PARADISE
The people who live in Paradise are without anxiety. In the mornings, they walk along the river of life, eat sweet berries and tell stories about a faraway, mythical place where nations fight wars and orphans scrabble for food. No one is ever happy there--the sun is too hot and the wind too cold. In the stories, the people, in the midst of their sufferings, invent for themselves a paradise, a land of endless peace.
The people who live in Paradise are often puzzled by these stories. "How could anyone be unhappy?" they say. "And why would anyone invent a paradise, when it is already here?" But then they tell the stories again, they love them so. There is one about an old woman whose only desire was for a teapot, a china teapot enameled in blue with Dutch girls and boys in wooden shoes. The old woman dreamed, schemed to find her teapot, she planned, she yearned, but she never got one, never in her whole life. Hearing the story, the people who live in Paradise feel sad, a feeling they have never known before. How poignant. How lovely, this sadness. Gradually, their desire for sadness grows stronger with each night, and they begin to dream their own dream of unhappiness, to wish for the one thing they cannot have, a world of sadness, a world of emptiness and pain, where people weep for their sins and die alone in their beds.