The problem with happiness & other notes

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

Campo Santa Maria Formosa