Happiness Is but a Dream

Cicero, Plotinus, John Ruskin, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, William Quan Judge · Living the Life Series · 10 pages

A ten-page compilation setting five authors on the same question, each under his own heading with its own page. The frontispiece is by Ulla Thynell. Two epigraphs open it, one from Byron on the bitter that bubbles up from the springs of joy, and one on decking the board with damask, cheer and wine.

The organising claim is given at the head — that without truth or ethics, happiness is a summer night's dream — and the five sections then supply the same conclusion from different directions and different centuries. Cicero comes first, then Plotinus, then Ruskin, then Blavatsky, then Judge; the arrangement is chronological rather than argumentative, and no attempt is made to reconcile them, which leaves the reader to notice how far apart their starting points are and how close their conclusions. The two epigraphs establish the tone before any of them speak: Byron's image of venom bubbling up through the flowers at the fount of joy, and the invitation to lay a fine table with the best cheer and mirth and wine — the second read against the first. The file is short and its sections are brief, so it functions as an anthology on one theme rather than as a treatment of it, and it sits with “Can there be joy without love?” in this same batch, which asks a neighbouring question in the form of a story.

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