Customer Reviews

Short Notes from the Long History of Happiness

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First of all it should be said that this book is NOT out of print. It's freely available in bookstores in Australia and it is something I give as a present to people who mean a lot to me, or whom I sense WILL mean a lot to me.

How to define the eclectic enigma that is Michael Leunig? A poet, a painter, a singer of the soul's deepest longings - all of these and more. Leunig is best known as a cartoonist, but instead of lampooning politics, satirising society, he holds up a gentle spiritual mirror of the soul to the human condition. In doing so he whimsically touches what is fundamentally spiritual in all of us, and makes us better people into the bargain.... witness this little gem, accompanied by a gloriously simple yet moving sketched cartoon...

When the heart is cut or cracked or broken do not clutch it let the wound lie open

Let the Wind from the good old sea blow in to bathe the wound with salt and let it sting

Let a stray dog lick it. Let a bird lean in the hole and sing, a simple song like a tiny bell. And let it ring

Let it go. Let it out. Let it all unravel. Let it free and it can be A path on which to travel.

Leunig himself provides that path and reminds us, while we smile through our tears, that the history of happiness is as old as each of us. We just have to reach inside and find it.

A new friend from Australia introduced me to this book and Michael Leunig. When I began to read it I had a knee-jerk reaction of cutesy-anxiety. But within minutes I was completely sold on the perceptiveness and inventiveness of the man and his cartoons and poems. In a short space I had finished this small volume, having undergone a series of delightful surprises and pleasures. (There is bitterness, loneliness, and the whole gamut of humanness in evidence ... but it is all presented in a way that can only please and sometimes astound.) I was also filled with the conviction that I must share this with just about everybody I know, and seek out more Leunig.

Here is Zen in the art of cartooning. A sample (slightly abbreviated):

How will you know if a person is corrupt?

You must study the duck.

You must play with the duck. You just talk with the duck. ... You must look deeply into the eyes of the duck.

Then [look] into the face of the person ... You will know.