Our Town: Little joy, big joy or no joy at all

Dr Tom Ferraro
tom ferraro

How does one go about finding joy in life? Joy and happiness are the Holy Grails of life that every American seeks. We seek and yet we do not find.

Whether you’re a superstar athlete, young Olympic hopeful, a successful business type or someone just like you or me, we all work to the bone looking for happiness and too often in the end we come up empty. The American zeitgeist is best characterized as the obsessive drive to succeed, to win, to make money and even get famous.

Our obsession with materialism is based on Madison Avenue’s ability to keep us searching for that golden ticket in the form of something new. Consumerism has made us the most powerful and the wealthiest nation on Earth but at what cost? All this work and all these purchases seem to be taking us further from joy and happiness.

Clearly a change is needed, and it’s needed soon. The writing of American philosopher Thomas Kuhn may help us here. He wrote “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” and explained that most people think change in society, science, religion or politics occurs gradually, incrementally in small logical steps. But, in fact, change almost always occurs suddenly after a long, stagnant waiting period and this change is always resisted. The old paradigm is rigidly defended until a genius comes long to shatter the current mode of being and replace it with a better one.

This is what occurred in physics when Albert Einstein developed the theory of relativity. This is what occurred in religion when a mystic named Jesus Christ came along and shook things up for the next 2,000 years. This is what Galileo did and what Newton did and what Freud did as well. These are the ones we call mystics or geniuses or messiahs. These are the bringers of hope, the pioneers, the change-makers.

And so, to our question of how to inject joy and peace into a world consumed by work addiction, where are the messiahs of mirth that we can turn to for guidance? Who can bring us back to the joys of childhood?

Maybe great literature contains some answers. Well, there is no messenger of joy in “Moby Dick” because Ahab worked himself to death. Don Quixote sought some fun and adventure, but that ended badly too. Perceval searched valiantly for the Holy Grail. but his story ended in tears and regret. So who do we turn to?

I did like the way Buck ran free at the end of Jack London’s “Call of the Wild,” but Buck was a dog, not a human. Dante also made it to heaven after traveling a long while through hell and purgatory. But you may not have the time to read that lengthy masterpiece.

So in the name of brevity I would recommend four short classics to fill your heart with hope and light. The first is an essay by German-Swiss poet Herman Hesse called “On Little Joys” in which he implores you to pause in your daily routines and just look around you. If we would only take a moment to look at the sky or a tree or a painting or a child, we would be confronted with joy.

My second recommendation is to read the novella by French novelist Gustave Flaubert called “A Simple Heart,” which is about Felicite, a maid in the French countryside, who has a golden heart. The story revolves around her simple life and her ability to attach herself to little objects, the most wonderful of all is a stuffed blue parrot named Loulou. The final scene is pure mysticism and magic as she spends her last few moments on Earth looking longingly at her blue parrot.

The third recommendation is the great novel “Far From the Madding Crowd” by lish novelist Thomas Hardy. The story is set in pastoral southwest England in the 19th century and is about the frugal shepherd, Gabriel Oak, and his undying devotion to Bethsheba Everdene. This is a story of how to live a simple life of goodness and fidelity and how this kind of life finally gets rewarded.

The last choice is “Our Town” by Thornton Wilder, the play many consider to be the best American play of the 20th century. At the end there is a soliloquy by Emily Gibb, who has just died shortly after she married and is now in a state of limbo but asks those in charge of these things if she can return to Earth for just one more day. She is advised against it but is finally granted her wish.

She returns to Earth for her 12th birthday and proceeds to observe the way her family seems harried and oblivious to all that life has to offer. In her tearful soliloquy before she must return to the graveyard she says “Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by Grover’s Corners…Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, Earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

She then turns to the stage manager and asks “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” to which the stage manager answers “No. Saints and poets maybe, they do some.”

These sweet classics suggest that joy is found in the simplicity of everyday life. Felicite didn’t need a Lamborghini to find happiness; she was content with her stuffed parrot Loulou.

The way we now live life in the 21st century produces fatigue, somatic illness, loneliness, alienation, paranoia and despair. Something is wrong with the system. But as we await the next mystic to help us break out of this cloud of darkness, we can find solace in the past and the current masters which include the names of Herman Hesse, Gustav Flaubert, Victor Hugo, Thomas Hardy, Thornton Wilder, and maybe even new found geniuses like British novelist Kazuo Ishigura or Japanese writer Haruki Murakami.

And as the old television advertisement instructed: “Try it, you’ll like it.”

TAGGED: Tom Ferraro
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