I have been examining the subject of happiness because the thesis for my critical paper on The Stranger was that defining or looking for happiness is one theme of Camus’s book. This was/is an iconoclastic idea and I am thrashing around with it. While existentialism finds its famous expression in the book I think that the case can be made for a more mundane statement—that the protagonist is just looking to be happy.
What have discovered is that there is a whole new publishing industry on happiness. It’s a big subject for researchers. Here’s a title I ran onto this weekend: Happiness Around the World: The paradox of happy peasants and miserable millionaires by Carol Graham. Or here’s what Goeorge Akerlof, a Nobel laureate in Economics, Koshland Profesor of Economics, University of California at Berkeley says in a book review on amazon: “Most of us could not imagine what it would be like to live in Afghanistan. But Afghans are happier, at least by a little bit, than the average for the world as a whole. They, like poeple everywhere, are tremendously adaptable, and magage to smile even though the worst of it.” (www.amazon.com/Happiness-
