Showing posts tagged happiness

Adam Gopnik on Wislawa Szymborska: “Life fully imagined”

Though hardly a happy poet in the usual sense—born in Krakow in 1923, possibly the worst moment and place ever to arrive on this planet, with Hitler waiting to greet her on her sixteenth birthday and Stalin evilly coming along behind, how could she be?—Szymborska’s poetry had the gift of creating both the happiness of wisdom felt and the ecstatic happiness of the particulars of life fully imagined. From the experience of armies and dogmas and death that shaped her early life, she found a new commitment to the belief that the poetic impulse, however small its objects, is always saner than the polemical imperative, however passionate its certitudes.

Szymborska took as subjects “chairs and sorrows, scissors, tenderness, transistors, violins, teacups, dams and quips,” to use a list from the title poem in that last collection [Here]. Though determinedly microcosmic, she was never minor. Szymborska takes on an onion, and that onion is peeled, down to its essence. A Szymborska poem is always charming, wonderfully charming, charming as a small child singing, charming as a great pop-song lyric. But her poems are also, to use an old word, “deep,” mysteriously so, about the very nature of existence.

— from “Wislawa Szymborska: The Happiness of Wisdom Felt” (The New Yorker)

Blaise Pascal: “We never keep to the present”

We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.

Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.

— from Pensées

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When I was five years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy.’ They told me I didn’t understand the assignment. I told them they didn’t understand life.
John Lennon
Michael Cunningham ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: [The Hours] is also a novel that has darkness in it .  .  .  . I would call it the abyss, which Virginia Woolf, for example, sees behind her when she looks in the mirror in one of my favorite passages, and yet I don’t find the novel ever dark. It’s almost illuminated. How did you do that? MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM: Beats me. I can’t imagine wanting to write a novel that wasn’t about darkness in some way. I don’t feel like we need much help with our happiness. The Kodak moments we can manage on our own—I don’t mean to dismiss happiness. We can manage our happiness on our own.  .  .  . I feel like what we need art for is a little bit of solace, a little bit of company in trying to deal with the darker stuff. And at the same time, I would never write a pessimistic book. I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act. — from “The Pulitzer for Fiction,” a conversation with Michael Cunningham, by Elizabeth Farnsworth (PBS News Hour) (Photograph by Richard Phibbs. Thank you, mysanantonio.)

Michael Cunningham

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: [The Hours] is also a novel that has darkness in it .  .  .  . I would call it the abyss, which Virginia Woolf, for example, sees behind her when she looks in the mirror in one of my favorite passages, and yet I don’t find the novel ever dark. It’s almost illuminated. How did you do that?

MICHAEL CUNNINGHAM: Beats me. I can’t imagine wanting to write a novel that wasn’t about darkness in some way. I don’t feel like we need much help with our happiness. The Kodak moments we can manage on our own—I don’t mean to dismiss happiness. We can manage our happiness on our own.  .  .  . I feel like what we need art for is a little bit of solace, a little bit of company in trying to deal with the darker stuff. And at the same time, I would never write a pessimistic book. I think writing is, by definition, an optimistic act.

— from “The Pulitzer for Fiction,” a conversation with Michael Cunningham, by Elizabeth Farnsworth (PBS News Hour)

(Photograph by Richard Phibbs. Thank you, mysanantonio.)

Michael Cunningham: “Like the beginning of happiness”

Still, there is this sense of missed opportunity. Maybe there is nothing, ever, that can equal the recollection of having been young together. Maybe it’s as simple as that. Richard was the person Clarissa loved at her most optimistic moment. Richard had stood beside her at a pond’s edge at dusk, wearing cut-off jeans and rubber sandals. Richard had called her Mrs. Dalloway, and they had kissed. His mouth had opened into hers; his tongue (exciting and utterly familiar, she’d never forget it) had worked its way shyly inside until she met it with her own. They’d kissed, and walked around the pond together. In another hour they’d have dinner, and considerable quantities of wine. Clarissa’s copy of The Golden Notebook lay on the chipped nightstand of the attic bedroom where she still slept alone; where Richard had not yet begun to spend alternate nights.

It had seemed like the beginning of happiness, and Clarissa is still sometimes shocked, more than thirty years later, to realize that it was happiness; that the entire experience lay in a kiss and a walk, the anticipation of dinner and a book. The dinner is by now forgotten; Lessing has been long overshadowed by other writers; and even the sex, once she and Richard reached that point, was ardent but awkward, more kindly than passionate. What lives undimmed in Clarissa’s mind more than three decades later is a kiss at dusk on a patch of dead grass, and a walk around a pond as mosquitoes droned in the darkening air. There is still that singular perfection, and it’s perfect in part because it seemed, at the time, so clearly to promise more. Now she knows: That was the moment, right then. There has been no other.

— from The Hours

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They seemed to come suddenly upon happiness as if they had surprised a butterfly in the winter woods.
Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
Toni Morrison She repeats [her father’s words], slowly, with the air of revelation. “Go to work, get your money, come home.” She was not obliged, he said, to live as [her white employers] saw her in their imagination. Later, when Morrison was bullied at school, it had little effect on her, she says. “A little Italian boy called me an Ethiopian. ‘Hee hee hee, you Ethiopian, you.’ I went home and said to my mother, ‘What is that?’ And she said, ‘It’s a country in Africa.’ And it was sort of like, what? He obviously thought it was a great insult.” Morrison, dry as ice, says, “It was not impressive.” This attitude has, at times, landed her in trouble. “It limits you. It makes you insensitive to certain things, that later in life you should be sensitive to.” She never took drugs, she says, not even as a teenager when everyone around her was smoking dope. “I did not want to feel anything that did not originate with me. Because the big deal, as they described it, was that it made you feel so good. I did not want to feel something that was dependent on it. I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness, whatever that means. Because you’re all you’ve got.” — from “Toni Morrison: ‘I want to feel what I feel. Even if it’s not happiness’” by Emma Brockes (The Guardian) (Photograph [Ms. Morrison and her son Slade in 1978] by Jill Krementz. Thank you, Ms. Krementz and newyorksocialdiary.) View high resolution

Toni Morrison

She repeats [her father’s words], slowly, with the air of revelation. “Go to work, get your money, come home.” She was not obliged, he said, to live as [her white employers] saw her in their imagination. Later, when Morrison was bullied at school, it had little effect on her, she says. “A little Italian boy called me an Ethiopian. ‘Hee hee hee, you Ethiopian, you.’ I went home and said to my mother, ‘What is that?’ And she said, ‘It’s a country in Africa.’ And it was sort of like, what? He obviously thought it was a great insult.” Morrison, dry as ice, says, “It was not impressive.”

This attitude has, at times, landed her in trouble. “It limits you. It makes you insensitive to certain things, that later in life you should be sensitive to.” She never took drugs, she says, not even as a teenager when everyone around her was smoking dope. “I did not want to feel anything that did not originate with me. Because the big deal, as they described it, was that it made you feel so good. I did not want to feel something that was dependent on it. I want to feel what I feel. What’s mine. Even if it’s not happiness, whatever that means. Because you’re all you’ve got.”

— from “Toni Morrison: ‘I want to feel what I feel. Even if it’s not happiness’” by Emma Brockes (The Guardian)

(Photograph [Ms. Morrison and her son Slade in 1978] by Jill Krementz. Thank you, Ms. Krementz and newyorksocialdiary.)

This happiness thing Silverstein’s career was broad and varied. Before he became known for his poetry, he got both kids and parents a little teary with his children’s book “The Giving Tree,” published in 1964, which told the bittersweet story of a tree willing to give everything it could for the little boy who loved it. “Happy endings, magic solutions in children’s books create an alienation in the child who reads them,” Silverstein once told the New York Times. “The child asks why don’t I have this happiness thing you’re telling me about, and comes to think when his joy stops that he has failed, that it won’t come back.” — from “Shel Silverstein: a new collection, 12 years after his death” by Molly Driscoll (The Christian Science Monitor) (Photo: Thank you, kidsinharmony.)

This happiness thing

Silverstein’s career was broad and varied. Before he became known for his poetry, he got both kids and parents a little teary with his children’s book “The Giving Tree,” published in 1964, which told the bittersweet story of a tree willing to give everything it could for the little boy who loved it.

“Happy endings, magic solutions in children’s books create an alienation in the child who reads them,” Silverstein once told the New York Times. “The child asks why don’t I have this happiness thing you’re telling me about, and comes to think when his joy stops that he has failed, that it won’t come back.”

— from “Shel Silverstein: a new collection, 12 years after his death” by Molly Driscoll (The Christian Science Monitor)

(Photo: Thank you, kidsinharmony.)

That was to be her happiness What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old. It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one. So, nothing now but what she or anybody could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for. Nothing secret, or strange. — from “Post and Beam” (in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) by Alice Munro (Photo: Thank you, coverspy and goodreads.)

That was to be her happiness

What made more sense was that the bargain she was bound to was to go on living as she had been doing. The bargain was already in force. To accept what had happened and be clear about what would happen. Days and years and feelings much the same, except that the children would grow up, and there might be one or two more of them and they too would grow up, and she and Brendan would grow older and then old.

It was not until now, not until this moment, that she had seen so clearly that she was counting on something happening, something that would change her life. She had accepted her marriage as one big change, but not as the last one.

So, nothing now but what she or anybody could sensibly foresee. That was to be her happiness, that was what she had bargained for. Nothing secret, or strange.

— from “Post and Beam” (in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) by Alice Munro

(Photo: Thank you, coverspy and goodreads.)

(Reblogged from coverspy)

Alice Munro: “This was what I wanted”

When I had walked for over an hour, I saw a drugstore that was open. I went in and had a cup of coffee. The coffee was reheated, black and bitter—its taste was medicinal, exactly what I needed. I was already feeling relieved, and now I began to feel happy. Such happiness, to be alone. To see the hot late-afternoon light on the sidewalk outside, the branches of a tree just out in leaf, throwing their skimpy shadows. To hear from the back of the shop the sounds of the ball game that the man who had served me was listening to on the radio. I did not think of the story I would make about Alfrida—not of that in particular—but of the work I wanted to do, which seemed more like grabbing something out of the air than constructing stories. The cries of the crowd came to me like big heartbeats, full of sorrows. Lovely formal-sounding waves, with their distant, almost inhuman assent and lamentation.

This was what I wanted, this was what I thought I had to pay attention to, this was how I wanted my life to be.

— from “Family Furnishings” (in Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage)