All this

All This - Reflections on Happiness

There is a question almost no one truly stops to ask.

Am I happy?

This book was born on an April morning, after a fever, when the world came back and that question never went away.

To answer it, the mind set off far. Among the Lakota on the Great Plains, in imperial China at Chang'an, across the steppes of Genghis Khan, at Roman banquets, on Cleopatra's Nile, in the courtyards of the Alhambra, on Viking longships. Different eras, distant cultures - and every time the same discovery: happiness is never where we think we'll find it.

But it is always there. In the same form. With the same face.

All This is not an essay on happiness. There are no theories, no advice, no lists. There is a voice - that of an ordinary man, with an ordinary life - recounting spear fishing in the Strait of Messina, a crane on a beach at six in the morning, sea urchins on Christmas Eve, fifty kilos of tuna in dark water, the children of Watamu dancing in a courtyard of red earth.

And the thread holding it all together: the animals on the edge of extinction that are still here. Like us. Like happiness.

Because happiness cannot be explained. It is lived.