Happiness is a lemon mousse and banjo lessons
SELF-HELP HAPPINESS: A PHILOSOPHER’S GUIDE by Frederic Lenoir (Melville House £17.99) O’S LITTLE BOOK OF HAPPINESS by The Editors of The Oprah Magazine (Macmillan £9.99)
There’s nothing like a discussion about happiness to bring out my inner curmudgeon. if the world has to be divided into glass half-full people and glass half-empty people, i’m the one who says my glass has been knocked over and made a nasty mess on the cream carpet.
i think i agree with Flaubert that ‘to be stupid, selfish and have good health are three requirements for happiness, though if stupidity is lacking, all is lost’.
For to make yourself happy, you have to be a kind of zombie, deaf and blind to the insane way we live: mortgages, traffic jams, final demands, clogged gutters.
And how can you learn to stop worrying if you have children? Parental responsibilities will fill you with endless worry, anxiety and uncertainty.
these two books, however, left me feeling i am the only person willing to go on record about being eaten away with insecurity.
Lenoir, for example, one of those French philosophers with grey, bouffant hair that needs cutting, says love, friendship and emotional ties are ‘the main pillars of happiness’ — while i find such obligations make me fret.
happiness, he says, is ‘ subtle, complex and volatile’. he’d be right if he means it is fleeting. romance fades: there are, on average, 125,000 divorces a year.
contentment ebbs: 40 million prescriptions for antidepressants were issued in 2012.
People attempt to cram the emptiness of their inner lives with booze, drugs, plastic surgery and online fantasy relationships.
What perks up Lenoir is ‘a seafood platter with friends in a small harbour by the sea’. i know a lot of France is inland but, nevertheless, by the sea is where most harbours are to be found, along with lobsters and crabs.
i generally preferred it, however, when the authors got to be
specific. The Oprah Winfrey volume is particularly rich in this regard. The mainly female contributors have found they can make happiness last longer by hanging about in the kitchen.
Lemon mousse, onion sandwiches and ‘fresh bread and heavenly tomatoes’ put smiles on faces.
Swimming can be blissful (‘ the texture of the liquid all around me’), as can watching a kitten ‘spinning leaps through the air’.
The most moving testimony comes from a person who’s had cancer, which compelled her to notice ‘people and puddles and pigeons and trees and taxis . . . Now, I want to spend every minute humanly possible with my children’. A tough lesson: happiness is sharpened by adversity.
One lady admits that burying her face in one of her husband’s shirts gives her goosebumps, though whether her husband is alive or recently dead and this is a grief thing isn’t specified. We are on safer ground hearing about the person who ‘signed up for banjo lessons’ as a way of finding fulfilment.
A woman called Jessica is Oprah’s most eccentric author. She found joy ‘wielding blow torches and chainsaws’.
Surprisingly, though, she doesn’t work in a travelling circus. Instead, Jessica ‘teaches narrative writing at Columbia University’.
It wouldn’t do if we were all the same, and perhaps the psychologists who want to replace the word ‘happiness’ with ‘subjective well-being’ have a point. The same things don’t interest everyone.
‘Family life gives meaning to our existence,’ states Lenoir, as if he has stumbled upon a universal rule. But I know lots of people who prefer to live in peace and total solitude.
Not everyone wants to be generous, whether emotionally or materialistically. Misers take delight in hanging on to what they’ve got. Tyrants and perverts take pleasure in torturing and having power over others.
Do you think American women are mostly on hallucinogenic medication, or only Oprah’s chums?
Because how about this for another piece of terrible advice: ‘When I walk into a room, I know that everyone in it loves me. I just don’t expect them to realise it yet.’
Even Jesus would draw the line at that — and He is often invoked, by the way, as is Nelson Mandela, as an example of a person who was happy because he was wholly lacking in ego.
But surely the attainment of selfless spirituality somehow clashes with the lesson — always given in these self-help books — that ‘the longest relationship we have with someone is with ourselves’ and, therefore, that ‘ only you can make yourself happy’, which implies looking after Number One?
Well, no one said to expect logic.