Searching for Happiness

Why does it make me so sad when I think back to that time? Is it yearning for past happiness-- for I was happy in the weeks that followed, in which I really did work like a lunatic and passed the class, and we made love as if nothing else in the world mattered. Is it the knowledge of what came later, and that what came out afterwards had been there all along?

Why? Why does what was beautiful suddenly shatter in hindsight because it concealed dark truths? Why does the memory of years of happy marriage turn to gall when our partner is revealed to have had a lover all those years? Because such a situation makes it impossible to be happy? But we were happy! Sometimes the memory of happiness cannot stay true because it ended unhappily. Because happiness is only real if it last forever? Because things always end painfully if they contain pain, conscious or unconscious, all along? But what is unconscious, unrecognized pain?

Exert from "The Reader" by Bernhard Schlink