Literary Happiness

Leo Tolstoy wrote that "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The line is one of the most famous in Western literature. It seeps into the reader's soul with a kind of all-pervading "true-ness." But is he right?

Adam has been making fun of me recently for my choice in literature. I like depressing books where unhappy things happen to characters. I think the only poetry really worth reading is poetry about dejection, loss, and pain. These stories and poems seem to mean something in a way other stories don't. If Tolstoy is correct--unhappiness is a unique, case-by-case, individual experience--how can it be that the literary texts, the ones that are supposed to capture universal human experience, are so often the tragic ones?

There are many poems that describe the way I feel when Adam is far away. Many that capture the fears I have about losing him. But there are no poems that express the way I love him. No poems that encapsulate the way he makes me feel. There are analogies in texts, and I've written about these, but nothing really fits us. It isn't our unhappiness--missing each other like we'd miss a piece of ourselves--that makes us unique. Lots of people spend months, years, or even decades apart from their lovers. It's our love, our own story of our vocation to marriage, that makes us unique. Our unhappiness is shared; we are happy in our own way.

So perhaps that's why I prefer "depressing" poetry to "happy" poetry, if such simplistic labels ought to be applied. Sadness is sublime. It transcends human differences of time, or class, or race so that I enter into Poe's pain, Longfellow's longing, and Hardy's obstinate grip on hope. Happiness is transcendental. My love, my happiness, is intimate, uniquely shared with only one other person. It's our own. We can, and hope, to pass it on to others. But I can only ever share my happiness with Adam.

Am I wrong? I'd love to learn about the positive stories, songs, or poems that you find compelling.