And how, exactly, do you know that it’s a myth? I can feel happiness on the moment of arrival when a project is completed that I worked hard on. Does that have no value? Perhaps not to you, but it does to me: if anything, it propels me on to new avenues that lead in turn to new arrivals where I can stop and just enjoy the moment of accomplishment, in whatever form it might take.

But you seem to be advocating that life is nothing but incessant, constant struggle and pain and hardship. Perhaps for you it is. But mine — and I daresay countless others — is one in which those moments of happy arrival counterbalance the struggle and the suffering. And they are just as genuine as that which preceded them, because they provide balance. You seem to advocate that happiness and joy, however momentary, is a drug and we’re all junkies working to reach another fix. I could just as easily respond that a life of eternal misery is just as much an addiction, and a far less pleasant one.

I enjoy Huxley a great deal, and IMHO I think you’re reading far too much into his concepts of happiness and misery and the “myth of arrival”. Somehow I cannot imagine Alduous putting down his pen after finishing Brave New World and thinking, “Oh crap… now what do I do…”

    Sean Stephane Martin

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    Cartoonist, "Doc and Raider" (docandraider.com); illustrator; Canadian, @doc_and_raider