff I can still explain. :P

It has been the mistake of everyone cradling a new insight, everyone who has followed a new path to its end, to stand in that new place and claim happiness.

Happiness is structural. It is an emotional correspondence to the relationships between one's parts and one's whole. What are the kinds of unhappiness, then...

It is a petty set of constraints under which can a life be optimized.

One can never go so astray as one can in adopting a metaphor.

The question of happiness is now an abusive one. To ask after happiness is to advance a two-pronged scrutiny, half of the scrutiny the probing of the questioner, who after all must have a reason to ask, and half the sudden need of the person asked to both evaluate and express himself. Are you happy? And can you ask the question without every answer preemptively rejected?