Okay, I’ll ask you the rudest question I know: Are you happy? Seems like everyone I know staggered out of the global lockdown we found ourselves in exactly four years ago, expecting some kind of honeymoon that never came. Seems like things are tough all over. Seems like a good time to ask ourselves whether we are happy. And, what happiness is.
***
Told you I’ve been reading Charles Bukowski lately. He was good on this subject. From his poem, “A Poet in New York.”
Eating out tonight
I find A table alone
and while waiting for my order
take out my wife’s copy of:
A Poet in New York
I often carry things to read
so that I will not have to look at the people.
I find the poems bad (for me)
these poems written in 1929
the year of the stock market crash.
I close the book and look at the people.
My order arrives.
The food is bad too.
Some say that bad and good run in streaks.
I hope so.
I wait for good, put a slice of
lemon chicken into my mouth, chew, and pretend that everything is fairly fine.
***
My mother was manic-depressive, and wrote in an unpublished journal that her moods rearranged the whole world:
Can’t trust responses, judgment.
Down, have so many problems; up, have no problems. Do I have problems or don’t I?
Afraid to make decisions. Start writing new book? Or take another twenty-five milligrams of Elavil? Get a job? Read the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW? Or take lithium blood level?
***
My dad Thomas Murray wrote this in a book on raising kids, and I read it at his funeral.
It seems to me that I must tell my children that the happiness of human beings is too often measured or referred to in unrealistic lengths of time—in happy years, or a happy life.
I want them to realize that life is not lived in lifetimes or even in seasons, but in sunny mornings and snowy afternoons, in picnics in the yard and on Tuesdays with the flu and in hours and minutes and in waiting for a child’s fever to break and sitting quietly with your husband or wife on a Wednesday night or picking up her dress or his suit at the cleaner’s.
That if they can’t find happiness here they won’t find it next week or next month somewhere over the horizon, in the excitement of flying an airplane or climbing a mountain or accepting the honors of their fellow men or of kissing a strange new mouth.
I am going to tell any child of mine what I believe—that the clearest indication of a happy life are happy days and happy nights, that the clock, and not the calendar, will always tell her truthfully whether happiness is truly hers.
***
(Roseanne Roseannadanna also had an unanswerable point.)
***
I’ve been on a few long sailing trips. Whatever weather you’re sailing in, you assume at the deepest level that it will never change, no matter how thoroughly your sailing experience has taught you to know better. When you’re going fast and smooth on a sunny broad reach, you think it will never go bad. And when the main is reefed and you’re making three knots in a disorganized sea with the rain tearing into your cheeks, you think it will never get good again. But what you also notice is? The circumstances make a surprisingly small difference on your deepest attitude, either way. This is why rich people are often miserable. And why the Ukrainians and Palestinians haven’t all committed suicide. (And why I don’t listen much to people who say they’re depressed because of how bad things are in the world. When in fuck was the “world” in a state that would have made you feel good about things? 1725?)
***
Tolstoy said, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Ummm, could he have elaborated a little on “happy families”?
***
My friend and colleague Mike Long has a book coming out—a sequel to a book he co-wrote on neuroscience titled, The Molecule of More. “Neuroscience is powerful, but it isn’t enough,” Mike concluded after writing the new book. “To experience true happiness in the moment, we need meaning in the long run.”
***
John Steinbeck wrote that his friend Ed Ricketts was one of the most generous people he’d ever known. But:
His feeling for psychic psychic pain in normal people also was philosophic. He would say that nearly everything that can happen to people not only does happen to them but has happened for a million years.
“Therefore,” he would say, “for everything that can happen there is a channel or a mechanism in the human to take care of it—a channel work down in prehistory and transmitted in the genes.”
My little sister injured her leg in ballet when she was 11 or 12. When I asked her why she wasn’t limping, she said, “Limping doesn’t help.”
Leave a Reply