A happy life is the one I never had,
but saying so may suggest I’m unfortunate
or ungrateful, either assuming no control
over fate or implying being endowed
with something of value in the first place,
as if a homo perditus were destined
for something other than a stint with a parasite
with angelic—if superficial—features.
If someone asked me if I was happy, I honestly wouldn’t know
what to say—not because I don’t know myself,
but because I don’t know what I’m being asked.
Happiness is one of those buzzwords that’s been around since time immemorial
and supposedly puts us above the paramecium, to name just one,
but I feel like we would have understood temporal multidimensionality sooner,
even though physics professors who study it are few and far between;
yet it can’t simply be reduced to an exercise in stale semantics.
So what is this chimaera we chase to the point of obsession,
or should I say, this phantom itch we don’t know how to scratch?
Whatever it is, there will always be those all too happy
to make a killing on the back of it.
Of all the fallacies, Golden Age thinking is the one
I could least likely fall victim to, since I am a poet,
and being miserable is in a poet’s job description,
whether it involves the present, the future, or the past.
And what is this happiness everyone’s talking about
anyway, let alone how and where to actually find it?
If anything, not having been born would be the only
glimmer of happiness I can think of, but it’s too late.
He who has learned to die has unlearned slavery
The Good Book. Consolations. 27:29. Made by A. C. Grayling (2016)
I’ve never been fifty before, so this should be interesting,
like the day I finally decided to be happy—as if becoming a merry chap
greeting fellow carousers with a pint in his hand could assuage the guilt
I’d accumulated over the years—by taking dying classes
on a maternity ward.
If every sexually transmitted disease is a cause for shame,
why aren’t we ashamed of the deadliest of them all—life?
It has its moments—that’s true—but above all, it is a fight
against the daily dose of monotony. Sooner or later, we fall
for it—that if we learn the alphabet, then the highway code,
and follow the laid-out path, putting on a front, we will find
time to buy a ticket to bliss—only to get on the wrong train.
You are allowed to be happy.
I got this from a film, since, strangely enough, no one ever told me that.
I guess everyone assumes it’s a given, like being infatuated with actresses
(I’m somewhere between the Tilda Swinton and Charlotte Gainsbourg phases).
But this whole idea seems a bit sketchy—bedridden, if I may say so.
I have long suspected that of all the things that make up
our meticulous, hand-woven everyday lives, nothing matters more to us
than the pursuit of happiness, and yet all we get are bus tickets,
bank statements, cartes du jour, bills supposedly paid on time, detailed itineraries,
and the like. Is that why the happiest person I’ve ever known
was a diener?
I hate smoking; I really do. For example, even the most beautiful woman, who normally would attract me immensely, the moment she reaches for a cigarette, I’m done with her. I will see her as a monster. And yet there was one time in my life when I was infatuated with such a woman, and her smoking, the way she did it, was something that added to her sex appeal. She was a friend of a friend, a bit of a tomboy, with her close-cropped blonde hair, tight jeans, an oversized men’s sweater with rolled-up sleeves, and a tough-guy attitude. I couldn’t take my eyes off her. We had both just turned eighteen and met in a pub, and I knew straight away she was not interested in me, not one iota. She was just being polite, and after that evening, I never met her again. Now, I don’t even remember her name.
Perhaps if I had met her under different circumstances later in life; or maybe my perception was distorted, like in the case of my friend, who one day admitted that she had been madly in love with me for a very long time—I just didn’t see it while chasing big-breasted bimbos. I never understood why she told me so many years later, when she was about to marry someone else. It was like a goodbye kiss, except without a real kiss. How stupid I was in my youth. Now I know that this was the first time I missed a chance at happiness because of my obsession with large breasts. I guess one never learns. At least I didn’t, and now it doesn’t matter anymore.
It would be nice to be seen as funny for a change. Perhaps if I were actually jovial and had someone around to appreciate that, it would be easier to fulfil that little whim of mine. But there is more to it. As Montaigne said, “The most manifest sign of wisdom is a continual cheerfulness; her state is like that of things in the regions above the moon, always clear and serene.” What I need is a soul that lodges philosophy. “There is nothing more airy, more gay, more frolic, and I had like to have said, more wanton. She preaches nothing but feasting and jollity; a melancholic anxious look shows that she does not inhabit there.” (from The Essays of Montaigne—Volume 05 by Michel de Montaigne, translated by Charles Cotton). And although Montaigne said the latter about philosophy itself, I consider it a perfect description of the soul I desire.
There is no point to life or value
beyond that of a pebble lying on a riverbank.
These could only be created between us, but only just,
since all we do is supply the necessary dose of meaning in life
to keep us going—not the meaning of life itself.
And by the way, let’s leave aside any notion of happiness
or morality as distinct concepts (have there been many lives
as meaningful as Judas’, to look no further than Christian mythology?).
So, asking about the meaning of life is, in itself, meaningless.
And as for meaning in life, just think of the paradox
of future individuals.
hidden pilcrow 