What does it mean to be happy? Americans have had an obsession with the pursuit of happiness ever since the Founding Fathers enshrined it--along with life and liberty--as our national birthright. Whether it means the accumulation of wealth or a more vaguely understood notion of self-fulfillment or self-actualization, happiness has been an inevitable, though elusive, goal.But it is hard to separate real happiness from the banal self-help version that embraces mindless positive thinking. And though we have two booming happiness industries--religion, with its promise of salvation, and psychopharmacology, with its promise of better living through chemistry--each comes with its own problems and complications.In Seven Pleasures, Willard Spiegelman takes a look at the possibilities for achieving ordinary secular happiness without recourse to either religion or drugs.
