You won't find formulas or recipes for happiness, but happiness emerges when a person who stretches for excellence in personal endeavor is so absorbed in the experience that nothing else seems to matter. The professor draws on a variety of examples -- the athlete who performs effortlessly with skills honed in hours of painful practice, the scientist absorbed in an experiment applying hundreds of hours of study and reflection, the mother immersed in her child's reading recitation after years of teaching the child letters and sounds. It's what the poet William Butler Yeats meant when he wrote of watching a body swaying to music so beautifully that he could not "know the dancer from the dance."
Such connections are rarely found in the modern workplace. Contemporary researchers in sociology, psychology and business management find that workers use their expanded leisure time now to escape reality rather than expand it. Television, the Internet, electronic games and spectator sports are engaging, but require the flutter of constant change and short attention spans, which are enemies of creative insight. Post-modern marketing is fragmented, too. Chris Anderson, author of "The Long Tail" and a prophet of profits, calls this "the shattering of the mainstream into a zillion different cultural shards."
Alain de Botton, the Swiss-born critic of architecture, finds architectural designs in fragments too. If, as he suggests, "buildings speak," many of them speak with forked tongues, the equivalent of the biblical towers of Babel: "The failure of architects to create congenial environments mirrors our inability to find happiness in other areas of our lives." They denigrate nature rather than imitate it.
"We owe it to the fields that our houses will not be inferiors of the virgin land they have replaced. We owe it to the worms and the trees that the buildings we cover them with will stand as promises of the highest and most intelligent kind of happiness." Well, Happy New Year, and to the worms and trees, too.