Against Happiness

It seems as though everyone is attempting to find true happiness. We are walking the face of the earth attempting to discover the source of profound joy, but we receive mixed messages. Author Eric Wilson of “Against Happiness” shares a very bold and deviating point of view in his book. Maybe happiness does not always deprive from 'prettiness', as Wilson would claim, but instead, it is driven from a sense of realness and honesty. In fact, life is not only the contribution of good but also life's contribution of the bad. And, to achieve wholeness, we would first need to not only appreciate, but absorb the 'beautiful ugliness' that is life. In this essay, I will examine Wilson's thesis, which is his attempt at helping others discover a profound joy while, at the same time, being “against happiness”! To do this, I will discuss 3 of his many concepts including “sorrowful joy”, “death is a call to life”, and lastly, “loss of real”.

Can sorrow or sadness be productive? Can it even be joyous, or lead us to joy? That is a powerful question, isn't it? Wilson throws us into a poetic pit of human emotion with, “Sadness reconciles us to realities. It throws us into the flow of life. It puts us on the brisk edge of experience. It makes the heart beat hard, throbbing between faith and doubt. Sadness says to the pining mind: it's fine to languish in incompleteness.” (33) What Wilson is trying to convey is, we need to embrace both the sadness and the happiness. Through this process, we will find a sense of inner philosophy within our piles on top of piles of painful realizations, knowledge and intelligence that was hidden before we opened our arms to the possibility of sorrowful joy. What we are trying to achieve here is the strength and will to no longer associate sadness with weakness and sickness with the need to medicate or heal. What Wilson is trying to tell us here is that sorrow can be joyful once we no longer constantly link a normal human emotion such as sadness with depression and manic hallucination; in other words, mental sickness.

In addition to the understanding that sadness is not a weakness and we can indeed achieve much from embracing “sorrowful joy”, Wilson believes we can achieve a similar positive outcome out of what humans consider one of the most sorrowful and mysterious occurrences we face in life, which is death. Our author makes another strong statement with, “death is a call to life”. It is true that the circle of life is a beautiful thing. It is understood that stars have died billions of years ago to give birth to us, and we share the same properties of these stars as well. That is quite remarkable, you could say. Flowers also wilt away in the death of each winter, and bloom back to life every spring! This can indeed witness a call to life through such a positive realization. Wilson continues to enlighten us with, “Life grows out of death, and death from life; turbulence breeds sweet patterns, and order dissolves into vibrant chaos...it is a call to life, an electrical jolt enjoining us to explore, with vigor and wit, our own odds and risks.” (44) We can also understand that one day we will seize to exist. This can give us a great drive to living a fulfilling life while we still have this life to live. Our life is truly the only thing we know for sure exists; we cannot prove that anything comes before, or after. All we have is the present moment; so indeed, death is the true calling to life.

Furthermore, Wilson suggests that we have lost our sense of the real, and in a way have become disconnected from reality. The author calls this phenomenon the “loss of real”. What is most intriguing is how he decides to explore this occurrence, not just as humans, but as Americans. On page 21, he claims that “...this American quest for happiness at any cost is not merely a pastime, an occasional undertaking. We are starting to realize that this push for earthly bliss is at the core of the American soul.” This particular passage is very intriguing because as Americans, we have a sense of this American Dream. Even today, many people from all over the globe migrate this way in search of this American Dream. Have we understood the American Dream or the American “way” incorrectly? Our grandparents lived through this generation, and speak both positive aspects of their experiences, as well as the negative. For some, it is understood that we live in the land of opportunity, while others would claim very differently. Some would say it is not real, that the American quest for happiness does not exist, that the American dream is not real, that Capitalism destroyed that long ago. Wilson elaborates on this ideal with, “But we are also on the verge of comprehending something else again: this quest for happiness at the expense of sadness, this obsession with joy without tumult, is dangerous, a deeply troubling loss of the real.” (21) Wilson is teaching us something very vital in this passage. He is revealing truth to us, that in fact, there is no triumph without tribulation. There is hopefulness without helplessness. We must achieve balance. We can only experience the magnificent feeling of achievement when there is an obstacle in front of us that needs to be overcome.

To conclude, I do not feel that what Wilson is expressing to us is that farfetched. Wilson makes a compelling argument about the source of happiness while maintaining such a poetically pleasing prose. There is a gloomy writer or artist that gracefully sits behind these words, which is appealing to the reader. His book ends with a lengthy biography teeming with authors and studies by Walter Benjamin and Frederick Jameson where you can get a little bit of insight as to where he acquires inspiration behind his ideas especially in relation to his thoughts on the American way of life, and our painful lack of true happiness.

When receiving this assignment, I thought, maybe I'll go out into the world to discover beauty within a church with magnificent arches and stain glass windows, and considering the examples of Ficino, Jesus and Adam & Eve within Wilson's book “Against Happiness”, I could not help but think of how the example of religion has played into the happiness of human beings, though a completely different approach has been made by Wilson. For the purpose of this assignment, I decided to try something a little different. I decided to observe nature, more specifically, animal and plant life itself, and the stars. I hoped to witness death. I went out into the world to observe life and death.

This may sound bizarre, but with my new found mentality gained from Wilson's concept of “death is a call to life”, I could not help but attempt to find that particular call to life within death. I spent a full 24 hours with the idea of observation in mind. I found 'beautiful ugliness' is all the oddest places and spaces. I woke up early one morning and went to a nearby fish market, and purchased six small live snow crabs. Of course, I bought them with the intention to steam in a large pot covered in Old Bay seasoning and enjoy them, but more importantly, I did it with the intention to witness the death of animal life with hopes that I would run into some sort of profound realization. It is not that I found it morbidly beautiful in any such way, but because I went into the situation with an entirely different mindset, the experience felt uncomfortable. Although, in that discomfort, I also felt like I had a more meaningful connection to what I was eating. It was as if I saw the larger picture, for a split second, and maybe, I didn't like how I felt about being at the top of the food chain instead of a part of the circle of life. I did not mindlessly cook a meal, more so, I did not mindlessly pop a TV dinner into the microwave or add kettle water to my Cup Noodle without any such thought of where my food came from. That day, I thought about where my food came from, and there was an odd beautiful ugliness to it. I saw the bigger picture, and I don't think we do very much anymore. Honestly, I really don't think we do this at all.

Furthermore, I also went to the pet store specifically to feed live crickets to the lizards and chameleons. It sounds quite silly, but it's not like I could go to a stranger's funeral, or sit in a hospice organization with dying patients all day. Well, I guess I could sit in a hospital all day but that seemed a bit overwhelming and I've never quite liked the smell of hospitals. Plus, there is some kind of moral line crossed or ethical dilemma presented here. Watching other people die, and watching the families of those people grieve is probably not something I should be doing. So, instead, I went to the pet store and watched the chameleon eat the cricket. Maybe when I gather enough bravery, I will do something wild like watching people die.

Maybe the average “happy person” would not see the wonder in these small but astonishing acts. It is true that neither of them was “pretty”. Today I realized you don't need to answer life's biggest questions with philosophy or religion, maybe just a simple observation of the world around us can bring us true happiness. Maybe what we really need to do is look within ourselves and observe all the fortunate and unfortunate aspects of human existence, then peer around ourselves to see how we fit into this large mess we call life. I think something that is so crucial that Wilson often reminds us is that we must feel our feelings fully. In that way, we can find fulfillment. Life is the goodness and the not so goodness. Maybe those philosophers that have suggested the importance of balance, along with our author Eric Wilson were seriously on to something.

Work Cited

Wilson, Eric. Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Print.