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The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World

In the first Quarterly Essay for 2011, David Malouf returns to one of the most fundamental questions and gives it a modern twist: what makes for a happy life?

With grace and profundity, Malouf discusses new and old ways to talk about contentment and the self. In considering the happy life — what it is, and what makes it possible — David Malouf returns to the “highest wisdom” of the classics, looks at how, thanks to Thomas Jefferson’s way with words, happiness became a “right”, and examines joy in the flesh as depicted by Rubens and Rembrandt. In a world become ever larger and impersonal, he finds happiness in an unlikely place. This is an essay to savour and reflect upon by one of Australia’s greatest novelists.

  • Format
  • paperback
  • Pages
  • 95
  • Language
  • english
  • ISBN
  • 9781863955195
  • Genres
  • philosophy, australia
  • Release date
  • 2011