Pursuits of Happiness

On Being Interested

Eva Brann

By Eva Brann

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About the Book

“[Brann] is a person of many strong interests. The central chapter of this book, 'On Being Interested,' offers a road map to staying happy: cultivate real interests . . . For John Locke and his disciple Thomas Jefferson, happiness is not pleasure. Like those precursors, Brann teaches Americans to free themselves from attachment to superficial gratifications and to pursue a higher-quality contentment with life. She locates this contentment in our ‘interestedness.’ . . . As an American, my encounter with Brann’s work calls me back to a sense of my own good fortune. Against a keening background noise of lament—over the economy, the climate, the pandemic, the predations of technology, crime—Eva Brann’s bright witness lifts me up and out.”—Peggy Ellsberg, Los Angeles Review of Books

"Brann holds us steady in a world that sometimes seems chaotic . . . At this time, the loudest voices among us are dystopian, and spoken language is losing all civility. If you want a change from this, Pursuits of Happiness is a good place to start. Here’s a fascinating, independent-minded writer whose words connect us to living more fully toward a more beneficial life—thought-forms as catalysts."—Washington Independent Review of Books

The essays of Pursuits of Happiness are articulations of Eva Brann’s “vocational” happiness of thinking things through. To Ms. Brann our inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness is the right not to an “endless chase,” but rather the right to the actual practice of happiness, as in the “pursuit of a vocation.” With essays like “Tips on Reading Homer” and “The Greatness of Great Books” she keeps at her calling: to understand the world around us, and between us, to listen to our inner self-talk, and to consider what comes, perhaps, from beyond us.

Author

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for sixty-one years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include Iron Filings, How to Constitute a World, Doublethink/Doubletalk, Then & Now, Un-Willing, The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets/Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).

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