Happiness
“Hap” is a chance, a fortuitous event, something unexpected that happens. It can’t be planned or controlled or manipulated. It does what it does: a bird lights on a fence, an uninvited person walks into a room, a rainbow appears or, conversely, the border guard is irritated from lack of sleep, a deer jumps out in front of the car, a heart almost literally explodes. Human life is laced with such events. Thomas Hardy, that agonist of woe, wrote in his poem “Hap” that “Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain.” We want all sorts of things from what we grandly call “life,” yet “Casualty obstructs.” The capital letter indicates a force to be reckoned with.
Happiness is movable, hither and yon, not to be put in a safe deposit box or purchased on the installment plan. If the United States can be taken as the modern protagonist of the comedy entitled “The Pursuit of Happiness,” then a marvelously compelling yet disappointing perspective opens up: the attempt to solidify what cannot be solidified. Little wonder that Americans are often dismissed as materialists. What else could they be? To identify a nation with the pursuit of happenstance is a grand, deluded, and poignant gesture. In an existential sense it frees the individual to believe in the intelligence of desire. Since those aims (assuming there are aims) may be less than happy, this may be a dubious freedom.
The Puritans who helped found what became the nation were of two minds about making efforts. Their God was inscrutable. Grace could not be earned in some simple, hardworking fashion. Yet God favored those who led a godly, upright life. And God, as any Boston merchant would tell you, favored industry. The curious mix of the Puritan spirit with the spirit of the Enlightenment accounts for the American propensity to ardently pursue happiness. The industry is Puritanical. The aim is not Puritanical. Happiness as a sort of task seems ludicrous and is. Yet there it is. Work—the exile from Eden—and play—a return to Eden—form a strangely shaped beast, a hippogriff of well-being.
Each American carries around an internal Happiness Thermometer. “Are you happy?” is a question that can be asked at any inopportune moment. It is every American’s duty to respond. Although the answer depends on more circumstances than can ever be articulated, the respondent should be able to point a finger at some palpable reasons. These reasons may be debatable. Does a wallet full of cash make a person happy? If the person says it makes him or her happy then it makes a person happy. The inwardness the Puritans favored became something else, still self-obsessed but looking outward. The signs that the Puritans eagerly sought became the trappings of the Good Life. The idol of happiness, which banished both God and the devil, may be regarded as America’s unofficial religion.
It exacts a fearsome toll. Various modern words—stress, functionality, multi-tasking, overtime, breakdown, crack-up, maladjusted—testify to the difficulties of happiness. The materialist striving necessitates more work to get more things (or borrow more). The vaunted Economy is like a dog chasing its tail. One way or another, everyone in the society is caught in that spin. When various disenchanted pundits in the 1960s counseled people to “drop out,” they were speaking to the spin, the earnest dizziness and dizzy earnestness of the USA. Surely, they were saying, there were other matters to attend to than the materialization of the evanescent, a hopeless, infantilizing endeavor if there ever was one.
Happiness is emphatically not about contentment, which seems to any excitable eye to be stagnant, dull, and utterly not-with-it, indifferent to the new-model-year and the latest entertainment. As a backward creature, Contentment may sit on the back porch, whistle some ancient ballad, and stare at the clouds for frightful amounts of time. Lacking, as it does, the element of pursuit, such sitting around and doing nothing seems to any forward-looking American a very paltry state of being. Contentment doesn’t even require electricity.
Nor is happiness devoted to pleasure. Pleasure is frivolous. When viewed through the lens of justification, sensual delight may be downright repellent. It has no lambent, greeting-card halo around it, often accompanied instead by a medley of swinish sounds—lip-smacking, grunting, and moaning. The notion of a society devoted in part to the arts of love or even gastronomy, is, accordingly, very disturbing. We would drown in our bodies. No higher missions, be they evangelical or democratic, could be evoked. Yet trying to accommodate pleasure in a modern work schedule has been a challenge. Pleasure, as it rhymes with leisure, is prone to sprawl out rather than be slotted in a tight half-hour. Pleasure favors cultivation and sensibility. It can be taught and learned but resists being graded.
As a heuristic spirit, happiness can be co-opted by many busy hands. It can be looked upon foremost as the icing on capitalism’s cake (and thus superior to communism’s dour, collectivist manias). Without happiness around, I wonder if the whole propulsive American endeavor would have been quite so propulsive. At once vague and promising, happiness has no interest in any boundaries. Happiness incites and, as such, is much more ill-defined than the joy of solidly hitting a tennis ball or the pleasure of sipping a fine wine or the contentment of playing the harmonica.
Happiness is also, as many a work of American literature has attested, a burden. Others may be happier: Shouldn’t I be happier? Or I’ve done what I was told to do: Where is my happiness? Or I’m facing illness, loss, heartbreak, and death: What use is happiness? Or I was happy but I’m not happy now. Or I had an unhappy childhood. Or I was happy elsewhere. Or you don’t make me happy. The list of happy woes is legion. Many a character in American fiction appears as a Sisyphus rolling the stone of happiness up a steep hill and then watching it fall back down. Often the stone’s path crushes the paltry individual. Yet to dismiss the notion of happiness seems unbearable and perhaps is. The lights of heaven are dim. Happiness beckons and we need that beckoning.
Nailed it again and again. Bravo Baron. How delighted am I to sink my teeth into such thoughts! Thank you
Years ago, when Larry was managing the Coop, a woman who was in line at the cash register was going on about how people can always be happy. A little girl who happened to be standing nearby, asked the woman, "But if you're never sad, how do you know your happy?"