Today I shall not paraphrase La Rochefoucauld (as here) but, discounting the difficulties involved in translating an aphorist, quote him exactly: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us examine how happy those are who already possess it."
If good writing expresses memorably large truths in few words then not many of all the sentences ever written are better than that one. Thoreau, in Walden, wrote that "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"--a contender for the same title and, in subject matter and acuity of vision, an obvious cousin.
Who is not afflicted? Reading Coetzee on Beckett in The New York Review, an unlikely victim swings into view:
One of the more unexpected of [Beckett's] literary enthusiams is for Samuel Johnson. Struck by the "mad terrified face" in the portrait by James Barry, he comes up in 1936 with the idea of turning the story of Johnson's relationship with Hester Thrale into a stage play. It is not the great pontificator of Boswell's Life who engages him, as [his] letters make clear, but the man who struggled all his life against indolence and the black dog of depression. In Beckett's version of events, Johnson takes up residence with the much younger Hester and her husband at a time when he is already impotent and therefore doomed to be a "Platonic gigolo" in the menage a trois. He suffers first the despair of "the lover with nothing to love with," then heartbreak when the husband dies and Hester goes off with another man.
[Snip]
In the confident public man who privately struggles against listlessness and depression, who sees no point in living yet cannot face annihilation, Beckett clearly detects a kindred spirit.
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