Walt Whitman on happiness

I don’t know what or how, but it seems to me mostly owing to these skies, (every now and then I think, while I have of course seen them every day of my life, I never really saw the skies before,) I have had this autumn some wondrously contented hours — may I not say perfectly happy ones? As I’ve read, Byron just before his death told a friend that he had known but three happy hours during his whole existence. Then there is the old German legend of the king’s bell, to the same point. While I was out there by the wood, that beautiful sunset through the trees, I thought of Byron’s and the bell story, and the notion started in me that I was having a happy hour. (Though perhaps my best moments I never jot down; when they come I cannot afford to break the charm by inditing memoranda. I just abandon myself to the mood, and let it float on, carrying me in its placid extasy.)

What is happiness, anyhow? Is this one of its hours, or the like of it? — so impalpable — a mere breath, an evanescent tinge? I am not sure — so let me give myself the benefit of the doubt.

Specimen Days

October 20, 1876

Brainpickings

Happy Valentines Day!

"Find your beach"

With his philosophy of happiness as a moral obligation, it is no surprise that Albert Camus is intellectual America’s favorite European export. The American Dream is built on the pursuit of happiness, but Camus amplifies it from a mere right to something more, something better aligned with the modern condition of compulsive pursuit — of happiness, of productivity, of self-actualization. Indeed, this is a paradoxical culture where the Self reigns supreme, even though we know it is an illusion; a culture built on hard-headed, hard-bodied, hard-and-fast individualism, even though we don’t know how to be alone. Ours is an era built on the legacy of the age of anxiety, the pathology of which we’ve perfected to a virtuoso degree.

Some weeks ago, I attended Amanda Stern’s excellent Happy Ending music and reading series. The magnificent Zadie Smith, she of great wisdom on the craft of writing and the psychology of the writer’s mind, read an enchanting essay she had just written — about Manhattan, about our modern compulsions, about the artist and the anguish of the American Dream. The essay, titled “Find Your Beach,” is now published by The New York Review of Books. With unparalleled humor and humility, Smith explores the essential hubris of our age, not without admitting her willful participation as an ambitious cog in the machinery of compulsive self-actualization.

She opens with a view of a billboard across from her university housing in Soho — a beer ad, “very yellow and the background luxury-holiday-blue,” captioned “Find your beach.” Smith finds the text — almost a command — perfectly, tragically emblematic of American culture. She writes:

It seems to me uniquely well placed, like a piece of commissioned public art in perfect sympathy with its urban site. The tone is pure Manhattan. Echoes can be found in the personal growth section of the bookstore (“Find your happy”), and in exercise classes (“Find your soul”), and in the therapist’s office (“Find your self”).

(Brainpickings, continues)

Enjoy!

Philosophers have traditionally been highly suspicious of fleeting pleasures, but to enjoy the moment is a radical act

One fine evening a band is playing. People are dancing and enjoying themselves. A woman is there, relishing the event. Then she thinks to herself:

Everywhere, imperceptibly or otherwise, things are passing, ending, going. And there will be other summers, other band concerts, but never this one, never again, never as now. Next year I will not be the self of this year now. And that is why I laugh at the transient, the ephemeral; laugh, while clutching, holding, tenderly, like a fool his toy, cracked glass, water through fingers.

These thoughts from the journal of the American poet Sylvia Plath ask whether there is something inescapably painful about enjoyment. Maybe enjoyment makes you anguished and miserable; perhaps this vitiates its worth entirely. Certainly, there have been many philosophers who have endorsed just such a negative position. But they are wrong.

To understand why that is so, we need to clarify what we are debating. Philosophers have puzzled over the question of what enjoyment is, proposing competing accounts of pleasure, but we can take a straightforward view that enjoyment is a distinctive state of finding an experience pleasurable. The hallmark feature of pleasure, in turn, is its feel-good quality. An enjoyable experience feels good. And it can be distinguished thus from a painful one, which feels bad. Does then the transitory nature of enjoyment undermine its worth? Or might that very brevity of enjoyment be part of its importance in human life?

(continues, Aeon)