happier sad

an excerpt from an email i got tonight from my best friend, who's just returned from overseas...

"There's a passage in 'Paris Trance' where the main guy is lying there on the grass naked with the girl he's in love with, looking up at the canopy of stars and he has the realization, absolute in his mind, that he will never know happiness to the same extent as at that precise moment. There may come times that approach it or, as the scientists say, "narrowly approximate it", but they'll never surpass it. And he's convinced of that. And it, ironically and inevitably, makes him sad."

genius...