We each have a handful of those moments, the ones we take out to treasure only rarely, like jewels, when we looked up from our lives and realized: “I’m happy.” One of the last times this happened to me, inexplicably, I was driving on Maryland’s unsublime Route 40 with the window down, looking at a peeling Burger King billboard while Van Halen played on the radio. But that kind of intense and present happiness is famously ephemeral; as soon as you notice it you dispel it, the way you block yourself from remembering a word by trying to retrieve it. And any attempt to contrive this feeling
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