The-Conquest-of-Happiness-by-Bertrand-Russell

happiness of my gardener is of the same species;
he wages a perennial war against rabbits, of which
he speaks exactly as Scotland Yard speaks of
Bolsheviks; he considers them dark, designing and
ferocious, and is of the opinion that they can only
be met by means of a cunning equal to their own.
Like the heroes of Valhalla who spent every day
hunting a certain wild boar, which they killed
every evening but which miraculously came to life
again in the morning, my gardener can slay his
enemy one day without any fear that the enemy will
have disappeared the next day. Although well over
seventy, he works all day and bicycles sixteen
hilly miles to and from his work, but the fount of
joy is inexhaustible, and it is ‘they rabbits’ that
supply it.
But, you will say, these simple delights are not
open to superior people like ourselves. What joy
can we experience in waging war on such puny
creatures as rabbits? The argument, to my mind, is
a poor one. A rabbit is very much larger than a
yellow-fever bacillus, and yet a superior person