Happiness

Happiness is joy at rest. Joy is a reaction, sudden, and fleeting. That is not to say that happiness is joy watered down, nor joy repeated – that would wear you out, or familiarity would diminish each occasion of joy. Rather, joy and happiness are made of the same stuff, of fear and uncertainty. Joy follows their resolution; happiness must be accompanied and fed by them – what we believed was inevitable, what we believed was already rightfully ours, never makes us happy.

Happiness is a human invention. Wild animals know joy by occasions; only pets know happiness. They are mutually exclusive. Joy belongs to a resolution – you are hungry: you hunt, you kill, you eat, you rejoice. Happiness belongs to a balance – you are hungry, there is food, you eat, something reminds you that there might not have been food, and you are happy. If you forget hunger, you cease to be happy – your circumstances are no longer a balance, but a given. Happiness must be reminded. For animals, it is reminded by instinct; for human beings, it must be reminded by memory.

Happiness, remember, comes in bottles, powders, and pills. It can be forced by lowered expectations, by narrowed attention (which values avoiding the depressing over facing the unpleasant), or by a sheer plodding effort no different from any other, which effortfully attains the state to which drugs make a shortcut. What we mean when we say that we want to be happy is that we want the right to be happy – we want an excuse to be happy – we want happiness and self-respect.

There are only two schemes of pleasure in life – the smooth, straight way of happiness; and the rough, winding way of joy intermitted with distress, desperation, and disappointment. These are not absolute commitments – as it is good and necessary for all simply to be happy sometimes, so there would be something distasteful in never choosing to set happiness aside, neither for joy nor for sorrow. It would a self-indulgent and antisocial vice to be always ready to reconcile yourself to the way things are – to smother the itch of discomfort or inconvenience that mothers invention, the restlessness of curiousity or the pain of perplexity that searches out discoveries, the indignation that demands change.

As life and history are a infinity of problems, the only excusable function of happiness is between them – it cannot be allowed to avoid them. Happiness is not something you are, it is something you wear; and like any cloth, it has proper and improper climates and seasons.

Fable of the Hyena and the Comedian

A spotted hyena, having escaped the zoo, walked the streets that night terrified and disconsolate. (He was small, so those who saw him took him for a dog.) He wandered until he heard, from a large building, the sounds of laughter. What could be causing so much terror – what could be frightening so many?

The hyena, approaching the source of the noise, saw through a window that the threat was only a single man. But the man had a terrible voice, as powerful as the trumpeting of the elephants at the zoo. The voice carried through the whole hall and out through the half-open window, into the alley where the hyena watched. It was a terrible and evil voice, full of mockery and cruelty.

The hyena did not know why the people did not destroy him. Perhaps (with that voice) he was too strong for them; but the hyena had nothing to lose. He burst through the window, leaped onto the stage, and before the creature could blast him with that terrible voice – the hyena tore out his throat.

The crowd stayed silent until the hyena had dragged the carcass off the stage and out of the building. Then they started whooping and gasping and murmuring, and the hyena was pleased to have caused so much joy, and to have freed so many.

Later, in the shelter of a storm drain, as he ate his prize, he reflected that he had found his purpose. There must be more of these creatures, and he was the only one swift enough to destroy them.

Moral: Never laugh in front of someone who does not get the Joke.

The Beach

The beach is as different from ocean and from land, as land and ocean are different from each another. It is the third state, the middle path. Ocean is faithless, relentless, and indifferent; we can hurt it but we cannot destroy it. Land is fixed; it is given; grounded, grounding, foreground and background. There are no names for what we trust which do not in some way resolve to the rock-solid trust we give the land – even when that trust is misplaced, given to earthquake zones, floodplains, or coy volcanoes.

The beach is always between, in kind as in place. It is the sea slowed down, and the land sped up. It is solid enough to sleep on, but not solid enough to build on. It flows without tides. Dry, it is liquid-like, cannot be dug out or molded. Wet, it is solid-like, can be built with or sculpted – but when it dries it does not set, it falls apart. Dry, you half-swim walking in it. Wet, it is smooth and hard as pavement. The paradoxes of sand, as a child discovers them the first day at the beach, exhaust all riddles.

Beach air is different. It does not feel like sea air. Here the motions of the air are not answered by a moving deck. On a beach I could never imagine myself on a boat. On a boat, even in still water, I could never imagine myself on a beach. Nor does it feel like inland air. And the sunlight is different. Even in summer, though medically no less dangerous, it feels harmless – it does not seem to burn. Its warmth goes straight to the bone and stays there.

We cannot see what we take for granted; to see at all, we must see anew; and we are never more aware than when we are between – between day and night, between forest and field, between city and country – between sea and land, where the beach makes a permanent twilight, the golden hour of the golden sand. Even between past and present – when the smooth dark horseshoe crabs, leading their slow tails, creep together out of the sea, up from five hundred million years to tell us that on this planet, we are the aliens.

The beach can do well to wake you in this way even in the summer, when you must trip over tourists and vacationers; it can do better, when the crowds thin in the cold; best, when the wind is high and the clouds are thick ahead of the storm, when the sea and sky are full of the same gray restlessness, and you share the beach only with those who know better than to notice each other, who share a mutual irrelevance as they watch the reckless, desperate surfers ride.

Gauss's Nightmare

[N.B. In the early nineteenth century Gauss, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, proposed to test whether the Moon was inhabited by intelligent beings by outlining (according to various sources: with flaming oil in a trench; by planting a forest on a plain; by planting a wheat field in a forest; or with an array of mirrors) a colossal right triangle. He expected that if they saw the shape, the people of the Moon would reciprocate it with a similar triangle.]

Planet A

From Letter to Minisalonicaro, Saboditamoni.

Dear friend:

I know not, of course, whether you are right about the appearance of our own Earth from the Moon. Certainly, plants of all sorts do appear green from our proximate position, but it is not impossible that they appear to be some other color when viewed through clouds and vast depths of air. Likewise, it is not impossible that the blues and greens of the Moon represent some other phenomenon, similarly shifted away from its natural appearance.

I might be supported in this by the speculations of our late friend Tamothoditanara, whose doctrine of degrees of rarefaction allows us to speculate that great thicknesses of air might behave quite like relatively slight thicknesses of water. Consider the enormous shifts in color which an object undergoes when immersed in water, and tell me again whether it is indeed likely that the colors which we see through two atmospheres, on the moon, represent what we see at hand to have those same colors…

I must recommend that you abandon this scheme. You may have convinced your prince that it will be worthwhile, but you should remember that princes are fickle and that if the response you expect is not forthcoming, he may choose to exact punishment for the waste in labor and precious oil which you have caused him. The trenches you propose will demand at least as much as a year’s harvest of oil to fill to an adequate level with soaked fuel. Also, as I remember from my visit, the ground in your district becomes very hard and rocky just a few feet below the surface, and it will require much more manpower than you have calculated to dig the trenches.

With all that, I must confess that I do not fear at all for whether you will be able to keep the lines straight over so great a distance, after the feats of surveying which I saw you perform for the laying-out of Tabacoraca…

Planet B

From Of the Marvelous Night of the Burning Shapes,
Archives of Mong Sthro Diocese.

O supremely noble prince! O beloved brother!

I indeed saw, o Brother, o Peer, the Burning Shapes of the Moon but a Month ago, when they inspired the Fear and Admiration of all Men and Princes. O Brother! O Peer! I tremble still to think of that wonder. The Temples of my Country have not ceased to make daily Sacrifices of our most precious Animals to the Moon since it offered that terrible Warning, since it displayed the terrible Shape of the Ax over all over our heads. O Brother! O Peer! I take comfort to know that our Wisest Emperor has offered the wonderful Sacrifice of his foolish General who obscenely demolished the Lunar Temples of Brift Tankt…

Humanism

We are uneasy in this world, half because it is cruel, and half because it is boring. That is not to equate cruelty and boredom, though boredom may reach cruel intensity (as for prisoners, who fear the boredom of isolation more than abuse), and though the cruelest of the cruel are the bored and cruel.

Nor is that to say that the world is in itself boring. But the things that are worthwhile about the world – its scientific intricacy, its aesthetic depth, its spiritual weight – are not the things we naturally see in it. They must be found or found out; introduced by education or example; happened upon, in reveries or shocks; or won, by study or pursuit, patience or passion.

In the long view, of many lives together, or of one life in unity, the intellectual endowments of human beings exceed any particular demand for their use. We do not feel this when we are engaged on a difficult problem. Our powers are tidal – when they go out, we drag, and think the world too much; when they come in, we soar and rush, and call it inspiration. But in the end, there is no such thing as a hard problem; only a problem which happens to be hard in a certain place or time. Every problem that can be solved is, or will be, easy for someone, not because that someone is any smarter than you, but because that someone, knowing what is irrelevant, where the dead ends are, and what it is realistic to expect, will not waste time or effort.

This is easiest to see in politics and economics. A body of voters is more likely to be correct than a cabal of aristocrats; consumers, than planners; educated guessers, than experts. But this wisdom of the demos, the market, or the crowd, is not because the many are even as smart together as a single human being alone; but because, when acting as a unit and addressing a limited range of choices, they stop in the right place. A laser is not brighter light, but light without distractions.

How could it be that the many are better than the one at deciding what policies to establish; at knowing how many widgets to make; at guessing how many beans are in a barrel? Certainly, averaging draws towards the mean, and so filters out the kinds of distortion which, being continuously variable, fit a curve – like variability in strength of eyesight. But people are diverse, and while you can average apples and oranges (as fruits, or spheres, or edibles, or vendibles), you cannot eat an average.

It must be noted that, while a range of secret answers always contains a few absurd outliers (three or a million beans in the barrel), the averaged results will tend towards the real. But this is not a miracle effected by the act of averaging; it is an effect of some people being right, or nearly right, by themselves. The reality of a true quantity creates a distribution over the crowd; the crowd does not, by the distribution, create the quantity.

Individuals’ failings result in part from their weaknesses. They cannot clearly see the beans or the barrel, they do not know how large the beans are. But even when everyone has equal access to the same data – as in the stock market – performance is not therefore equal. No special intellectual ability distinguishes successful investors. Rather, failures in investment are generally caused by over-thinking. That does not only mean thinking too hard, or reaching for the obscure when the obvious suffices; but also the inescapable friction of irrelevant considerations – moral, emotional, sentimental, logical, philosophical, mathematical, scientific, ambitious, charitable, or personal. Even where these are consciously excluded, the discipline required to avoid such constant temptations demands and impels needless, wasteful, confusing, and complicating repetition and recapitulation. The art of haggling is the art of inducing this state – of leading someone in circles until they are dizzy with thinking; so that the easiest to take advantage of, tend to be the most determined to energetically resist it. By thinking in circles we drill ourselves into deeper holes than we could fall into by not thinking.

This is not as strange as it sounds. You must leave room between routine and emergency, or an unforeseen emergency will catch you overstretched. It is admirable to be able to improvise in an emergency; it is foolish to do so from day to day, when the right tool or procedure is available to save time and effort. In an emergency, the wise man finds many ways to drive a nail; but when the emergency is over, the wise man uses a hammer (or a nail gun) like everyone else. Animals built to fight are slow to fight, because they fight all-out; animals that fight habitually do not fight well, because they fight predictably. In war, room for heroes proves bad planning – the best commander is not the one whose soldiers earn the most medals, but whose soldiers do not have the chance to earn medals before they win.

Boredom is one of the human conditions. Belief blunts, even turns, the sharp cruelty of life; but whenever religion tries to address the boredom of life, it becomes fanaticism; and the same is true of politics, which becomes totalitarianism. The opposite of this, whatever the religion or party, is humanism.

Life cannot be all about one thing. It is certainly possible to indirectly refer everything back to the glory of God, or the good of society. And if one takes any thought about life, some such summum bonum, some such qiblah, is inevitable. But even saints and prophets cannot always have God before their eyes; nor philanthropists, humanity. Such hauntedness, such fixity, is a kind of madness – the intellectual equivalent of staring at the sun.

At one extreme, fanaticism and totalitarianism deny boredom; at the other extreme, barbarism suffocates it; between, humanism cultivates it, and all that answers to it. The cruelty in life gives value to what allow us to overcome that cruelty, which are virtues; but virtues are all in some way denials of life – the patience to bear it as something separate to be borne, the courage to risk it as something you could lose. It is the boredom in life which gives value to life itself: to company, conversation, and friendship; to creation, enjoyment, and appreciation; to knowledge, reflection, and wisdom; to everything that provides human beings with the substance of human dignity.

As boredom and cruelty meet each other at the extremities, so do belief and humanism. A beautiful place of worship or devotion is more than the sum of a place of worship and a beautiful place. Still, even then, they must be pursued separately, each by its own law, each with its own end even where both share the same means. But the relationship is not perfectly reciprocal. Belief without humanism is death; humanism without belief is still a kind of life, though a naked one. Disbelief or unbelief is an act of independence which leads to dependence, because it preserves an openness which, like an unwalled city, is open to all; belief is an act of dependence or surrender which leads to independence, because it armors the mind against ambush and siege. This is a distinction of intellectual metabolism. Belief, endothermic, makes its own warmth; but in cities, people are like bees – individually ectothermic, they can yet ball up and shiver against each other for warmth.

Bare life, life unmoving and unmoved, is rightly an object of horror. Life is not need, and life is not fulfillment; life is in between – between hunger and satiety, to eat; between satiety and hunger, to do. We live to live; and life is the question which only life answers. The summit, fullness, and extremity of hope is the idea of a heaven which is but more and better life; and the best thing which can be done with life is to bring about more life. We live to live – and, living, to add to life.