Returning to the mud

The French in another context call this "nostalgia for the mud." They mean a bourgeois romanticization of impoverishment. But I mean it in spiritual terms. Every time I recognized the truth and lived it, I was happy, and when I did not, I was not. And yet I always returned to not-happy, as if that were ... warm and happy mud.

Peggy Noonan, John Paul the Great