The Chocolate Philosopher

I was eating some Dove dark chocolate pieces the other day. There are messages on the foil wrappers which can be read on the occasions one does not destroy them in the process of extracting the chocolate. Often they are very dull, not exactly, but along the lines of, "Mmm... isn't chocolate tasty?" On this occasion, however, I got "Love is the master key which opens the gates of happiness." These are, apparently, the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes; he is uncredited on the foil, but I've googled it.

Prior to the googling, I was wondering whether the statement is, in fact, a correct one. I'm sure it says something about me that the knowledge someone other than an employee at Dove had said it first instantly made it more dependable. Still, my immediate thought on first reading the wrapper was that it seemed more accurate backwards: happiness is the master key which opens the gates of love.

So I've been flip-flopping between the two for a week or so now. Then I happened to read something in my daughter's geometry text book about contrapositive statements and that set me off googling again. The version of the statement I initially preferred is the converse of the original (coincidentally, in addition to converse statements I also prefer Converse shoes and have just bought some). When the converse of a statement and the statement itself are both true, I have just learned that the relationship can be said to be biconditional. So, throwing poetry, for the moment, out the window, we are left with: Love ↔ Happiness. Which is, at the very least, much more reassuring than Love → Building on Fire.