"Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there," the psychologist William James wrote in 1892.
"We are butlers," said Mr. MacDonald, "who have a sense of pride and professionalism and do our duties with happiness, cheerfulness, enthusiasm, excitement and because we love it.
The cheer left her cheerfulness.
Farmers Sarah and Chris Broadbent, custodians of the Lovestruck, couldn't have been more welcoming; they escorted us with great cheerfulness over their fields, our luggage in a wheelbarrow, especially as we had arrived – like inconsiderate city folk – at gone midnight and they had to get up in a few hours to feed the animals.
By using diversion to increase cheerfulness, we turn the inconstancy of our emotional natures to our benefit.
Until then, Updike says, a courtly cheerfulness would seem to be our best bet.
"Contrary to our expectations, we have found that childhood cheerfulness is inversely related to longevity," reports Friedman.
The man on the street in Calcutta, India, or Port-au-Prince, Haiti, overturns all our simple notions about the relation of terrible conditions to cheerfulness and energy and asks whether we haven't just brought our ideas of poverty with us.
His elder brother sent home letters of enviable cheerfulness from the trenches of Flanders: "We had our 'baptism' of fire but it was the C of E method, not total immersion!" he wrote in 1915.
