anathematization of the world is not an adequate response to the world.
(donald barthelme)
what i would like to know is who the hell said anyone is supposed to be happy? there's this idea never more prevalent than in the 20th and 21st centuries that the greatest good in life, the whole reason for existing, is happiness, and that we all must come to it in the same prescribed ways, and if it eludes you than you've somehow failed in life. this is a deplorably unbalanced way of thinking, and has goes a long way, i think, toward creating much unhappiness--both in the depressive (whos unhappiness it no doubt compounds by the idea that there's something wrong with them, that they're missing out, by not being happy) and in the average person by instilling such an aversion and fear of unhappiness, that happiness becomes it's own opposite. to me this is not a very humanistic way of thinking: the idea that humans should by all means be happy, that they should reject suffering. because what happens is that when you reject suffering you're rejecting your own humanity, so much of which is based on suffering and struggle. suffering, make no mistake, is at the heart of everything. and people who think themselves happy or that put pressure on themselves to be happy are most likely latently unhappy. i find it really hard to believe that, for example, people who lead these suburban lives (sordid suburbia i call it, wrote a great essay on it once wherein my professor called me a future nobel prize winning writer *smug*) revolving around children and barbeques and soccer games are actually happy unless they're extraordinarily simple folk. in any case, a life like that can never afford real joy, the kind that bypasses such pedestrian ideas of happiness and doesnt depend on any cliche conditions for it's existance; the kind that you cant find in any of the familiar places, because like all things of any value it creates itself. and one of the keys to real joy is the refinement of emotion and the exquisiteness of the expression of that emotion--all emotions. which is why many artist who are said to be tortured souls are also said to experience moments of real joy and ecstasy which ordinary people with their mediocre ideas can never experience. and id much rather lead a raw ragged life with despair as my only companion in pursuit of the refinement of feeling than lead a boring borgeois life, where success in life is based upon the principle of being very very good at being very very mediocre. anyone who is so coarse as to believe that deserves to be unhappy.
