"When your longings center on things such
that sharing them apportions less to each [party],
then envy stirs the bellows of your sighs.

But if the love within the Highest Sphere
should turn your longings heavenward, the fear
inhabiting your breats would disappear;

for there, the more there are who would say 'ours,'
so much the greater is the good possessed
by each--so much more love burns in that cloister."

Purgatorio VI.49-57

I realized the other day that human happiness is not a commodity that decreases when others have it. I think that often we see other people who are happy and we might be tempted to think that we are missing out or that we somehow now are less happy because they are happy. I think everyone can be happy in their own way, with their own talents, and with their own futures that lie ahead of them. We have tough breaks for sure, but if we realize that we the reservoir of human happiness is bottomless, our feelings would be more in line with the above quote. A love that is turned "heavenward."

Kinetic Happiness

Before I share this quote I have to explain a bit. Kinetic happiness, or pleasure, is the type of happiness that we get from a pleasurable change of state. Katastematic pleasure is thus pleasure from undergoing no-change, or being in a state of satisfaction. If I have a stomache ache, and then it subsides, that change is kinetic happiness. Soon thereafter I enter a state of Katastematic Happiness. Okay, the quote:

"We often do seek kinetic pleasures and katastematic satisfactions of the first sort. It seems to be a natural preoccupation with us, for we invent problems to solve; we play games. If there are no challenges, we quickly invent some. We enjoy the kinetic pleasures and the katastematic satisfactions of the first sort which accompany such activities. We even endure the pains of love because of the immense kinetic pleasures and first order katastematic satisfactions which great passions promise. Yet Epicureans 'do not believe that the wise man will fall in love...'" (David B. Suits)

I have to think more about this quote. I think it is significant though. I'll probaby edit this post later.

Beauty

Beauty is an experience, nothing else. It is not a fixed pattern or an arrangement of features. It is something felt, a glow or a communicated sense of fineness.
~ D. H. Lawrence~

I was at work the other day working on a spread sheet of addresses that needed to be organized. When I began it was a cluttered, unorganized mass of black letters and numbers on a white background. After working for an hour or two they were all arranged in nice rows. I said out loud "How beautiful!" I quickly realized that my perception of beauty might not be shared by a passerby. His first reaction to a few lines of letters and numbers on a computer screen might not be to praise the transcendant beauty of such a cyber sight. Nonetheless, to me it was beautiful. Why? I had seen the beginning and the end product. I had put effort into it. I realized that I had found an important element of humanity's perception of beauty: The difference between the beginning and the end. A possession in your home may be quite ugly but it may represent something to you. Something from your past, your life. Something that you have put effort into to. This gives the object a quality which the most dazzling aesthetics could never give. The couple, bent low by age, wrinkled beyond recognition after 50 years of marriage may not present a stereotypical view of aesthetic beauty, but to themselves, they who have endured together, lived together, worked together, raised children together, maybe even fought each other but still love. To them the beauty of their togetherness surpasses any and all beauty which dazzles the eye.