The contagion of happiness

A pleasant but foreboding exchange between characters in Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, one of whom is torn between his love for the woman he's talking with and his previously-chaste devotion to God. I know which I'd choose.

"Doctor, help me," he says. "Tell me something magnificent."

  ..."Well, I woke up this morning and diagnosed a very early case of happiness."

"Never heard of it," he says. 

   "It's a rare disease..."

"Is it contagious?" 

   "Don't you have it yet?"

It is contagious, for most of us. For this particular character, other maladies impend. Great book. The fragility of happiness, as of life, is one of its great themes.