I'm sure I've said this in this venue before, but I'm so impressed with the things I say that I have no hesitation saying them again and again (I've probably even said that before): One of life's worst kick in the ball's came when I realized that the earth, the solar system, the whole damn galaxy, even the universe as I know and love it is going to disappear and no one will ever know that we ever existed. That really depressed me for a long time. Before that, I kept thinking that our noble struggle towards the godhead, though fruitless, would at least ennoble the universe. Now I agree with the Duke of Gloucester: "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods." No one will ever know we ever existed. How many astonishingly brilliant and beautiful and unimpeachably noble life forms have blossomed and flourished and disappeared that we will never ever know about in galaxies gone now some hundred billion septillion years ago? Alas. Such is life.
A friend told me, though I've not been able to substantiate it, that Einstein when asked if he were happy, once replied: "Happy? Pigs are happy."
Of course the same friend told me that William Carlos Williams wrote in a poem: "On my wife's sixty-fifth birthday, I kissed her while she pissed." I used that line, writing it out large and bold on the black board to introduce my 10th grade English class to the Poetry Section. They giggled and snickered and chortled, as I knew they world. Then I let loose a rip-roaring lecture on love and prudery and familiarity and poetry and how poetry works and etc., etc., etc. Never was I so good! The principal heard about and asked me not to come back the next year. This was at a Catholic boys' high school. "I couldn't be trusted with 16 year old minds," he said. "To think of associating married love with bodily elimination" he shuttered, he actually did. I laughed. But I've never been able to authenticate that as a Williams' poem or verse or quip or anyone else's. Help please. Not that it matters. In fact, I hope it isn't. I want to claim it as my own (my friend is no longer with us and will never know I stole it from him).
Happiness is the feeling you feel when you're not thinking about yourself. It's when the world overwhelms you so much with itself that you forget yourself and your responsiblity to judge it, straighten it out, bring meaning and moral order to it. Happiness is nothing more than mood that comes with dereliction of duty, it is born of the forgetfulness of meaning. Meaning is the hopeless striving to measure up to the reproaches of our culture.
But don't worry, in 5 billion years or so our sun will burn up, taking with it any evidence that any of us ever existed and so your permanent record will be expunged. Had I known that back at Immaculate Conception School I could have scoffed at teacher and told her: "Go ahead, write it down in my "permanent" record. See if I care." But I didn't know that then. Like a coward, I cowered. Until she wasn't looking, then it was fun time again. So sit back and relax, folks. Happiness isn't something achieved, it's just what overtakes us when we forget we're that supposed to be meaningful and dutiful and responsible and mature and good citizens and successful and, well you know the routine.
Mike Geary sometimes happy, sometimes sad but seldom meaningful in Memphis----- Original Message ----- From: "Robert Paul" <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Saturday, September 20, 2008 8:05 PM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Happiness or Meaning?
Here's something that just bopped into my mailbox—a cfp from the journal MONIST. Their quarterly issues are devoted to papers on a theme. The next one isThe Meaning of Life! Deadline: January 2009Advisory Editor: Quentin Smith (Western Michigan University) <quentin.smith@xxxxxxxxx>The vagueness and ambiguity of the question ‘Is there a meaning of human life?’ is standardly resolved by reformulations using more precise categories from the philosophy of religion or from moral realism. But are there alternatives to such reformulations? Consider:(1) Biology: the meaning of human life is to survive and reproduce; because we no longer have to struggle to survive and reproduce, we are no longer in a position to experience this meaning.(2) Physics: Hawking has argued that the meaning is in principle expressible in terms of a ‘complete unified theory’, which will throw light inter alia on‘the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.’(3) Psychology: People talk of sensing ‘emptiness’ in depression and ‘fullness’ in joy. Can these metaphors be justified as referring to modes of epistemic access to some mind-independent meaning of human life that is neither religious nor ethical in nature?(4) Art: Some hold that there are artistic symbols which somehow express the meaning of human life but in a way that is not expressible in linguistic form. Can such a linguistic ineffability theory be philosophically defended?Are there other approaches to defending a theory of the meaning of human life? Is it possible to articulate a formal structure or account of meaning which all such theories must share? Articles are invited addressing these and related questions in an analytical spirit.Robert Paul ------------------------------------------------------------------ To change your Lit-Ideas settings (subscribe/unsub, vacation on/off,digest on/off), visit www.andreas.com/faq-lit-ideas.html
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