I call my blog ‘Notes from the Boundary’. Perhaps that
is what it should be: a series of notes . . .
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1
The admonitions to be happy . . . have about them the
fury of the father berating his children for not rushing joyously downstairs
when he comes home irritable from his office.
Theodore
Adorno
The dictionaries of course categorise ‘Happiness’ as
an (abstract) noun. In other words, as a state that may obtain under different
times or under different circumstances: just like, pain, joy, grief, elation,
or any other emotion or bodily state that we endure or enjoy. Well, I do not
know, but I have a feeling that there is a fairly widespread notion that
happiness is a state of being that it is both desirable and possible to enjoy
permanently. If only we could adjust our modes of thinking in some precisely calibrated
way, then happiness could almost be categorised as a concrete noun. Because it
would be something that you possessed – like a ring on your finger – and carried wherever you went. All this is of course completely fallacious,
because – to take but one example – if you have a boss who consistently humiliates
and bullies you – it will be utterly impossible to be happy. You will dread
going into work, hate being there, sleep badly, in all likelihood brood through
the weekend, and very likely become seriously depressed – given that your
energy will be sapped and your self–confidence undermined – if not, to all
intents and purposes, shot to pieces. To tell someone, under such circumstances,
that they need to practice ‘positive thinking’ is little short of cruel. Yet this
is precisely the kind of advice you will find in the ‘self help’ books. I have
read a few of the latter, and found a handful of truths in some of them. But on
the whole they are shallow – if not downright useless or unhealthy – and the
bonfire or the trash–can would be the best place for the majority of them.
“It is difficult to get the news from poems,” William
Carlos Williams said, “yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is
found there.” To “get the news” from the world of psychology is equally
difficult. It can take a lifetime. And – through no fault of their own – many
cannot even find their way to the first rung of this particular ladder. It would
be a great help if society did not pressurise everyone to ‘be happy’, and if
people could admit – in appropriate ways – that things often go far from
swimmingly with them. As Philip Slater writes, “Life would indeed be less
frantic if we were all able to recognise the diversity of responses within
ourselves, and could abandon our somewhat futile efforts to present a
monolithic face to the world.”(The
Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at Breaking Point, 1970)
2
It is a diverse world, is it not?
Full of people who never fully understand themselves, others, or indeed the
existential fact of 'being'! Albert Schweitzer writes, “We are all more
oppressed by the riddles of the universe than we allow others to see.” I wonder
how far this is the case for the atheist.
3
“A head,-huge, inhuman, and monstrous,-leering in
bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described, or to be
beheld for more than an instant: yet let it be endured for that instant; for in
that head is embodied the type of the evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned
in the fourth period of her decline; and it is well that we should see and feel
the full horror of it on this spot, and know what pestilence it was that came
and breathed upon her beauty, until it melted away like the white cloud from
the ancient field of Santa Maria Formosa.”
John Ruskin – The Stones of
Venice
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| Campo Santa Maria Formosa |
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