Word: seldom
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...young ex-copper handling his first major assignment for British intelligence. In fact, he is made to walk two sides of the street, London's Birdcage Walk, home of a covert security operation. Kerslake, as he is called-when treating of the lower classes, the English seldom assign first names-is sent to Portugal to investigate Sarah Branton, who is most definitely U. Sarah has spent eight years in a nunnery and has been saved from a suicidal drowning attempt by Richard Farley, a charming drifter of the sort that only the shires and Kenya can produce...
...world saturated by print and photography, it is difficult to be a nai'f; art is too available. Grandma Moses was not un touched by commerce, but nobody could doubt the integrity of her work or the delicacy of her imagination. She was a graceful colorist, seldom candied or sentimental, and never coarse. In those blue-gray distances of field and forest, punctuated by the silhouette of a horse (the creature's profile cut like a weather vane, as though by shears) or the bright red caesura of a barn, one sees the equivalent of perfect natural pitch...
...well = E in the known physical universe. Nothing quite that pat can be said about the cosmos of the human temperament. In the play of emotion, logic is seldom evident, and the laws of gravity and thermodynamics never. What goes up in the psyche sometimes does not come down; the boiling points of individuals and collectives alike are impossible to fix. In light of this, it is no wonder that science long shied away from studying, or attempting to explain, that most subtle and elusive of all human moods: happiness. Instead, it happily left the field to philosophers, preachers, poets...
...happiness should not be confused with preaching about it. Books hustling formulas and drills that are supposed to produce happiness circulate these days in numbers that are too great to count, let alone mention. These products of the booming feel-good industry invariably try to evoke happiness, but they seldom describe or analyze it. That, of course, is the fascination of the scientific challenge. The feelgood trade's blizzard of lighter-than-air tracts proves nothing whatever about happiness except that a lot of people are willing to pay for help in pursuing...
...early discoveries are that breathtaking, although many of them come in similar statistical form. Findings may vary from survey to survey, but seldom astonishingly. Some results that fail to amaze can still be heartening. Most studies so far confirm that happiness does not depend on any single factor. That is, neither geographical location nor financial status nor age is a determinant of happiness. The happy are slightly more likely to be married, but unhappiness is anything but epidemic among the single. Neither the young, the middle-aged nor the old have any special claim on happiness...