According to the Cambridge Dictionary,
‘bliss’ means ‘perfect happiness’. According to a study published in the Journal of Positive Psychology, ‘bliss’ is defined on the basis of four main criteria: Finding happiness in the moment; finding happiness within oneself; appreciating what one has; following one’s deepest desires. According to Google Trends, the word ‘bliss’ has significantly decreased in usage from 1800 to 2019 – counting results in every English-language book digitised by Google Books – with a modest peak in the 2000s, which signalled a slight, yet indicative resurgence of the term. The 1800s – what a time! – pure idyll, Romanticism, lyricism, the human condition, Leopardi! Bliss, bliss, bliss!
Looking closer at the U-shaped graph, it’s quite fair to assume that the curve’s first downward trend started around the 1850s, in the midst of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions. Literature, then, seems to reflect the despair of those dark years marked by devastatingly poor working conditions, child labour, and severe poverty for the sake of cynical progress – ‘bliss’ was definitely not the right word for those times.
The U-shaped graph depicting the ‘bliss’ usage trend keeps plummeting until it hits a lower-than-low plateau between 1918 and 1966: spanning the First and Second World War – which book could possibly talk about ‘perfect happiness’ in times like these? The bliss-trough stays low until the advent of the economic boom in Europe and the United States, with a moderate increase throughout the Postmodernist Eighties – happiness was, as matter of fact, a key component of the Yuppie age, with baby boomers paving the way for new ravishing spending habits based purely on primordial instincts and insanely easy access to capital: bliss in its purest form!
Yet it’s on the verge of the Noughties that ‘bliss’ re-emerges from the bottomless pit as a rediscovered word in the dictionary of civilization. On Google Books, not only books (or what is often casually referred to as ‘real literature’: novels, essays, short stories, etc) are meticulously indexed, but an indefinite, seemingly endless plethora of other print materials is also digitised and optimised for search engines. This includes trade publications, customer support documents, instruction manuals, massmarket magazines, brochures, pamphlets, and any other paper publication that can host ink and words on its surface. Searching for ‘Windows XP’ in Google Books – note, not in a Google web search – produces about 1,150,000 results in 0.24 seconds. Another U-shape comes to mind, although this time, our ‘bliss-trend-chart’ is turned upside down.