Felicity

Earlier this year, I was captivated by Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies, a book by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre.  Let me share some excerpts from her chapter titled "Love Words."

"Felicity is a kind of happiness our culture does not, on the whole, promote: something like rational contentment, entailing acceptance, considered compromise, and self-knowledge."

"Happiness of this kind is, in fact, more a point of view than a state of affairs."

"But felicity includes something beyond simple contentment.  Felicity not only accepts what is, acknowledging and cheerfully submitting to the limitations of one's condition: it also unabashedly wills and seeks pleasure.  Its pleasures are more subtle than sensational.  Felicity comes in lively, sustained conversation; in long walks on which one notices small changes in the landscape; in the silent companionship of an old friend or partner; in serving a good inner to a family one loves."

"I think of felicity as a sign of wisdom."

"A felicitous word choice is one that so precisely names an idea or experience that it produces for the reader or hearer a shock of recognition, a surprised 'Yes! That's it!" and a gratifying sense of having put two interlocking pieces of a puzzling world perfectly in place."

"Precision of expression is neither taught nor appreciated in a culture that has prostituted language in the service of propaganda.  To the degree that we consent to cheap hyperbole, flip slogans, and comfortably unexamined claims, we deprive ourselves of the felicity of expression that brings things worth looking at into focus -- things like happiness, for instance, which comes so much clearer and seems so much richer when we see it displayed in an array of colors: merriment, blitheness, gaiety, delight, contentment, joy, bliss, felicity itself....We can fall prey to the flattening of words and experience, and so diminish the variety and quality of happiness, or we can retrieve the words that name the forms of happiness that are worth pursing and, by returning them to good and careful use, rediscover felicity."

McEntyre challenged me on many levels, including the value of using language with care, choosing interesting, specific, descriptive words rather than relying on easy hackneyed phrases, and recognizing that our language and life experience are inextricably interconnected.

I invite you to join me in pursuit of felicity, in words and in life.