Delight Springs

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Sisyphus, paterfamilias?

"One must imagine Sisyphus happy." Really, Monsieur? Why?

That's our big Happiness question today. Last time I pondered it publicly it happened to be Older Daughter's birthday, prompting me then to wonder if Sisyphus had kids. If so, the existential urgency of pushing that rock might have been a little more salient. What he or we call his happiness would have been inseparable from his familial commitment.

If all the days of your life, save one or two, were filled with unpleasant drudgery, but those one or two were as ecstatic as the birth of a child, would you call yourself happy? I think I would. Fortunately I've had many more than one or two great days, and relatively few days of dread. Thanks to my walking habit, even most of those were salvaged by a happy hour away from the rock of pointless routine. And because I find my teaching vocation mostly gratifying, most of my routine feels purposive, not pointless (except when pushing paper and filling out forms for our administrative overlords).

If Sisyphus had no children, no down-time to himself, and no hope for early retirement, I really can't imagine him happy. (Maybe he was a secret Buddhist, meditating on the transience of existence and willing the good of all sentient beings, behind his rock.) Nor can I really imagine Samuel Beckett's "Unnamable" happiness: "I can't go on, I'll go on." But apparently, happily, some can.
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Today is Halloween, or All Hallows’ Eve, a day in which the dead are traditionally believed to walk among the living...

It’s the birthday of English poet John Keats (books by this author), born in London in 1795. He’s best known for poetic odes like Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on a Grecian Urn, about the famous Elgin marbles on display in the British Museum, which ends with some of the most famous lines in poetic history: “beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ — that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”

By the time he died at the age of 25, John Keats had only published three small volumes of poetry, 54 poems in all. He’s now considered one of the finest poets in the English language. He once told a friend, “I carry all matters to an extreme.” WA

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