'a seeming / and after that turning away'

CHORUS

STROPHE

O generations of men, how I
count you as equal with those who live
not at all!
What man, what man on earth wins more
of happiness than a seeming
and after that turning away?
Oedipus, you are my pattern of this,
Oedipus, you and your fate!
Luckless Oedipus, whom of all men
I envy not at all.

—Sophocles, Oedipus the King (c. 427 B.C.; trans. D. Grene 1942)

'mute and secret fires'

I rose, went to the window, and stood there till morning . . . the lightning did not cease for an instant. It was what the peasants call a Sparrow Night. I looked at the silent, sandy stretch, at the dark mass of the Neskootchny Gardens, at the yellowish façades of distant buildings which seemed to quiver too, with each faint flash. I gazed, and could not tear myself away. This silent lightning, this controlled light, seemed to answer to the mute and secret fires which were blazing within me. Morning began to dawn. The sky was stained crimson. As the sun rose, the lightning became fainter and less frequent; the flashes came more and more seldom, and finally ceased, drowned in the clear and unambiguous light of the rising day. And the flashes within me died down too. I felt weary and at peace, but the image of Zinaida still hovered triumphant over my soul, though even this image seemed more tranquil. Like a swan rising from the grasses of the marsh, it stood out from the unlovely shapes which surrounded it, and I, as I fell asleep, in parting for the last time clung to it, in trusting adoration.

Oh, gentle feelings, soft sounds, the goodness and the gradual stilling of a soul that has been moved; the melting happiness of the first tender, touching joys of love—where are you? Where are you?

—Ivan Turgenev, First Love (1860, trans. I. Berlin 1950)

'the thin shoots of some new desire'

Afterward, our protestations of love poured forth simultaneously, linguistically complex and metaphorically rich: I daresay we had become poets. We were allowed to lie there, limbs intermingled, for nearly an hour. It was bliss. It was perfection. It was that impossible thing: happiness that does not wilt to reveal the thin shoots of some new desire rising from within it.

—George Saunders, "Escape from Spiderhead," Tenth of December (2013)

'a happiness so fraught by an awareness of its brevity'

Things were going so well with Leonard, the mood was so promising—even the weather lending a hand because, after they finished their food and left the diner, walking back to campus, a March drizzle forced them to share Madeleine’s collapsible umbrella—that a feeling came over her like those she’d had as a girl when treated to a pastry or a dessert, a happiness so fraught by an awareness of its brevity that she took the tiniest bites, making the cream puff or éclair last as long as possible. In this same way, instead of seeing where the afternoon led, Madeleine decided to check its progress, to save some for later, and she told Leonard she had to go home and study.

—Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (2011)

'I have an unfortunate disposition'

“‘Now look here, Maksim Maksimich,’ he [Pechorin] answered, ‘I have an unfortunate disposition: whether it is my upbringing that made me thus or whether God created me so, I don’t know: I only know that if I am a cause of unhappiness for others, I am no less happy myself. Naturally, that is poor comfort for them, nevertheless, this is a fact. In my early youth, from the minute I emerged from under my family’s supervision, I began madly to enjoy every pleasure that money could buy, and, naturally, those pleasures became repulsive to me. Then I ventured out into the grand monde, and, soon, I became likewise fed up with society: I have been in love with fashionable belles, and have been loved, but their love only irritated my imagination and vanity, while my heart remained empty ... I began to read, to study—I got just as sick of studies—I saw that neither fame nor happiness depended on them in the least, since the happiest people are dunces, while fame is a question of luck, and in order to obtain it, you only have to be nimble. Then I began to be bored ... Soon after, I was transferred to the Caucasus: this was the happiest time of my life. I hoped that boredom did not exist among Chechen bullets. In vain! After one month, I got so used to their buzzing and to the nearness of death, that, really, I paid more attention to the mosquitoes, and I was even more bored than before, because I had almost lost my last hope. When I saw Bela in my home, when for the first time I held her in my lap and kissed her black curls, I—fool that I was—imagined she was an angel sent me by compassionate fate ... I was wrong again. The love of a wild girl was little better than that of a lady of rank; the ignorance and the naïveté of one pall on you as much as the coquetry of the other. I still like her, I suppose; I am grateful to her for several rather sweet moments; I am ready to die for her—only I find her company dull. Whether I am a fool or a villain, I don’t know; but of one thing I’m sure, that I also deserve pity, even perhaps more than she. My soul has been impaired by the fashionable world, I have a restless fancy, an insatiable heart; whatever I get is not enough; I become used as easily to sorrow as to delight, and my life becomes more empty day by day; there is only one remedy left for me: to travel. As soon as I can, I shall set out—but not for Europe, God preserve! I shall go to America, to Arabia, to India—perchance I may die somewhere, on the way! At least, I am sure that this last consolation will not soon be exhausted with the help of storms and bad roads.’ He went on like this for a long time, and his words became engraved in my memory because it was the first time that I had heard such things from a man of twenty-five, and I hope to God it may also be the last ... ”

—Mikhail Lermontov, A Hero of Our Time (1839/rev. 1841) (trans. Vladimir Nabokov w/ Dmitri Nabokov 1958)

Friendship and Eschatology

This is that extraordinary and great happiness which we await, with God himself acting and diffusing…among the individual souls whom he has chosen, so much friendship and charity, that thus each loves another as he does himself; and that, by this means, just as each one rejoices in his own, so does he rejoice in the good fortune of another, and thus the happiness of each one individually is the happiness of all, and the universality of all happiness is the possession of each individual….This is true and eternal friendship, which begins in this life and is perfected in the next…

—Aelred of Rievaulx, Spiritual Friendship 3.79, 1160.