Men are never more imaginative than when dreaming up punishments for others to suffer. That’s why accounts of heaven in religious literature are so anodyne, and why accounts of hell are so vividly descriptive. A German term, mitfreude, is the opposite of schadenfreude: sharing in - and being happy for - someone else’s success. It’s a little-known word (I hadn’t heard of it until today), which suggests that we don’t have much need for either the word… or the concept. As Gore Vidal noted, "Every time a friend succeeds, something inside me dies”.
A weekend licence: a snowy lane in the village of Bolton Abbey in the Yorkshire Dales...
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