Something Different from Happiness

                        For Norman V.

What if you no longer believe in happiness?  Not that it cannot be attained or felt–denying this aspect of happiness, its sheer existence, would be as stupid as denying the white or yellowed light of a smile, or the rock you stumble over on your walk to work, or the presence of a gift in its factor of surprise and its fittingness to who you are–but that it is not worth attaining or feeling, that life should not be fussed over to the extent that it achieves, or fails to achieve, the stature of a happy life.  What then?  Is life worth the trouble, at bottom, in the absence of such a belief?  Of course it is not, at least insofar as what was taken to be the standard of earthly existence is found or deemed worthless–what a pathetic game, whose players are more to be pitied than envied, this constant scrambling after a feeling, a feeling that, in addition to whatever worth life might have, is supposed to grant us a sense of satisfaction with that worth.  But if life, the living of a life, has different powers and aims than those which contribute to our contentment?  Well, then it is a different story indeed, and we must ask ourselves if, in staking out a path for our well-being and reaching out, to whatever degree of desperation, for that destination, we have perhaps started out on the wrong foot.

            Mantras to the effect of proclaiming, confirming, or reminding us of the importance of happiness are no small part of our speech and thinking today, perhaps more so now than ever before, since it seems that we have so many options and opportunities laid out for us and at our disposal that the mere selection of one over another, or the enhancement of a host of our strengths so that they come together in a certain harmony and please us in contemplating them, are the only barriers separating us from that highest of high bestowals.  Be happy.  Do what makes you happy.  Follow your heart.  Happiness is all that matters, and your own especially.  So ring in our ears the mantras of today with rude simplicity.  Nietzsche, in his Zarathustra, when trying to gain focus on what it would mean to embrace or affirm a tragic existence, sings a different mantra, in the form of a question, one which he says follows close upon the hour of the great contempt, when just what seemed most worth striving for is seen as the most paltry thing, a worthless obsession, much ado about nothing, or at least as not providing a guidepost for our lost and unstable lives, nothing as secure in its eminence as all that.  It reads, or it sounds–that is, if we take the time, as we should, in uttering it aloud, so that the words gain substance: What good is my happiness?  Notwithstanding that the question is followed straightaway by an answer, that happiness is poverty and filth and wretched contentment, and that we should see to it that our happiness justifies existence itself, the bare question, the question alone, is our focus, our mantra, our counter-mantra for times such as these, times that make comfort and ease with the course of things into a religion.

            What good is my happiness, we should ask ourselves in a quiet corner, or in the silence of our breasts, anytime we are reminded to go after nothing with more determination or surety as to its beauty and goodness than happiness and happiness alone, or in any case happiness first and foremost.  Happiness, happiness, happiness: we are bombarded at every corner with the word.  In English the word is tied to luck and happenstance; what luck those three syllables come out time and again to dig their way into our ears and burrow into our hearts!  To those we should reply, in song if we must, with the challenge of our four unbending syllables: What good is it?  What good is it?  What good is it?  We see life take on a different mien and character then, as though it had been sold short before, when it was reckoned only by how happy it happens to make us.  Then, in the hour of contempt or the hour of making slights at and making small what was supposedly grand and distinguished, we see life come forward to whisper to us as it is wont to share with us some of its other secrets.

What good is my happiness? It is poverty and filth and wretched contentment. But my happiness should justify existence itself!

Nietzsche, Zarathustra, “Zarathustra’s Prologue”

            Not the least of which is having no answer to the query, not even one of condemnation, but just being stunned by it into recognizing life, at least possibly, stripped of the dress of our happiness.  It is an apocryphal matter in life, that happiness may be put at a wholesome distance by a question, and we nevertheless go on living, go on in a hapless existence.  In fact, we do so all the time, and we finally come to see that the best of what we are and what we perform is not given credence in the insistence on happiness.  We may, that is, forget about happiness and its importance for awhile, perhaps a good long while, perhaps for the rest of our while here on the earth, and not thereby forget about life or living life, perhaps even loving life, and not leave life in the lurch in our strained search for the happy life.  If only some being would continue to have, as Zarathustra exemplified, the compassion to give us this hearty reminder, rather than at bottom singing the same old tune with variations and in a different key and register, getting in line as everyone else seems to be waiting in line, waiting for the day when happiness, at last, despite all our pessimism and gloominess, despite how ugly we find the happy man or woman compared with the rest, the suffering and the maimed, will come and will be well worth the wait and all the trouble, a reminder of something different from happiness, something better, something stronger, something indifferent to happiness or unhappiness.