There is no happiness like that of a young couple in a little house they have built themselves in a place of beauty and solitude.

– Annie Proulx, “Them Old Cowboy Songs”

One of the functions the chorus has is the same as the narrator – telling you the way things are, the way things should be, the way things ought to be. And the chorus has always been unreliable, because they are real characters and have information hidden from them. They continue to be optimistic even when the audience knows it’s curtains for Antigone. But this line, and others like it that I keep stumbling into in fiction, make me think of choruses. Like this:

CHORUS
There is no happiness
like that of a young couple
in a little house they have built themselves
in a place of beauty and solitude.

It is so specific – it makes an aphorism, a general statement about life, out of something so very particular. There is no happiness like – but they has to be young, the house little, the place must be beautiful and isolated. Then, and only then, is there no happiness like it.