Deliriously happy

Are you deliriously happy?

Here’s google’s Ngram viewer chart of instances of the term. As this graph would have it, delirious happiness bubbled along in the emotional undersift from about 1840, before really taking off in about 1980 and peaking in 2014. Share prices in delirous happiness are now steadily falling... but is it a good thing to be? Here’s one gentleman from a novel called The Favourite Scratched by Bracebridge Hemming, in 1869:

His emotional state is almost beyond what is liveable, and he teeters on the ledge of reality, only kept there by his sensible wife. and her brick-bat.

Here’s the life of painter Paula Becker Modersohn in 400 Outstanding Women (1933), who was deliriously happy for a while with her husband, but soon had to return to her true calling:

Lots of sources testify to delirious happiness being an emotion of the early stages of love — the rocket boosters that set things going, but might not last.

Other types of delirious happiness are out there. This is Mel Birnkrant, toy designer and collector, talking about the love he and Maurice Sendak (author of Where The Wild Things Are) shared for Mickey Mouse. Maurice might look very serious in Mouse Heaven, Birnkrant says, but he was in fact delirious with happiness.

The serious, delirious happiness Maurice Sendak brings to his love for Disney’s animated mouse, augmented by the sincere mutual enjoyment of his friends, seems like something to aim for.