There is no mistery to happiness.
Unhappy men [and women] are all alike. Some wound they suffered long ago, some wished denied, some blow to pride, some kindling spark of love put out by scorn - or worse, indifference - cleaves to them, or they to it, and so they live each day within a shroud of yesterdays. The happy man [or woman] does not look back. He doesn't look ahead. He lives in the present.But there's the rub. The present can never deliver one thing: meaning.
The ways of happiness and meaning are not the same. To find happiness, a man [or a woman] needs only live in the moment; he need only live for the moment.
But if he wants meaning - the meaning of his dreams, his secrets, his life - a man [or a woman]must rehabit his past, however dark, and live for the future, however uncertain.
Thus nature dangles happiness and meaning before us all, insisting only that we choose between them.
On sunday night, August 29, the view from outside the Alabaster Wing would have been shocking indeed.
A slender young woman was standing within, lit by a dozen flickering candles, barely clothed, exquisitively proportioned, her wrists tied togheter over her head, and her throat embraced by another binding...
Her entire body glistened in the unbearable August heat. Her long legs were bare, as were her arms. Her elegant shoulders were nearly bare as well.
The girl's consciousness was fading.
She tried to speak.
There was a question she had to ask. It was there; it was gone.
Then she said it again.
'My name', she whispered. 'What is my name?'
Yet there it was: a brand-new answer to the most famous riddle in Western literature.
Shakespere's Hamlet has been performed thousands upon thousand's of times, more than any other play in any language... Yet there is a strange void or vacuum at the core of the drama: all the action is founded on the inability of its hero [heroin] to act. The play consists of a series of evasions and excuses seized on by the melancholy Hamlet to justify postponing ...punctuated by anguished soliloquies in which he villifies himself for his own paralysis.
What stops him, and why should this inexplicable faltering - this seeming weakness, this almost cowardice - be capable of riveting audiences around the world for three centuries?
The greatest literary minds of our era, Goethe and Coleridge, tried but failed to pull the sword from this stone, and hundreds of lesser lights have broken their heads on it.
I sat in the Yard day after day for hours at a time poring over Freud and Shakespeare. 
Freud's diagnosis of Hamlet came to seem increasingly irresistible to me, not only yelding the first complete solution to the riddle of the play, but explaining why no one else had been able to solve it, and at the same time making lucid the tragedy's mesmerizing grip.
Here was a scientist applying his discoveries to Shakespeare. Here was medicine making contact with the soul. When I read those two pages of Dr Freud's interpretation of dreams, my future was determined. If I could not refute Freud's psychology, I would devote my life to it.
'I dreamt of Rome last night', Freud replyed. Freud drew on his cigar. 'I was walking , alone', he said. 'Night had fallen, as it has now. I came upon a shop window with a jewelry box. That of course means a woman...'.
A debate ensued on whether Freud's teachings dictated defiance of conventional sexual morality...
...he maintained that anyone who failed to see this implication had not understood Freud...Only cowardice would make men [and women] submit to civilized morality once they had understood Freud's theories...
...vigorously disagreed. Psychoanalysis demanded that a man [and a woman] be conscious of their true sexual wishes, not to succumb to them. When we hear a patient's dream we interpret it. We don't tell the patient to fulfill the wishes...'
As for Freud, he intervened on neither side, apparently content to watch the debate unfold.
I informed our party that it was time to board the train. Freud took a last look over the railing. A stiff wind blew in our faces. As we gazed at the lights of Manhattan, he smiled. 'If they only knew what we are bringing them'.
Não te preocupes Miss Ansiedade.
