Topic
Misery in this collection is most honestly treated by Addison, who provides three of its sharpest entries — including the observation that delight in the misery of others is something no man will confess but that must explain much social behavior. Friendship as the mechanism that divides misery and doubles joy is his foundational social claim. Sophocles on the one word — love — freeing us from all the weight and pain of life is the counterstatement: misery has a remedy, but the remedy is not comfort or distance but deeper attachment. The interval-between-unhappiness definition of happiness inverts the standard account: happiness is not a positive state but a temporary reprieve. Shaw on the richest man in an ugly world gives misery its economic dimension: wealth cannot purchase a different reality, only more of the same one. What the collection argues is that misery is not random but structural — produced by the conditions of social life — and its most reliable treatment is not individual but relational.