Jay Dee

As part of my France Discovery Project and with a goal to revive my passion for philosophy, I chose to read his books starting with The Stranger and The Fall, (though French people may not necessarily agree with me is that this is the best way to get started to learn more about their very complex culture).  A Happy Death (original French title La mort heureuse) was published after his death because even though he worked on it for years, he never was convinced that it should be published, and I can see why.  It is very poorly organized and unless you have a lot of time and intellectual sophistication (which I don’t since I am just getting started with philosophy), it is a difficult read.

It was a timely book for me to read because Lorena was reading The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin (I was surprised that Ms. Rubin never even mentioned Camus considering her work is so academic).  The premise of A Happy Death is that one can be happy simply by having the will.  Like any philosophy book, it is very complex, but if you have the patience, you will glean several insights into his mind.  Patrice Mersault leads a very ordinary life (there are a lot of similarities with the same character in The Stranger) and argues that in order to be happy one needs to have money so that he can buy time to be happy.

Probably one of the most insightful passage in the book is:  “Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience. And in almost every case, we use up our lives making money, when we should be using our money to gain time.”  How many of us have realized that we spend our whole lives trying to make money, in some cases just to pay the bills, but I believe that even when that has been accomplished, we keep making money as our expenses and ambitions go up.  At some point, we are just making money because that is what everyone is doing, and keep delaying the quest for happiness.  Mersault actually argues that as soon one has earned enough to survive, we should use the rest of the money in buying time by hiring people to do what we do, and thus focus on doing things that make us happy.

Mersault has a low end job and since he cannot ever make enough money with his job, he kills a rich friend Roland Zagreus, steals his money and goes on a quest to find happiness, which he does, and eventually dies a happy death.  Strongly recommended.