about the pursuit of happiness
I learned about as a school boy
and
as a boy I saw my father's large murals
of American landscapes and monuments
a sort of home-made history
on canvas,
on walls,
and later in my mind's eye
and then
one day
when I went to an American university
"they" asked me "why I want to study" there, in America
I wrote down exactly what the boy in me saw and thought
and school-bookishly
had learned...
And then
what I never forgot:
an advice given
at that university:
"You should play the game!"
was to the boy in me
such stupidity coming from an academic
an advice that was of course
never congruent
with my very very own pursuit of happiness
And in that spirit
I stood later before my students:
always in pursuit of our mutual happiness
- life is much too short,
too enframed in zoo-like, moral enclaves
always only constraining definitions
- life much too often short-changed by miserableness
- so much so that
a mutual pursuit of happiness
goes beyond:
- all programmatical and affiliated forms of "kindness"
- all opportunistic lexica of proclaimed,
compliantly advertised "sincerity"