Happiness in times post-modern

I must have felt an inescapable loneliness when I first read this a few months ago to recall it even now. 

From Cosmic Neutrality, by Fredric Jameson. London Review of Books. Vol. 33 No. 20 · 20 October 2011 pages 17-18:

[T]his particular fairytale is perhaps not so affirmative when it comes to the value of chance meetings. It tells of a country boy who seeks, not to make his fortune, but only to return home with it (he has just served an apprenticeship of the traditional seven years and received his accumulated savings in the form of a lump of gold). In the first of many chance meetings, admiring the alacrity of a passing horseman, Hans is offered the horse itself in exchange for the troublesome lump of gold, an offer he is happy to accept. Then, after being thrown by the horse, he is not unwilling to exchange it for a cow, led by a farmer who explains the advantages of its sustenance, in the form of milk, butter and cheese. But it milks poorly, and a passing butcher persuades him of the benefits of a young pig, for which he gladly exchanges it; a bargain then soon enough replaced by the swap of a fat goose; and so on and so forth until he loses the final avatar – a grindstone – in a well and, no longer burdened by that weight either, joyously reaches home with nothing left in his pockets at all. ‘There is no man under the sun so fortunate as I,’ he cries happily as he greets his mother. We should take into consideration the possibility that this really is a happy ending...

The beginning of world history

From: The Age of Capital, 1848 - 1875, by Eric Hobsbawm (Vintage, 1996), pp 46 -47.

The period from the late 1840s to the mid-1870s proved to be not so much, as the conventional wisdom of the time held, the model of economic growth, political development, intellectual progress and cultural achievement, which would persist, no doubt with suitable improvements, into the indefinite future, but rather a special kind of interlude. But its achievements were nevertheless extremely impressive. In this era industrial capitalism became a genuine world economy and the globe was therefore transformed from a geographical expression into a constant operational reality. History from now on became world history.