The Man Without Qualities
Bonadea's system had so far consisted of leading a double life. Her social status was assured in that she belonged to a family of distinction; that she gave way to certain temptations she could ascribe to being constitutionally overexcitable, or having a heart given to folly, since the follies of the heart, like romantic political crimes, enjoy a certain esteem, even when committed under dubious circumstances. Here the heart plays about the same role as honor, obedience, and Service Regulations, Part III, played in the General's life, or as the irrational element in every well ordered life that ultimately puts to rights whatever baffles the unaided rational mind.
But Bonadea's system had a flaw, in that it split her life into two different conditions, the transition from one to the other of which could not be achieved without paying a heavy price. For however eloquent her heart could be before one of her lapses, it was equally deflated afterward, and she was constantly alternating between a maniacally effervescent state of mind and one that drained away into inky blackness, hardly ever coming into equilibrium. All the same, it was a system, that is, it was no mere play of uncontrolled instincts- the way life used to be seen as the automatic squaring of accounts between pleasure and pain, with a certain profit registered on the side of pleasure, but a system that included quite a number of psychological moves designed to fake these accounts.
Everyone has some such method of jockeying ones psychological accounts in one's own favor, aiming at a minimum balance of pleasure that should ordinarily get one through the day. A person's pleasure in life can also consist of displeasure; such differences in kind don't matter much, since as everyone knows, there are as many contented melancholics as there are funeral marches that float as lightly in their element as a dance tune does in its own. The opposite is probably equally valid, in that many normally cheerful persons are no whit happier than many habitually sad ones, because happiness is just as much a strain as as unhappiness, more or less like flying on the principle of lighter or heavier than air. In practice, it comes down to this, that everyone bears his burden with the patience of a donkey, since a donkey whose strength slightly exceeds the demands of his burden is happy enough. And this is, in fact, the soundest available definition of personal happiness, as long as we restrict ourselves to donkeys. In reality, however, personal happiness (or equilibrium, contentment, whatever we may choose to call the innermost reflex aim of the personality) is self-contained only as a stone is in a wall, or a drop of water in a river, which are permeated by the forces and tensions of the whole. What a person does and feels is a negligible part of what he must assume many others normally do and feel with him. A human being never lives only in his own equilibrium but depends on that of the surrounding strata of humanity, so that the individual's little pleasure factory is affected by a most complicated moral credit system, about which more will have to be said later on, being as much a part of the community's psychic balance sheet as of the individual's.
-From The Man Without Qualities, by Robert Musil