I remember my mother, while I was very young, excusing the weakness of a family friend by saying, well, she’s only human. It was a forgiving, affectionate explanation, and I recognized that at its root was the idea that to be only human was an essentially good thing. I was comforted by the thought that I too was only human.
But somewhere along the line, that comfort has vanished. To be “only human” in the twenty-first century is to be merely human, an aggressive and distasteful condition. It means being disconnected from nature’s laws, it means being selfishly venal, and probably destructive: an alien force, hostile to the well-being of the planet, at the bottom of the hierarchy of goodness.
How did we get to this? I and my children may end up leading good lives, but we have no shot at the Good Life the way my parents understood it because our joy and comfort at being what we are comes at the expense of one of a thousand disadvantaged minorities or will contribute to the further impoverishment of fragile landscapes and ecosystems, will endanger every threatened animal or plant, and will further pollute the planet. I can live with this because I’m used to it. But my kids have lost their right to collective human happiness because it is too costly to the planet and to the rest of their fellow human beings. That bothers me. It leaves them to lead guilty lives, with pleasures that are deemed anti-social and selfish.
Something else. The empirical observer in me has noticed that most people today think about happiness the same way art critics see still life painting: as a fixed state in which a nexus of static objects supposedly sheds an aura of light and exactness that evokes a summarizing kind of external meaning, usually in the form of a slogan. Life Is Short; Life Is Beautiful; Pleasure Is Fleeting; Don’t Worry, Be Happy.
At its core, still life is a distortion. If it were language, it would make sentences in which there are only nouns, with a halo of sepia where the verbs ought to be. Inside that sepia, however, rests the creator’s slogan, along with whatever prejudices he or she may have about the world. In art, and sometimes in life, there are formal intentions which take the form of a prescriptive syntax. For instance, some of the objects in a still life must be of human fabrication, some must be harvested from the world. In a typical still life, you might find a dead pheasant resting beside a rotting pear lying in front of an old bottle, while across the pheasant’s breast lies a slightly rusted knife.
The contemplation of still life constructions comforts people, but I don’t believe them for a moment. There is no such thing as still life, not really. Life is never still. The pear will soon rot or be eaten, the dead pheasant must be plucked and put into a hot oven before the maggots take over, the bottle recycled in a blue box or filled with gasoline and stuffed with a rag to make a Molotov cocktail. Don’t ask about the knife. And then there’s the real world, the one most of us live in day by day trying to find happiness—or a car dealership that gives away BMWs.
Happiness is subject to the same logic as still life: in the real world, if happiness and/or still life or even the Good Life exists, it is only for a moment, and glimpsed in flight. Things must move along in the real world, and every attempt to control or stop the movement fuels the slapstick that breaks it down into the human condition: moments after the painter sets his (or her) arrangement, his spouse (or one-eyed hunchbacked assistant) trips over a bucket of apples or empty Pepsi cans and scatters the arrangement. The bottle smashes on the floor, the family dog grabs the pheasant and runs for the door, trailed by the screeching spouse and followed, at a more leisurely pace, by the painter, who has a slight smile because he (or she) understands the artifice of the still life arrangement and the ease of making another construction—or maybe there is a lover waiting a few blocks away, and this accident will hasten the end of the working day.
Real world happiness isn’t, as the pie-faced optimists of Oprah Winfrey’s reality have it, an arrangement of self-inflating, easily faked pieties and on-camera revelations. It is intangible and limited, a fleetingly experienced emotional evanescence lodged within a continuum of other, not-necessarily-sanguine events. Except for a few very underemployed, self-involved, or very lucky people, happiness isn’t an accomplishment one gets to flash like a police badge or a designer handbag. It moves and shifts within the currents of everything else, always elusive, rarely surfacing in the same way or in the same figuration. Without effort, attitude, and concentration you don’t even know that it’s there, and even if you do, you’re more likely to trip over it and fall down the stairs than to find the time to clasp it to your spiritual bosom and genuflect over it.
But wait! The photograph of my family, taken in April 1945, rebukes this. The postures and characters you see in it—and the strain of happiness it self-consciously attempts to represent— remained still and stable until the twenty-first century, more or less. On the left is my sister Serena, named by my father before he knew he had twins, and given the name for her demeanour at birth. He holds her, not quite closely, both of them gazing at the camera as if the eye of the future was upon them. Behind him my brother, Ron, stands, a little shy, but proud to be at his father’s shoulder. I’m on my mother’s knee, chubby and imperious, the little prince on his throne. My mother’s smile is like my brother’s, shy but determined all the same. On my mother’s left is Nina, Serena’s older-by-a-half-hour twin, not serene at all. She is coiled and impish; full of light. Ideal, picture-perfect happiness.
It took my mother’s death to shake us from these ideal stances. By then, we were anything but picture-perfect.
IF THE STORY HERE was a novel, it would want to be a bittersweet tale about a marriage that didn’t make anyone happy, lightened and elevated by how the lovers struggled to be happy by different means. I’d call it The Good Life, or something even sillier, and paint it by numbers into symmetries as phony as they would be picturesque. But this isn’t a novel, and I’ll explain exactly why it can’t be.
A few weeks ago, on the way back from a family funeral, this time on my wife’s side, I stopped at a supermarket to buy a carton of light cream for the coffee drinkers who were coming over to commiserate. As I pulled my car off the road and glided through the supermarket’s parking lot, I was thinking, not of the immediate family death, but that of a close friend I went to high school with who’d recently died of a heart attack after 40 years trapped inside a schizophrenic fog. I pulled up beside a green minivan, and sat for a moment, lost in thought, tears rolling down my cheeks.
But an odd sound was coming from the minivan, and when I looked over, there was a 5-pound Chihuahua plastered against the driver’s-side window, snarling and splattering the window with drool as it tried to chew its way through the glass to get at me. As far as this mutt was concerned, I was Adolf Hitler and the Communist Menace rolled into one, and if I came near his property and even if not, well . . .
Crazed Chihuahuas that interrupt theme-based reveries just aren’t found in novels. In my world, they’re the everyday ciphers I navigate with.
So, I’ll spin you the love story I found, and I’ll do my best to make sense of the struggles of the main characters, whose lives, now over, were about equally filled with love and conflict. But both immediately and ultimately, this is as much rooted in slapstick as in romance or grim mortality: comedy is the unacknowledged third element that human life is constructed from.
I also have other ambitions for this. The serious part of me wants to uncover what two unambitious lives reveal about our dead-in-the-water civilization, where history and progress have broken and we are all off chasing private entitlements and BMWs and investment portfolios on a planet with dwindling resources, overburdened infrastructure and a rapidly faltering natural environment. We have too many of one species—ours, not those cattle farting in the meadow—and now we’re breaking up into a myriad of factions and tribes, most of them bristling with weapons, the hand-held automatic kind, and the larger ones, the WMDs that George Bush’s America couldn’t find in Iraq because the industrialized oligarchies of the Cold War have them all. That’s the