On "Can Happiness Be Feigned?" in Samira Azzam's Flights of Fancy

Dear Samira,

Your Flights of Fancy are delightful, like everything you write... and "philosophy without intending philosophy" was an inquiry into one of the most important of our human problems.

You ask: can happiness be feigned...

And I say: if it is a matter of acting without inner conviction, then there is no good in it... For an artist to compose verses, or write, or paint something other than what he suffers and feels—that is a play which loses its effect however skillfully its author acts in it... It does not spring from his depths... from his innermost core.

But suggestion to the self... or, as you say, "a will that can pour into the life already drawn another life... Is it a successful way of fleeing from the true self?... Is it truly something that yields social success but does not yield happiness?"... I do not think so.

Suggestion, my dear, means that a person actually changes his feelings... Your friend, Samira, the composer of sad poems, relishes her sadness...

Some people raise great statues to their sorrows... and remain all their lives kneeling before them, torn and burning with anguish... and whenever they feel forgetfulness stepping toward them, they hasten to their statues to revive the memory... They persist in remaining sorrowful... they suggest to themselves that they are the most wretched of God's creatures.

One and the same misfortune may befall two creatures alike, its circumstances similar... One of them is defeated by it... it accompanies him all his life... The other defeats it and rids himself of it... Not because the first is more sensitive... but because the second willed to fight... so he fought, and won...

Suggestion... Freud's idea was at first a legend and a heresy... then it became a truth acknowledged by men of science... Suggestion has at times conquered death... One scientist said of a patient at death's door, "He did not die because he did not want to die." And imagine—this "he did not want to die"!

In the Second War a number of doctors were asked about the strangest thing that had ever come their way, and one doctor said:

"A wounded soldier was brought to me, his abdomen a mass of flesh and sticky blood... thirty-five holes in his intestines and his temperature above forty... I did my duty as a duty without hope... and left the young man to die... But when I passed among the beds the next day, I saw a head lifting itself and heard a voice murmuring: Doctor, I'm fine... And he kept repeating it every time I passed him... and he recovered... And do not ask me how he recovered, for I do not know... All I know is that he wanted to recover."

Suggestion means that we tint our souls with a color like a fast, strong, true dye... that we seek out the pain and make it small... that we write or compose or paint what we would like our souls to be... and they become as we would like.

And perhaps the finest thing ever said on this subject is Gibran's remark:

— When I was writing "The Prophet," "The Prophet" was writing me.