Excursus: Happy families

Все счастливые семьи похожи друг на друга, каждая несчастливая семья несчастлива по-своему. ("Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.")

This famous quote from Tolstoy is one of those rare epigrammes that I find both false prima facie and completely indispensable. That is, I don't think that happy families are all alike. Human beings are so varied and their means of seeking accommodation with each other so ingenious, that I do believe there could be as many different ways for a family to be happy as unhappy.

But I do find many applications for the underlying metaphor. Perhaps it's just that I don't know the fields of endeavour to which I careless apply it as well as I presume to know families. Or, more likely, it's a problem of degree of generalisation. After all, at some level of granularity, every phenomenon is unique; but at a sufficient level of abstraction, it becomes an exemplar of a certain type. It could be I'm using one level of generalisation when I analyse the modi vivendi of happy families, and quite another when I (anticipating my next post) examine features common to successful rock songs.