Highlighted from The Atlantic online

What Writing Has in Common With Happiness

The author Yasmina Reza says that Borges taught her fiction, like joy, is borne of mysterious, instinctual processes achieved in an unconscious state.
by

The final line of an enigmatic Jorge Luis Borges poem became the title for Yasmina Reza’s latest book, Happy Are the Happy. For Reza, Borges’ poem suggests that happiness, which people tend to talk about as achievable and context-dependent, is dispensed more mysteriously than we like to think. In our conversation for this series, we discussed the ways contentment transcends our understanding—and how works of literature, too, are more than what their authors understand them to be.

Graphic courtesy of Doug McLean

“I was on a plane when the French phrase heureux les heureux, happy are the happy, came to mind. It seemed beautiful, and it occurred to me it might work as a title. But I couldn’t remember where I’d heard first it. I knew it was from Borges—that’s all. I wasn’t sure where the line originally appeared.” – Yasmina Reza

“Happy are those who are beloved, and those who love, and those who are without love.
Happy are the happy.” – Jorge Luis Borges from his poem, Fragments of an Apocryphal Gospel.

Read the rest of the story>
Related Post
  1. Author relies on self-revelation to write
  2. Literary author reveals secrets to creating the right point of view
  3. Why we have become lazy writers