"In Pursuit of Happiness"

We think happiness or “the pursuit of it” is a god-given experience shared by all mankind throughout history. Doesn’t our “Declaration of Independence” list it as a human condition to be sought after by all?

In his book, “Happiness, A History”, the author, Darrin M. McMahon, traces the origin and the growth of this peculiar human desire. The caveman and other subsistence-living humans didn’t give it much thought as they were more concerned about eating and not being eaten themselves. With all those hungry critters just outside the cave, how could one give much thought to happiness?

McMahon’s story begins in ancient Greece with the philosophers who had enough food and leisure to devote time to a new concept. These thinkers related happiness to luck. Sometimes luck and good fortune were with you and happiness resulted. When the harvests were good and there were no invading armies poised to attack, life was great. In bleak times when plagues, famines, and wars—or a combination of the three-- were ever present, who thought much about happiness? Survival was the natural instinct that prevailed.

For the Greeks, and later the Romans, and then the Christians, true happiness did not exist on terra firma. Instead, it was a condition of the afterlife---provided you earned it.

It wasn’t until the eighteenth century—the time of the “Enlightenment”--- that European writers and philosophers began to rhapsodize about an earthly happiness to be enjoyed by all. By the time of the American Revolution it had became an “entitled” human condition.

In the mid to late nineteenth century, utopians experimented with new forms of governments and societies to eliminate misery and extend happiness to all. Socialists and Communists rooted out the bourgeois, the clerics, and the landed royalty to establish new societies. With few exceptions tyranny and oppression, rather than happiness, prevailed.

Today, our own personal happiness is of great importance to each of us and we try to find it through religion, materialism, sex, drugs, and every new experience under the sun, now classified as “new age”. Happiness continues to be illusive. It is hoped that by reading this book our readers will momentarily find a source of enjoyment---maybe even happiness.

Recent donations to the Library Foundation include memorials from Mr and Mrs. Dick Luebbe and Shirley L. Thompson in memory of Mel Deyke. Jeanette Olson presented a donation in memory of Astrid J. Eggli. Mr. and Mrs. Craig Kucera remembered Marian Erwin with a memorial donation.

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