As for happiness, I had known what it is, and I had always wanted it. I did not find it easy to give it up. If I decided to abjure happiness, it was because I felt it would always be withheld from me. I could not separate it from love, friendship, tenderness, and I was setting out on an ‘irremediably solitary’ enterprise. In order to find happiness, I should have had to go back, to go down in my own estimation: I asserted that all happiness is in itself a fall from grace. How could happiness be reconciled with disquiet?
