Happy Memorial Day, everyone. My great grandfather served in the First World War. He never spoke about it to me, but I hardly knew him. He died when I was 8. But I’m sure that, like many men and women who served and are serving, speaking about it was beside the point. You signed up (and still sign up) to do what needed to be done, and for that, I and many readers, I am sure, are grateful.

First up is a piece in Aeon where the writer puzzles the therapeutic conundrum of what comes first—happiness or success: “Work hard, become successful, then you’ll be happy. At least, that’s what many of us were taught by our parents, teachers and peers. The idea that we must pursue success in order to experience happiness is enshrined in the United States’ most treasured institutions (the Declaration of Independence), beliefs (the American dream), and stories (Rocky and Cinderella). Most people want to be happy, so we chase success like a proverbial carrot on a stick – thinking that contentment lurks just the other side of getting into college, landing a dream job, being promoted or making six figures. But for many chasers, both success and happiness remain perpetually out of reach. The problem is that the equation might be backwards. Our hypothesis is that happiness precedes and leads to career success – not the other way around. In psychological science, ‘happiness’ relates to ‘subjective wellbeing’ and ‘positive emotions’ (we use the terms interchangeably). Those with greater wellbeing tend to be more satisfied with their lives, and also to experience more positive emotions and fewer negative ones. Research suggests that it’s these positive emotions – such as excitement, joy, and serenity – that promote success in the workplace.”

This is certainly wiser than a lot of self-help drivel, but I’m gonna put my Walker Percy hat on and ask one further question: What if your sense of “subjective wellbeing” turns out to be nothing more than a temporary, misguided fantasy from which you might wake suddenly when you realize that you’re gonna be dirt in 20, 40, 60 years and there’s not a thing you can do about it, no matter how many Zen trips you make to work in your vacuumed and waxed Honda Odyssey. I’ve got no “cross-sectional studies” to prove it, but my guess is that happiness not only precedes “career success,” it is related to a person’s ability to come to terms with failure and the tragic, absurd shortness of life.

In other news: Fat and alcohol were once thought to cause people—especially older women—to spontaneously combust. “One night in 1731, Cornelia di Bandi burst into flames. When the 62-year-old Italian countess was found the next morning, her head and torso had been reduced to ash and grease. Only her arms and legs remained intact. After examining what was left of her body, a local physician concluded, in a report cited years later, that the conflagration ‘was caused in her entrails’ by the variety of combustible materials to be found there, including alcohol and fat, ‘an oily liquid … of an easily combustible nature.’ An early instance of what would come to be known as ‘spontaneous human combustion,’ di Bandi’s case was one of many later studied by the French agronomist Pierre-Aimé Lair. If there was a common denominator to these otherwise unexplained phenomena, Lair concluded, it was the fact that most of them involved corpulent older women with a penchant for drink, thus combining fat and alcohol in a literally explosive mix. In addition to the fuel provided by excess body fat, which was rendered even more combustible when ‘penetrated by alcoholic substances,’ surplus fat was said to create higher levels of hydrogen, making the body especially flammable.”

A history of venture capital: “If the owl of Minerva flies at dusk, then venture capital as we know it is probably past its peak. In recent years, a growing body of scholarship (such as the work of Mariana Mazzucato and Robyn Klingler-Vidra) has demythologized Silicon Valley venture finance at precisely the moment when its network-effect-driven megacorporations have come to dominate the U.S. economy—and when the political, social, and economic effects of their ascendance have come under increasing criticism.”

I’m not a huge fan of Peter Schjeldahl, and this review lauding his “penetrating gaze” (ugh) unwittingly shows that he’s a fair but by no means great critic: “On de Kooning, for instance: ‘His art is not abstract, just relentlessly abstracting.’ (I have always thought that — I just never thought it.) Toulouse-Lautrec ‘embedded art in an imperishable present tense like no one else until Andy Warhol,’ while Karen Kilimnik’s eerie portraits of celebrities and raw-eyed women intuit ‘the authenticity that all kitsch dimly remembers.’”

The uncertain future of Sweden’s book boats: “On a cold morning in a port a few miles outside Stockholm, a group of boys who don’t usually read are huddled around a table of books. ‘Is there any more coffee?’ one of them shouts. The boys live on the Swedish island of Möja, a quiet, green island dotted with villages that house around 200 full-time residents and one library. The library they’re currently in, however, has hundreds more books than they normally see in one place, and it comes to them on the water.”

College students aren’t checking out books anymore: “There has been a 64 percent decline in the number of books checked out by undergraduates from Bass Library over the past decade. Yale’s experience is not at all unique—indeed, it is commonplace. University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. The University of Virginia, one of our great public universities and an institution that openly shares detailed library circulation stats from the prior 20 years, is a good case study. College students at UVA checked out 238,000 books during the school year a decade ago; last year, that number had shrunk to just 60,000.”

The composer Antonio Salieri is “one of history’s all-time losers,” Alex Ross writes in The New Yorker. “Shortly before he died, in 1825, a story that he had poisoned Mozart went around Vienna. In 1830, Alexander Pushkin used that rumor as the basis for his play Mozart and Salieri, casting the former as a doltish genius and the latter as a jealous schemer. Later in the nineteenth century, Rimsky-Korsakov turned Pushkin’s play into a witty short opera. In 1979, the British playwright Peter Shaffer wrote Amadeus, a sophisticated variation on Pushkin’s concept, which became a mainstay of the modern stage. Five years after that, Miloš Forman made a flamboyant film out of Shaffer’s material, with F. Murray Abraham playing Salieri as a suave, pursed-lipped malefactor . . . As brilliant as Abraham’s performance in Amadeus is, the Salieri of stage and screen is a fictional being. The real man was a more or less benevolent character who energetically involved himself in the musical life of Vienna and taught dozens of composers, including Beethoven and Schubert. Having been plucked from orphanhood by a generous mentor, he usually gave composition lessons for free. To be sure, he was a well-connected man who used his power to advance his cause. Beethoven once earned his wrath by presenting a concert on the same night as Salieri’s annual Christmastime benefit for widows and orphans. Yet this formidable operator had a nimble wit and enjoyed jokes at his own expense. Amid the procession of megalomaniacs, misanthropes, and basket cases who make up the classical pantheon, he seems to have been one of the more likable fellows.”

Essay of the Day:

In The Los Angeles Review of Books, Faruk Šehić writes about Sarajevo before and after the war. Will it ever become what it once was?

“We all know of Sarajevo’s historical associations, but very little of that can be found in the present-day city. In the 16th century, Sarajevo had a steam system for underground heating and a better water supply than it has today. It had the first European tramway, before Vienna.

“World War I started here, the 1984 Winter Olympics were held on the surrounding mountains, and the last Bosnian war also left its visible traces. The war recovery phase is still in progress. In this respect, Sarajevo is a great city, a metropolis with a spirit that did not want to yield to grenades and snipers, and used all its military capacity to repel those who had been granted permission from Europe and the UN to kill civilians unhindered, like in some dystopian film. You probably don’t know this, but during the war, various adventurers came from all over to the Serbian positions on the surrounding hills, in order to feel the thrill of shooting at civilians in the besieged city of Sarajevo. The most famous tourist of this type was the Russian writer Eduard Limonov, whose gun fire on the city was captured on film by Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski in the movie Serbian Epics.

“Sarajevo is a great city. Its citizens endured the longest military siege on a capital city in modern history. More than 11,000 civilians — of all nationalities and religious affiliations, as well as those to whom neither nation nor religion meant anything — died during the siege. Through it all, Sarajevo remained an open city and did not allow hatred to rule.

“Sarajevo is the only city whose inhabitants — ordinary people, writers, poets, and artists — burned classics of world literature during the long, cold winters of war at the end of the 20th century. In the poem ‘Coffee on Balzac’ (‘Kava na Balzacu’), Ilija Ladin writes: ‘We burn books / To serve you coffee on a copy of Balzac / Or would you prefer tea on Goethe?’

“Sarajevo is a city where it is quite normal for temperatures in February to drop to -16 degrees Celsius during the day, sometimes even reaching -26 degrees, while summer temperatures can reach 41 degrees. There is no moderation here; everything is exaggerated . . . Many foreigners stayed here during and after the war. And I’ve even heard that there is a term in psychology for the condition some of them experience: ‘Longing for Sarajevo.’ I know what that means, because I was myself, and still am, a patient longing for this city.”

Read the rest.

Photo: Möja

Poem: Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting”

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