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The title of Willard Spiegelman's enchanting, literate, and deeply happy-making "Essays on Ordinary Happiness" (this the sub-title) is "Seven Pleasures." Why Seven? It seems to mean something here. But what? The number is a lucky one, and recalls the Trivium and Quadrivium of medieval learning, or suggests an addendum to the Kama Sutra: a few positions that somehow escaped categorization. All of these seven pleasures, we discover from the table of contents as well as from the essays themselves, are gerunds: reading, dancing, swimming. The introduction, not one of the seven, is "Being." Sevenness as a meaningful notion, the reader gradually comes to understand, is a red herring: it could just as well have been five (though the book too short) or twenty-seven: the point is, pleasure is all around us, in all that we do--at least potentially, if we know how to find it. The key to finding this pleasure seems to be: lower expectations, cease lusting after the exotic, be happy with what you have, content yourself with "ordinary happiness," rather than extraordinary.The book combines easy, appropriate references to high art (Klee, Serra, Balanchine) with its consideration of middle-brow art (ballroom dancing, that the author learns in middle age) and no art at all (swimming): Jane Austen, for example, is evoked to consider the social aspects of swing dancing. These easy, digestible refrences to art and literature in the larger flow are everything the MLA journal is not: deft, interesting, useful. And they're part of the book's "message," if we can speak in such didactic terms about so graceful a performance: that the educated, aware, life, with art and literture, motion and sport, is its own end.I don't say nay: I don't have a better answer, though I admit to a lingering fondness for the blind energy of the young as another form of happiness. (Spiegelman admires it too, though from something of a distance, the way the world-weary writer Tonio Kroeger in Thomas Mann's eponymous novella looks at the beautiful blond child-adults he can never be: all those young people dancing, for instance.) So the very literateness of the prose is a bit melancholy: the more you know about the world, the more connections you can draw, the less likely you are to be headstrong and high on life, and the more likely you are to be able to content yourself with the everyday.The young typically lack this capability, and I'll be surprised if this book gets many readers under 40.For this reason and in this spirit, we may try to indicate the essential melancholy of the prose and say that this is an Autumn Sonata--though not the battle of wills between Ingrid Bergman (mother) and Liv Ullmann (daughter) of Ingmar Bergman's movie of the same name--something more like Tudor's ballet "The Leaves are Fading," drenched in nostalgia amid the swirls of bodies and youth. Nostalgia in the midst of plenty: it's a Keatsian concept, that melancholy is most acutely felt when the rose is fullest--from here it can only begin to decay. Or maybe it's John Lennon: that life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. Or doing something. Like swimming.Spiegelman seems set on finding the pleasures of the everyday, in his achievement of "ordinary happiness"--as if to say, this is all there is, you'd better enjoy it. And the people typically do. His essays are full of moments of people focused on their activities: "a portly middle-aged man with a ponytail effortlessly tosses his partner over his head and betwe his legs, all the while keeping up the beat." If this is not victory over mortality and death, this inner absorbtion in activity, what is? At least, to the extent that anything is. Caught in a kind of practical version of Heidegger's "thrownness," the ineluctable whoosh of existence, Spiegelman nonetheless offers the consolation of the mundane--which, if entered into passionately enough, becomes the answer to the question. If happiness is something you have to seek, you'll never find it: this point was Keats's as well. If you realize you have only to reach out your hand to have it (just do something!), you have already solved the problem.Still, it's melancholy: it would be nice if we could actually achieve extraordinary happiness, rather than just ordinary, as Spiegelman so articulately seems to do here. Life is full of activity, and potentially of ordinary happiness. But, not to kvetch, it all ends like a borscht-belt joke about not wanting to be a member of any club that would take you: we could, of course, be satisfied with what we have. But then we wouldn't strive--we'd be happy. Happy in the ordinary, sensible that past a certain point, it's wiser not to ask for more.Highly recommended.