[lit-ideas] Re: Happiness or Meaning?
- From: David Ritchie <ritchierd@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Fri, 19 Sep 2008 10:58:33 -0700
On Sep 18, 2008, at 10:37 PM, Eric Yost wrote:
David: Maybe somewhere between Sam Francis and Rothko, there's a
way forward?
John Singer Sargent's _Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose_;
Mary Cassatt's _The Boating Party_;
Richard Diebenkorn's "Ocean Park" series;
Edward Hopper's _Early Sunday Morning_;
Joan Mitchell's _Untitled_;
Gerhard Richter's _Clouds_; even
Tracey Emin's _May Dodge My Nan_
all seem happy in their own way.
A short response. I hope I haven't compressed too much. It's
probably better to start with this rather than spend days on a long
essay that no one has time to read.
Yes, they do. And what do they tell us? That our metaphors
concerning happiness are spatial perhaps and that they have changed
over time? A constant is that happiness is associated with what is
high, its opposite, with being low; happiness is expansive, it's
opposite is restrictive. But there have been changes. In the amount
of tranquility in that space, for example. Today the ultimate model
of happiness is not eternity spent within a walled garden, or gazing
from stadium seating at a very intense light bulb--I'm caricaturing
two early visions of heaven. These notions of a safe lonely or
social place, set apart from the world's turmoil have been translated
in modern times into fantasies of tropical island escapes. But what
happens when you actually become Gaugin or John Koffend today? Most
people quickly feel "out of touch" with life. In the latter
instance, you write a long letter to your wife, regretting all, and
then you kill yourself. Contemporary concepts of happiness are not
generally meditative; people want to be party of a boating party of
some sort. And yet we have this idea that hell is other people, so
the people in the party must be stripped to abstractions or colors if
the space is to seem generally welcoming.
What, then, is the *pursuit* of happiness? Some kind of hunting party?
David Ritchie,
Portland, Oregon
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