Books

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Originally titled The Choice of Life, Johnson’s wonderfully wily and energetic tale reminds us – like hangovers, bloat and post-Christmas blues – that happiness may just be a little more elusive than we think.

“Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy … who expect that age will perform the promises of youth … attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia.”

The young Rasselas was confined, according to Abissinian custom, to a “happy valley” – a place in which “all the delights and superfluities” of life were provided for until the time came for him to assume the throne.

In step with the tale’s governing ironies, the book begins with Rasselas maundering in his happy valley, miserable amid plenty for want of the contrast that would give it flavour.

Freed from the rocky confines of the valley, Rasselas and his companions avidly seek out competing versions of the good life, splitting up to divide the task between them.

They visit a stoic philosopher, a man “who, from the unshaken throne of rational fortitude, looks down on the scenes of life changing beneath him”, only to find him, a few days later, inconsolable from the death of his daughter.

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