Othering Happy

John Gray, in his latest book The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, quotes the German journalist Sebastian Haffner's account of society in Germany being comraded into happiness. A sort of environment where the not so active hater of the other still partakes in the happiness generated in the haters' non-hating activity. This must be true; for another author, Romesh Gunasekera, in a completely different context describes a happiness and preoccupation quite similar. And, with a war that's impending.

One is tempted to draw parallel to the Hindu right wing echo chamber of relatively strange people on Twitter who seem to enjoy othering Muslims. 

Two Men

There is a reason why literary fiction tends to touch love gingerly, if at all. It's difficult to be original, thoughtful and truthful about the said segment of human condition. In the past week however, there have been two  instances,

• Robert Peston's rendition of the British stiff upper lip when he selected his late wife Sian Busby's 'The Cruel Mother' in Radio 4's A Good Read. Mocking one's own vulnerability and being embarrassed about bringing personal suffering to a conversation and yet being honest about it is very moving.
• Marty Ginsburg's letter to his wife Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that was reproduced in The New Yorker's profile of her,

On the question of living

The trouble with modern life, or life in the calorie abundant world with relatively advanced healthcare, is that mortality is left to degeneration. That is, having survived the threats of infant mortality, influenza, childhood diseases, risks of famine, war, maternal mortality, heart disease, many types of cancer and many other major "killers", what most people will be left with is death due to Diabetes, Alzheimer, Osteoporosis and the rest. Ones where managing survival is possibly more difficult than death owing to their irreversability.

When faced with that prospect, what does a reasonable person do? Let's assume one manages to live to be sprightly until 90 and then hits a degenerative disease; simply because for all the advances in healthcare, mankind hasn't yet managed to eliminate death. 

What does a reasonable young person do?

One option is to ignore the inevitability. Another is to keep working on the ways one can mitigate the burden one will impose on the world when one ceases to be of any immediate value -- assuming there is value of some sort to be extended at all. The third, and perhaps the more honest is to question, what will be the difference between now and then? Is there any? Even if there is, is the relative value generated by one's own life worth the costs imposed on society and on the physical world? It must take phenomenal arrogance to answer that question in the affirmative, shouldn't it? As healthcare normalizes life expectancy and its relative quality, whatever that means, the obvious question mankind will ask itself is, why wait?

After all, the earlier uncertainty at least created the illusion of life being interesting.

Thought. Dream.

The meeting was boring as usual. He'd dozed off, as usual.

It's not a dream if you can will it. Why not? Does this then qualify as thinking? You don't think so? Who the fuck are you arguing with? You don't know? What are you doing anyway? You know what's more embarrassing? That you care enough to think your life is embarrassing. That it is, isn't. That you think it is, is. 

His name was called out. He's travelling to Baltimore. Clients were more fun. At least they kept his honesty from himself.

He wanted to tell her he did not want to cry again. He did not.

The Aftermath

What Emily Dickinson did not mention when she wrote 'After great pain a formal feeling comes':  the struggle between stubbornness to maintain formality and the willingness to yield is just as painful.

Broken Promises & Disturbed Sleep

He wanted to announce that falling out of sleep at 3.30 AM was not waking up. That the broken promise of sleep still had a redemptive possibility. Waking up was reserved for 6 AM, when staring into the unforgiving empty day did not have the promise of a hiding place.