civitas peregrina
Being at Home with Our Homelessness »
Why we’re happier knowing our happiness is inseparable from our misery.
A Bailout on Life
NAKHON NAYOK, Thailand — It is the ultimate in second chances: a Buddhist temple here offers, for a small fee, an opportunity to die, rise up again newborn and make a fresh start in life.
Nine big pink coffins dominate the grand hall of the temple, and every day hundreds of people take their turns climbing in for a few moments as monks chant a dirge. Then, at a command, the visitors clamber out again cleansed — they believe — of the past.
It is a renewal for our times, as recent economic hardship brings uncertainty and people try seeking a bailout on life. In growing numbers, they come here from around Thailand to join what has become an assembly line of resurrection.
[NY Times]
Julian Barnes on “the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment”
Bumper stickers and fridge magnets remind us that Life Is Not a Rehearsal. We encourage one another towards the secular modern heaven of self-fulfillment: the development of the personality, the relationships which help define us, the status-giving job, the material goods, the ownership of property, the foreign holidays, the acquisition of savings, the accumulation of sexual exploits, the visits to the gym, the consumption of culture. It all adds up to happiness, doesn’t it — doesn’t it? This is our chosen myth, and almost as much of a delusion as the myth that insisted on fulfillment and rapture when the last trump sounded and the graves were flung open, when the healed and perfected souls joined in the community of saints and angels. But if life is viewed as a rehearsal, or a preparation, or an anteroom, or whichever metaphor we choose, but at any rate as something contingent, something dependent on a greater reality elsewhere, then it becomes at the same time less valuable and more serious. Those parts of the world where religion has drained away and there is a general acknowledgment that this short stretch of time is all we have, are not, on the whole, more serious places than those where heads are still jerked by the cathedral’s bell or the minaret’s muezzin. On the whole, they yield to a frenetic materialism; although the ingenious human animal is well capable of constructing civilizations where religion coexists with frenetic materialism (where the former might even be an emetic consequence of the latter): witness America.
[qtd. here]
I saw my self like som Traveller
When I came into the Country, and saw that I had all time in my own hands, having devoted it wholy to the study of Felicitie, I knew not where to begin or End; nor what Objects to chuse, upon which most Profitably I might fix my Contemplation. I saw my self like som Traveller, that had Destined his Life to journeys, and was resolved to spend his Days in visiting Strange Places: who might wander in vain, unless his Undertakings were guided by some certain Rule; and that innumerable Millions of Objects were presented before me, unto any of which I might take my journey…. What then should I do? Even imitat a Traveller, who becaus He cannot visit all Coasts, Wildernesses, Sandy Deserts, Seas, Hills, Springs and Mountains, chuseth the most Populous and flourishing Cities, where he might see the fairest Prospects, Wonders and Rarities, and be entertained with greatest Courtesie…. For which caus I made it my Prayer to GOD Almighty, that He, whose Eyes are open upon all Things, would guid me to the fairest and Divinest.
[Thomas Traherne, qtd. here]
“It is not happiness that theodicy provides, but meaning.”
“I want to be someone else”
Closing the heavy volume of Montaigne,
The tall New Englander goes out
Into an evening which exalts the fields.
It is a pleasure no less than reading.
He walks toward the final sloping of the sun,
Toward the landscape’s gilded edge;
He moves through darkening fields as he moves now
Through the memory of the one who writes this down.
He thinks: I have read the essential books
And written other which oblivion
Will not efface. I have been allowed
That which is given mortal man to know.
The whole continent knows my name.
I have not lived. I want to be someone else.
[Jose Luis Borges, “Emerson.” Trans. Mark Strand]
“All that is not happiness is alien to our disposition.”
During my teens, two members of my parents’ congregation died of cancer, despite all the prayers offered up on their behalf. When I looked at the congregants kneeling on cushions, their heads bent to touch the wooden pews, it seemed to me as if they were literally butting their heads against a palpable impossibility. And this was years before I discovered Samuel Butler’s image for the inutility of prayer in his novel “The Way of All Flesh”—the bee that has strayed into a drawing room and is buzzing against the wallpaper, trying to extract nectar from one of the painted roses.
How can a man escape unhappiness, if he worships Felicity as divine and deserts God, the giver of felicity? Could a man escape starvation by licking the painted picture of a loaf, instead of begging real bread from someone who had it to give?
[Augustine, City of God 4.23]
