rationis causa

Be happy, they say. Love people, they say. Embrace life by all its warty bits and buttons.

Even if one were to stop and roll with this thesis, one has to drop the double standard, or at least acknowledge it: House does nothing but grapple with people on their scaly undersides, thinks nothing of people but their dirty, dubious details.

This is the resolution at which he sees. This is the distance of focus. This is the prescription the uncaring - say, dispassionate and dryly neutral, because let's not deify or demonize - universe has written him.

You want a diversity of human feeling? You've got it. Sure, everybody lies, but they all do it in such fascinating little deviant ways.

Everybody feints. Everybody taunts. Everybody steals. Everybody cheats.

You get married, you get divorced. It could be six days, two months, two years.

You have children, you fail them. Same timeline applies.

You meet someone you "like", it's only because you're hiding from someone else you don't, and you're hiding that from yourself.

The point is not to be hateful. The point is to be rational, logical. The point is for all the inferences not to be inferences, because they're sound.

He understands their behavior so supernumerarily well (as evidenced by, say, always hedging a perfect hypothesis) that it's grossly misguided arrogance for anyone to turn to him and scoff at his personal theory of humanity.

But the way he does it, so they say, is wrong. He's hyperempathic. He's hypoempathetic.

Stop pushing people away, they say. Conversely, stop sucking people in.

A horrible hokey-pokey, don't you think? Like the world is made entirely of elbows, and all the elbows have psoriasis.

Everyone is so much quicker to purport that House sees them as aliens than to propose that, to them, House might as well be an alien. That he's simply not interested in pushing that button.

Everyone assumes that he's just trying to get it. As if the left hand is simply not talking to the right and only exists to slap its twin down.

At what point are all the quacks out there finally going to accept that if something is this difficult to obtain and this flimsy once you've actually got it, it's probably not worth the strain ?

Life, on the other foot, is stupidly easy to create for those who don't want it badly enough and idiotically hard to destroy for those who do want a way out or don't deserve it.

The human body flails and self-flagellates, because it is so fatally programmed to keep itself breathing, even when the pain wants to win.

Life is pain. Some may say, love is pain. But people are not programmed to be happy.

Pain is easy. Pain is constant. If you're unlucky - and most folks are - blood keeps flowing even when the muscle dies.

Let the systems be. Let the logic work.

What is it they say, again?

Be happy, ideally. Say, be reasonably content. Consolation attempt (dishonorable mention): just don't make the rest of us look bad.

But happiness is merely a theory. There's no proof.

They say-

There doesn't need to be.

House may not subscribe to any positive attributes of sentience, but he does believe in the stateless healing powers of animal pleasures - food, sex, and a good thrill. Music, a stimulation of the senses. Wit, an exercise of the throe. Sins have a much greater potency than virtues, per cubic centimeter of culpability.

And happiness is not nearly so simple as satisfaction.

So House doesn't just figure that he won't try, he determines it.

No happiness. No peace. If it comes, it comes by accident. He won't prove it by either contradiction or omission.

He will not sit - refuses to sit - on the sliding scale.

Speaking of making others look bad, whose fault is it that they think Gregory House ever served to be a reflection on anyone else?

Surely he doesn't show evidence of James Wilson needing (choosing) someone to help weight down his effervescent conscience. Surely the way in which he acts is entirely excommunicable.

People are not programmed to be happy. House, certainly, lacks perception of whatever systems and functions it is that might otherwise lead to this.

He's not even programmed to make Wilson happy. He just...does it anyway.

Honesty is House's gift and curse, but whether he's giving it from himself or of himself is the true operative difference.

There's a disconnect between his mind and his heart. He knows this. Maybe he's always known this. It's not one that would have been charted even if he'd have liked it to be.

What he has no way of knowing is whether or not the fragility of happiness is meant to be supported, scaffolded, by that missing connection. All these lies that people tell to comfort themselves, to keep them in their own stases, are without fail much longer cons than House will ever mount. And he doesn't find himself motivated to believe that they're all faffing about faith.

Truth is stranger than fiction. Life is stranger than truth. And eleven interleaved major organ systems make life a tough old bastard.

Being happy hurts. Trying to be happy hurts. Trying to make others happy hurts.

But trying to make Wilson happy is...easier. More fun. Less coated in the bitter taste of failure, since Wilson has his own problems with women to absorb the blows.

Someone he's been able to tolerate, who's been able to tolerate him for all these years. That's the base case - the patient zero, rather. And then, from there, it builds.

Every takeout container. Every jazz club gist. Every turn and turnabout.

He lambasts Wilson for his bedside manner, but he never doubts his skill as a doctor.

Of course, by dint of being stationed at the same hospital in a separate department, Wilson is House's one true peer and equal.

They're just different enough. They're just so satisfyingly not-quite-similar.

(Which is to say, Wilson's face is not so intimidating, and he, like House, never shows any real frustration.)

Make Wilson happy. Find Wilson's happiness. Find happiness in Wilson.

A goal he's been able to reach, incrementally. A mountain that makes him meaninglessly accomplished to climb.

Why do you do it? Because it's there.

Happiness is still a theory.

(Maybe not just a theory.)

A thriving theory. A beautiful axiom - the thrilling corollary to Wilson's face-splitting, unstumpable smile.