Paul Bowles: The Spider's House

A little sentence he had once read came into his head: Happy is the man who believes he is happy. Yes, he thought, and more accursed than the murderer is the man who works to destroy that belief. It was the unhappy little busybodies who were the scourge of mankind, the pestilence on the face of the earth. “You dare sit there and tell me they’re happy,” Lee had said to him, the self-righteous glow in her eyes. Surely the intellectuals who had made the French Revolution had had the same expression, like the hideous young men of the Istiqlal, like the inhuman functionaries of the Communist Party the world over.

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