Rasselas 1/31

Restlessness

• "he neglected their officiousness, repulsed their invitations..." - p. 46
• "pained with want, but am not, like him, satisfied with fullness" -p. 46
• "I fly from pleasure because pleasure has ceased to please" -p. 47
• "I know not what I want, is the cause of my complaint" -p. 48
• "my hopes and wishes have flown beyond this boundary of my life, which yet I have never attempted to surmount" - p. 49

How to be Happy

• Our desires must be quenched before we an truly be happy ("desires distinct from sense which must be satisfied before he can be happy." - p. 46)
• We must know what misery is before we can appreciate happiness ("if you had seen the miseries of the world, you would know how to value your present state."-p. 48)
• Pop culture reference: "Let Her Go" by Passenger
• Only know you've been high when you're feeling low
  Only hate the road when you’re missin' home
  Only know you love her when you let her go
  And you let her go
• "Happiness must be something solid and permanent, without fear and without uncertainty"-p.77
• this will get ride of the issue of jealousy

Philosophy of Happiness

• happiness is a delusion as seen in the happy valley. It is presented to be some sort of paradise ("covered in trees... diversified with flowers... every month dropped fruits...sprightly kid... monkey frolicking" - p. 44), but is also derscribed as a prison that traps people ("every year produced new schemes of delight, and new competitors for imprisonment."-p. 44)
• "when the same state is again at a distance, imagination paints it as desirable"- p. 85
• happiness is superficial, there is always discontent lying somewhere under the surface
• the "young men of spirit and gaiety" practiced shameful acts in which he could not be happy
• the wise old man abandoned his idea of happiness after his daughter died
• shepherd rumored to celebrate life with innocence, but they are angry about their lower station in life
• there was not happiness in solitude because the man missed human interaction too much and had no one to share his feelings with
• the court of Bassa didn't have the happiness Rasselas assumed because there was always a threat to power
• the daughters Nekayah talked to were too light and superficial, "their affection seldom fixed on a sense of virtue," but their hearts were swelling with sorrow" from their poverty (88)
• happiness does not exist
• "Human life is every where a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed" - p.66
• "long before we are convinced that happiness is never to be found, and each believe it possessed by others to keep alive the hope of obtaining it for himself"-p. 75
• we are never happy because we are always jealous of what others have
• "great father of  the waters, thou that rollest thy floods through eighty nations...Tell me if thou waterest, through all thy course, a single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmur of complaint?"

Imlac's character also represents the importance of knowledge

• "they are more powereful...because they are wiser; knowledge will always predominate over ignorance"-p. 65
• "knowledge is certainly one of the means of pleasure" -p.66
• "man is not weak, knowledge is more than equivalent to force" -p.70
• and the fact that he left his father behind to travel the world in pursuit of knowledge. Above all, he praises the poet the most
• "presiding over the thoughts and manners of future generations; as a being superiour to time and place"