“Why should I strive for happiness?”

Looking forward to John Kaag’s October 2 MTSU Lyceum visit, when I’m sure he’ll affirm the possibility of happiness in work. I’ve decided we’ll read this book in Existentialism just before he arrives (and we’ll read how William James saved his life in CoPhi then, too).

“For Nietzsche, I consoled myself, the point was not about avoiding or even conquering suffering: he recognized, like so many philosophers before him, that suffering was a fundamental fact of human existence. But the ascetic response to suffering was to understand it as a complaint about life. My challenge—the challenge Nietzsche raises—was to embrace life with all its suffering. When he wrote, at the very end of his career, “Have I been understood? Dionysus versus the Crucified,” he meant to show that suffering does not refute life as we experience it but must be welcomed, embraced, in exactly the same way we welcome and embrace happiness. In fact, Nietzsche often sounds as though happiness is at best a kind of secondary goal. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche’s most famous character, having spent his life in the mountains, concludes: “Happiness? Why should I strive for happiness? I strive for my work.””

— Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are by John J. Kaag
https://a.co/02BXPDFc

A Happy Death by Albert Camus

“You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters—all that matters, really—is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever-present consciousness. The rest—women, art, success—is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.”

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/1591380-la-mort-heureuse