Brian Fawcett is the author of more than twenty books, including Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow, The Secret Journals of Alexander Mackenzie, and Virtual Clearcut, or The Way Things Are In My Hometown. He is a former columnist for the Globe and Mail, has written articles and reviews for most of Canada’s major newspapers and magazines, and is a founding editor of the internationally followed Internet news service www.dooneyscafe.com. Fawcett was born and raised in Prince George, B.C., and now lives in Toronto.
HUMAN HAPPINESS
ALSO BY BRIAN FAWCETT
Cambodia: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow
Public Eye: An Investigation Into the Disappearance of the World
Gender Wars: A Novel and Some Conversation About Sex and Gender
Virtual Clearcut, or The Way Things Are In My Hometown
Robin Blaser (with Stan Persky)
BRIAN FAWCETT
HUMAN
happiness
THOMAS ALLEN PUBLISHERS
TORONTO
Copyright © 2011 by Brian Fawcett
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior written permission of the publisher, or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Fawcett, Brian, 1944–
Human happiness / Brian Fawcett.
ISBN 978-0-88762-808-5
1. Fawcett, Brian, 1944–. 2. Fawcett, Brian, 1944– —Family.
3. Authors, Canadian (English)—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS8561.A94Z468 2011 C813'.54 C2011-903593-6
Editor: Patrick Crean
Cover design: Sputnik Design
Cover image: courtesy of the author
Text design: Gordon Robertson
Published by Thomas Allen Publishers,
a division of Thomas Allen & Son Limited,
390 Steelcase Road East,
Markham, Ontario L3R 1G2 Canada
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council for its publishing program.
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $20.1 million in writing and publishing throughout Canada.
We acknowledge the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Media Development Corporation’s Ontario Book Initiative.
We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.
11 12 13 14 15 5 4 3 2 1
Text printed on a 30% PCW recycled content and FSC certified stock
Printed and bound in Canada
HAPPINESS is most often defined as a state of mind similar to, but more encompassing than, contentment, satisfaction, pleasure, or joy: what you are to yourself rather than what you feel at any given moment or are seen to be by others.
In the distant past happiness was associated with the Greek word “Eudamonia”: living a good life, which is to say, without being under threat from barbarians (however one defines them) or the gods.
Happiness is central to Buddhist thinking, which focuses on gaining freedom from suffering by following an Eightfold Path aimed ultimately at overcoming desire. In the last half of the twentieth century both happiness and desire became more closely linked with shopping, and in the twenty-first it has become a consumer commodity in and of itself, usually linked to disposable income and Oprah Winfrey–level therapy or, in some cultures, with detonating bandoliers of C5 explosives amongst the infidels so you can go to a heaven filled with voluptuous virgins.
My findings are that human life is morally and physically a mess and that the future is utterly unpredictable. Thus, true happiness lies in the ability to live with ambiguity, and the road to happiness runs along those paths through the dark wood that aren’t blocked by the paralyzing blindness of ambivalence, or slicked to individual and collective idiocy by simplifications that can’t bear the sunlight.
Earlier versions of parts of this book have appeared in Descant, on www.dooneyscafe.com, and in The Heart Does Break: Canadian Writers on Grief and Mourning by Jean Baird and George Bowering, Random House, 2009.
The quotes on pages 163 and 177 are from Sherwin B. Nuland, How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, Vintage Books, New York, 1993, pages 168 and 169, respectively. The passage quoted from David Shields on page 9 is from Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2010, pages 25–26. The lyrics to “Little Things Mean a Lot” on page 169: words and music by Edith Lindeman and Carl Stutz, as recorded by Kitty Kallen in 1954.
THE LAST TIME I TALKED to my mother, she announced that she hated my father. This was a couple of days before the end of November; she was in Penticton, B.C., and I was in Toronto. I’d called her on the telephone to ask about a recipe for Christmas cookies, but that wasn’t really why I called. While I talked to her the week before I’d heard something odd in her voice, and I was checking to see if it had dissipated. It hadn’t.
There’s not a hell of a lot that’s wise or comforting you can say to your mother when she drops a bomb like that. Particularly when she’s 90 years old. You just let her speak her piece, and hope there are no more bombers taxiing down the runway. And of course, hating the man she’d been married to for 64 years wasn’t the only thing she had on her mind. She’d spent the afternoon making the cookies I wanted the recipe for, she’d just packaged up a batch of beef stew into meal-sized portions for the freezer, and was about to start sewing the green net “Nanny Bags” of Christmas treats that had been a favourite of the small kids in the family since I’d been one of them. Did I think the kids still wanted them?
I assured her that they did, although I suspected, in a world filled with more spectacular confections, that they didn’t care one way or another.
“Your father’s supposed to be back from Kamloops any minute,” she said, when I asked about him. That’s when she dropped her bomb. “I can’t say I’ll be glad to see him. I think,” (here was an auspicious pause as she considered what the right words should be) “I’ve finally gotten to the point where I hate him. He’s your father, but I really just hate him. So there.”
The flat finality of it was disturbing, but it didn’t exactly take me by surprise. Things hadn’t been going well between them for a long time, and to tell the truth, the rest of the family wasn’t getting along much better.
We were, at that moment, on the verge of a civil war, with several fronts.
My