The album opens with "Happy," which presents happiness as something that can muddle experience as much as soothe it: "Happy came to visit me / He bought cookies on the way / I poured him tea and he told me it'll all be O.K. / Well I told him I'd do anything to have him stay with me".
Your greatest gift is my present happiness.
The result is a murder trial in which the Darcys find themselves inextricably entangled and which threatens their present happiness and future security.
"If my present happiness had come to me at eighteen, I should probably have taken it as a matter of course," she wrote.
But when a creepy stranger with a porcelain hand turns up one day in the bookshop, the past threatens to unravel this present happiness.
I could never have such faith in my own past or present happiness (and surely he, too, is being a bit ironic), but, thanks to Anne, I know what he means.
He seems to feel that something is dangerous about a society in which there is no philosophical bridge between private happiness and social welfare, a society in which individual life is the only thing that has meaning, and everything else — institutions, customs, traditions, values — is understood to exist only to serve our present happiness.
Lesley Brill writes, "The inexorable forces of past sins and mistakes crush hopes for regeneration and present happiness".
The main coefficient of interest in these regression models is the one related to contemporaneous happiness in alters that is, the extent to which an alter's present happiness, net of the alter's previous happiness, is associated with an ego's present happiness, net of the ego's previous happiness.
The first was "The Science of Happiness," presented by Amherst College Psychology professor Catherine Sanderson.
