Or Happiness equals reality divided by expectation - was based on the universal truth that you always had some expectation for what was to come. In other words 'E' was always a real number, since you could not divide by zero. But recently, he wondered about the truth of that. Math could only take a man so far. In the middle of the night, when he was wide awake and staring up at the ceiling, knowing that his wife lay beside him pretending to be asleep and doing the very same thing. Lewis had come to believe that you might be conditioned to expect absolutely nothing from one's life. That way, when you lost your first son, you didn't grieve. When your second son was jailed for massacre, you were not shattered.

You could divide by zero; it felt like a canyon where your heart used to be.

He stared at the equations until they melded together, and then he began to scrawl furiously, a composer with a symphony moving too fast for his fingers. Why hadn't he realized this before? Everyone knew that if you divided reality by expectation, you got a happiness quotient. But when you inverted the equation, expectation divided by reality, you didn't get the opposite of happiness. What you got, Lewis realized, was hope.

Pure logic: Assuming reality was constant, expectation had to be greater than reality to create optimism. On the other hand, a pessimist was someone with expectations lower than reality, a fraction of diminishing returns. Someone who was happy would have little need to hope for change. But conversely, an optimistic person was that way because he wanted to believe in something better than his reality.

He started wondering if there were exceptions to the rule: if happy people might be hopeful, if the unhappy might have given up any anticipation that things might get better.

- Nineteen Minutes, Jodi Picoult

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[ Edit - 1:54 am Wednesday, 21st May 2008 ]