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The Lunation Cycl...
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Pascal Bruckner
“Let everyone be left free not to be happy without feeling ashamed, or to be happy episodically as one sees fit. Issue no decisions, make no laws, impose nothing. If we do not want a legitimate aspiration to degenerate into a collective punishment, we must treat the pitiless idol of happiness with the most extreme disrespect.”
Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

Pascal Bruckner
“Even if I lead the most stunted, lethargic life, I still have the feeling of being caught up in an unprecedented whirlwind that has to be slowed before I can do anything else. Trying to escape the busyness that arises from the emptiness of life by resorting to still more emptiness, that is the vicious circle that threatens us. Whereas in our colorless lives we need tranquility less than authentic activities, important and meaningful events, dazzling moments that prostrate us or transport us. Time, that great thief, is constantly stealing from us; but it is one thing to be robbed magnificently and to grow old in the awareness that one has lived a full and rich life, and it is another to be cheaply gnawed away, hour by hour, for things that we have not even known. Our contemporaries' hell is called platitude. The paradise they seek is called plenitude. Some have lived; the others have simply endured.”
Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

Pascal Bruckner
“Our societies put into the category of the pathological what other cultures consider normal - the preponderance of pain - and put into the category of the normal and even the necessary what others see as exceptional - the feeling of happiness. The question is not whether we are more or less happy than our ancestors: our conception of happiness has changed, and to change utopias is to change constraints. But we are probably living in the world's first societies that make people unhappy not to be happy.”
Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

Pascal Bruckner
“Today, luxury resides in everything that is becoming rare: communion with nature, silence, meditation, slowness rediscovered, the pleasure of living out of step with others, studious idleness, the enjoyment of the major works of the mind - these are all privileges that cannot be bought because they are literally priceless.”
Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

Pascal Bruckner
“Instead of admitting that happiness is an art of the indirect that is achieved or not through secondary goals, it is presented as if it were an immediately accessible objective, and recipes are provided. Whatever the method chosen, psychic, somatic, chemical, spiritual, or computer-based, the presupposition is everywhere the same: contentment is within your reach, all you have to do is undergo a "positive conditioning," an "ethical discipline" that will lead you to it. This amounts to an astonishing inversion of the will, which seeks to establish its protectorate over psychic states and feelings that are traditionally outside its jurisdiction. It wears itself our trying to change what does not depend on it (at the risk of not dealing with what can be changed).”
Pascal Bruckner, Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

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