It was by coincidence or something rather eerie that, shortly after my encounter with Dr. Stemson in hopes of obtaining brain regeneration with stem cells, I came across a book on happiness in the children’s section of the Books for Sale area of my local public library. The library accepts donations of books from the neighborhood, culls out the ones in good condition with the highest probability of being sold, and puts them on the Book Sale shelf, pricing them at $1 for paperbacks and hardcovers for $2. Whatever appears there is an indication of the average mental level of the neighborhood at any given time, most often serving as a reminder to authors that popularity is no guide to immortality, at least not until a box of classics shows up.
Dealers swoop in with barcode readers to check the marketability of the offering and snatch up whatever they believe they can make a profit on, usually what snobby intellectuals would call trash, and that is all the worse for what they leave behind, say, some temporarily important person's ruminations co-authored by someone who can write and whom nobody has heard of.
I asked a librarian today if anything had been donated on the subject of Being, Existence, or Nothing since I had purchased recently donated books on those subjects. No, he said, because those books were his own donation, the only ones of that sort, and nothing further in that vein is expected because theology and existentialism has been passé for decades.
As for the used children’s books, I look through them because I have neighbors with kids. Those books also indicate the state of mind of the adults who purchase them to influence their offspring accordingly.
Now I apologize in advance for saying that what I have found in the children's section of donated books is, on the whole, incomprehensible if not pathetic, I hope not composed with the latest pedagogical principles in mind. But one book’s cover did make a positive impression on me, perhaps because I was down in the dumps after looking at the adult offerings: MR. HAPPY by Roger Hargreaves
Why, that could be me! I do not know why, but I go around grinning like a fool most of the time, so I do appear to be loony even when I am unhappy because it has not been true that, if you smile, the whole world will smile with you, for you might just get smacked down by resentful people who think you have plenty of the good things in life. They do not know that some of the happiest people are homeless folk who have next to nothing except a pint to their name, therefore one might be tempted to give away everything he owns to happily lord it over those who have it all.
Well, I opened that book, and I was impressed by the clarity of the writing as well as the logic, to the effect that, If you want to be happy, hang out and smile and laugh with happy people!
The book did not have much volume to it, but I paid a buck for the spirit of the thing, took it home and put it on my desk as a sort of hopeful preface to my own Adventures into Happyland with stem cell brain regeneration.