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[Canadian novelist Robertson Davies said in an interview that happiness is a byproduct of liking what you do. He certainly wasn’t using the word “happiness” in the strong sense, namely, a self-supporting state of the mind and the emotions. In his Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau describes an experience of happiness that bears no relation to Davies’s definition. Many people can relate to the experience or mood that Rousseau describes. Some cannot.]

At this moment began the short happiness of my life, those peaceful and rapid moments, which have given me a right to say, I have lived. Precious and ever-regretted moments! Ah! recommence your delightful course; pass more slowly through my memory, if possible, than you actually did in your fugitive succession. How shall I prolong, according to my inclination, this recital at once so pleasing and simple? How shall I continue to relate the same occurrences, without wearying my readers with the repetition, any more than I was satiated with the enjoyment? Again, if all this consisted of facts, actions, or words, I could somehow or other convey an idea of it; but how shall I describe what was neither said nor done, nor even thought, but enjoyed, felt, without being able to particularize any other object of my happiness than the bare idea? I rose with the sun, and was happy; I walked, and was happy; I saw Madam de Warrens, and was happy; I quitted her, and still was happy!—Whether I rambled through the woods, over the hills, or strolled along the valley; read, was idle, worked in the garden, or gathered fruits, happiness continually accompanied me; it was fixed on no particular object, it was within me, nor could I depart from it a single moment.

Nothing that passed during that charming epocha, nothing that I did, said, or thought, has escaped my memory. The time that preceded or followed it, I only recollect by intervals, unequally and confused; but here I remember all as distinctly as if it existed at this moment. Imagination, which in my youth was perpetually anticipating the future, but now takes a retrograde course, makes some amends by these charming recollections for the deprivation of hope, which I have lost forever. I no longer see anything in the future that can tempt my wishes, it is a recollection of the past alone that can flatter me, and the remembrance of the period I am now describing is so true and lively, that it sometimes makes me happy, even in spite of my misfortunes.

Of these recollections I shall relate one example, which may give some idea of their force and precision. The first day we went to sleep at Charmettes, the way being up-hill, and Madam de Warrens rather heavy, she was carried in a chair, while I followed on foot. Fearing the chairmen would be fatigued, she got out about half-way, designing to walk the rest of it. As we passed along, she saw something blue in the hedge, and said, “There’s some periwinkle in flower yet!” I had never seen any before, nor did I stop to examine this: my sight is too short to distinguish plants on the ground, and I only cast a look at this as I passed: an interval of near thirty years had elapsed before I saw any more periwinkle, at least before I observed it, when being at Cressier in 1764, with my friend, M. du Peyrou, we went up a small mountain, on the summit of which there is a level spot, called, with reason, Belle-vue; I was then beginning to herbalize;—walking and looking among the bushes, I exclaimed with rapture, “Ah, there’s some periwinkle!” Du Peyrou, who perceived my transport, was ignorant of the cause, but will some day be informed, I hope, on reading this. The reader may judge by this impression, made by so small an incident, what an effect must have been produced by every occurrence of that time.

[The following passage is from Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography Chronicles of Wasted Time: Vol. 2, 1973. The Earl of Willingdon was Viceroy of India from 1931 to 1936.]

The only member of Willingdon’s Government I got to know well and like was P.J. Grigg, the Finance Member. We began—as almost everyone did in dealing with P.J.—with a ferocious row; in my case, over some articles I had written in the Statesman about India’s fiscal policy, which, I argued at some length, was subordinated to British interests. After a slanging match between the two of us, we became friends, and remained so to the end of P.J.’s life. He was a strange, irascible, infinitely kind man, who from humble origins had risen to be a senior civil servant, and then was sent to India, where he had political responsibilities for which he had little aptitude, and administrative ones at which he was superbly competent. Life induced in him a more or less permanent condition of irritation, which he vented on anyone who happened to be around; especially his wife Gertrude, a stately lady, daughter of a bishop, who loved him dearly and proudly, and accepted his strictures with equanimity, while quietly working away at translating books into braille. She looked rather like a pantomime dame herself, and together they put up a wonderful comic turn. To P.J.’s great credit, the various prizes he had worked for—his professional advancement, his KCB [a British Honour], his familiarity with the great (he had been private secretary to both Lloyd George and Churchill), his easy financial circumstances, his directorships, his wine cellar and library and other such amenities—failed to give him any lasting satisfaction. To the end of his days he was looking for something else, but never, I think, found it; anyway, dying still irascible. Thinking of him—and of myself, for that matter—I draw comfort from Pascal’s saying that to look for God is to find Him.

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