“Happiness is kitsch”

“Happiness is kitsch” is the compressed verdict at the center of a passage that rejects happiness as a shallow ideal and distinguishes it from joy. The phrase begins as a claim about religious and philosophical language; addressed to Ilana Sommo, it ends as part of a personal reckoning with the remnants of their relationship.

Meaning and Argument

The speaker presents the phrase as a rebuttal to Bernanos’s claim that unhappiness is a source of blessing. Against what he calls a trite Christian invention, he sets the Greek idea of eudaimonia, which he says happiness has nothing in common with. His argument is not simply that happiness is difficult to attain: he denies that it names a meaningful spiritual good in the Jewish tradition he describes.

Happiness and Joy

The passage argues that the Bible has no word corresponding to happiness, apart from the satisfaction of divine or human approval. It instead assigns Judaism the language of joy, invoking the biblical injunction to rejoice in youth. This joy is ephemeral rather than secure: likened to the cryptic fire of Heraclitus, it carries its opposite within itself, and its victory is also its destruction. The contrast makes the phrase more than a dismissal of pleasure; it questions the promise that lasting happiness can be made into a stable condition.

From Doctrine to Relationship

The argument turns abruptly from religious ideas to the speaker’s bond with Ilana Sommo. He asks what remains of their joy and answers with the prospect of taking pleasure in each other’s misfortunes: only embers from a dead fire, which they try to fan from opposite sides of the globe into a brief flicker of malice. The image recasts the earlier claim about joy’s self-consuming nature as a description of their estrangement.

The speaker’s declared capitulation follows that recognition. He imagines himself as a defeated man made to serve, while describing a future in which one man worships Ilana and another finances those spiritual nuptials. The offer to write another check gives the passage’s philosophical distinction a bitterly practical ending: happiness is dismissed as kitsch, while what survives between the two is reduced to resentment, surrender, and money.