Happily, ever after

A few nights ago, I went to my local theatre to see a production of a recently composed opera, based on an old Italian fairy tale.  The libretto was both light- and warm-hearted, the singing and playing were both competent, and while the evening was enjoyable, nonetheless I left the theatre dissatisfied.  The narrative structure in Act One hinted at Greek tragedy, but the concluding Scene in Act Two was pure Hollywood.  Reflecting on my disappointment, I concluded that there is good reason why fairy tales tend not to work well as the source material for opera.   In the best opera, most, if not all the principals lie dead on the stage by the time the curtain falls.  By contrast, the best fairy tales conclude with the narrator’s assurance that the main characters will now live “happily, ever after”.

I do not intend to say more about opera, at least not in this text.  Instead I want to write about living happily ever after: what would that be like?

I remember a poem by C P Cavafy, titled “Monotony”, written in 1908 and here translated from modern Greek by Aliki Barnstone:

From one monotonous day, another day
follows, identically monotonous. The same
things will happen. They will happen again.
The same moments find us and leave us.

A month passes and brings in another month.
We easily guess what is to come:
the same boring things from yesterday.
Then tomorrow no longer looks like tomorrow.

One reason I like this poem is for the way Cavafy generates tension between form and content: there is repetition as day follows day, month follows month, and the same things happen again and again.  But he is careful to tell us that the days are monotonous, and that the things are boring.  It is not their repetition that is the problem but their intrinsic uninterestingness.  Boredom is a feature of the events themselves not their repeated recurrence.  From which we might infer that a life of repetition could potentially be an interesting life – a happy life, a life in which tomorrow truly looks like tomorrow – even though this particular exemplar, the life about which Cavafy writes, is neither interesting nor happy because what is endlessly repeated is by nature dull.

Many of the moments of our lives, which find us and leave us, do so daily.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will eat: which means that I will also buy ingredients, cook food and clear away the utensils after consuming what I have prepared.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will go to sleep: which means that I will also brush my teeth, wash my face and make the bed after rising in the morning.  For most of the days of the rest of my life, however long that is, I will read: which means that I will also browse my shelves for material, sit for an hour or more in my chair and return my glasses to their case after perusing the chosen book or magazine.  For most days of the rest of my life – not the unusual days, the extraordinary days, but the normal days – it is these habitual activities that will determine whether my life is lived happily, ever after.

(I take it that “ever after” in this context means “for a good while”, and not “for time without end”.  For immortals, the problem of monotony will be harder to resolve).

One part of the secret to living a happy life comes from avoiding war, famine, or the premature deaths of those we love, but success in these cases mostly remains beyond our control.  We cannot always avoid adversity, however much we try, and unluckiness can surely be the enemy of happiness.  Finding satisfaction in the quotidian is, I think, another part of the secret: if we can adjust our sense of pleasure to focus on the enjoyment of the everyday, we increase the likelihood of a happy life.  Many facets of our daily lives can be thought of as tiresome chores which distract us from greater, more meaningful activities, but I suspect that thinking in this way makes the achievement of greater things less likely.

Which brings to my mind another poem, titled “I Want” and written in 1933 by Ricardo Reis, one of the anonyms of Fernando Pessoa, here translated from the Portuguese by Jonathan Griffin:

I want – unknown, and calm
Because unknown, and my own
Because calm – to fill my days
With wanting no more than them.

Those whom wealth touches – their skin
Itches with the gold rash.
Those who fame breathes upon –
Their life tarnishes.

To those for whom happiness is
Their sun, night comes around.
But to one who hopes for nothing
All that comes is grateful.

Chasing after wealth and fame is foolish, for all the obvious reasons, but so too is chasing happiness as an end-in-itself.  Enjoying what we have, what is given to us – the daily repetitions that structure our lives – can bring pleasure enough, and anything additional should be treated as a gift.  Reis (Pessoa) wants no more from life than his days of life: they suffice; living itself is good enough.

Pessoa’s poem echoes the writings of Benedict Spinoza, whose Jewish ancestors had left Portugal for Holland, rather than accept forced conversion to the Christian faith.  Spinoza was himself expelled from the Jewish community in Amsterdam for refusing to abjure his radical theological views.  He was a man denied the security afforded by membership of a strong national or religious community, a man who depended on the kindness and discretion of a small group of like-minded friends, themselves at the margins of Europe’s emergent Republic of Letters.  He was a man who, though he might think as he pleased, needed to be very careful about saying what he thought; he was a writer whose caution led him to remain unpublished in his lifetime.  Yet, he was also by all accounts a happy man.

At the start of his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (written in the late 1650s), Spinoza writes that experience had taught him that “all the things which regularly occur in ordinary life are empty and futile”.  This might be taken as a wholesale rejection of my suggestion that happiness can be found in the enjoyment of the quotidian.  But while he dismisses the pursuit of wealth, honour or sensual pleasure for their own sake as routes to happiness, Spinoza is careful to note that these three need not be obstacles to happiness, so long as they are considered only means to a greater end.  That end – true happiness – he describes as “the knowledge of the union that the mind has with the whole of Nature”.  To understand what Spinoza means by this enigmatic statement would require extensive commentary on his great philosophical treatise, The Ethics (published in 1677, shortly after his death).  However, for my present purposes I want only to draw attention to a claim that he makes – emphatically – in the fourth chapter (paragraph 42), where he writes that “cheerfulness cannot be excessive, but is always good”; or, as another translation puts it, “there cannot be too much joy”.  Spinoza is sometimes portrayed as a man who lived an austere life and developed an austere philosophy.  On the contrary: he was a man who found great joy in both his life and his thought.

Whether we find the things that regularly occur in ordinary life to be empty and futile, depends less on their intrinsic nature and more on the way we think about them.  If we chase wealth, fame or pleasure as our goals, we are likely to find the daily routine to be no more than a daily grind.  By contrast, if we take pleasure in small, repeated actions – the daily making of coffee, a weekly swim, tending a garden through the seasons – our happiness can be founded upon these well-loved routines.  Should some wealth, fame or pleasure appear in our lives – by effort, merit, or accident – they may bring us supernumerary joy.  But we are more likely to be happy if we do not depend on the extraordinary as the source of our happiness.

Which is another way of saying that whether we are happy – or not – is consequent more on how we think about our lives and less on what happens to us during our lives.  If we understand, as Spinoza did, the union of the mind with the natural world, or if we learn, as Pessoa did, to hope for nothing, then we can enjoy the routines of daily life cheerfully because such a life can be lived with joy.  What once were considered obstacles can, in practice, become vehicles to true happiness, if only we adapt our minds to the reality of the world.

I do not mean by this that happiness if only to be found by withdrawal from the world, escaping into a sheltered, scholarly or poetic renunciation of public life.  Spinoza spent much time thinking and writing about politics and science: his retreat into domesticity was forced upon him by the lack of intellectual and social freedom of his time.  And he is the most materialist of all philosophers, denying the existence of a separate realm of spirit, mind or ideas, distinct from the physical universe.   His approach to happiness is not founded on an abandonment of the material world, but on the whole-hearted embrace of it.  And for him, as for most of us, for most of the time, this embrace is centred on the repetitive daily tasks that form the bones of our lives, the skeleton upon which all else we do hangs.

In classic fairy tales, the hero and heroine live happily, ever after, once the dragon has been slain, or the wicked witch/wizard has been defeated, or the enemy’s attacks have been thwarted, allowing the protagonists to enjoy many, many days in peace and quiet.  Happily, ever after, implies a time of calm, a time of wanting no more than the days themselves.  Does this sound monotonous?  Maybe so, but only if we choose to find days of peace and quiet to be dull.  If we learn to take pleasure in them and their sufficiency, we need not think of them as empty and futile.   And, in addition to the great pleasure we obtain from eating, sleeping and reading – over and over, time and again – we can also go to the opera once in a while, to enjoy the spectacle of der Lieberstod, content that it is others, not us, who chose death in ecstasy over repetitious daily life.