Another reading review

In honor of the feast of Blessed James Duckett on April 19, here is a review of the little bit I’ve been reading lately. (another link to an interesting bit of Catholic trivia.)

Almost five months into the year and my reading has been slight, other than class material and a couple books for book club.  Can I blame Anna Karenina? Class? Training for a marathon? Life? So much for reading 40 books in the year before I turn 40.  Unless I count kids’ books.  Maybe it will be 40 books in the year after I turn 40… So much for that list of “Things” too.

I’ve picked up a few books that looked interesting at our very small library. Have I mentioned that our library uses a card catalog?  There are no fines for late books, because all of the books are donated. So if you lose a book, you just donate another book. I love this system. We have only lost one book, Ralph S. Mouse, because our carpool friends took it home thinking it was theirs and they ended up losing it. I donated a handful of easy chapter books, since the library already had a couple of other copies of RSM. 

I was angry a couple months ago when the library’s funding was cut and the employees terminated. A new organization now runs the library and they began at once to inventory the books and move toward a computer system. I’m glad we’ll be gone before this process is finished. Fines are imminent.

In addition to replacing the librarians, they also began removing books that hadn’t been checked out in 5 years. I was sorry to see boxes of old sturdily bound library books being boxed up. I checked out a few to save their spines. I asked if I could have some, but I have to go through the DOD department that deals with discards.  Our neighbors have found some good deals from this system – washers and dryers, shelving, kayaks. All owned by the military and sold for pennies. At least they don’t go to the landfill. But I couldn’t find the books.

Many of the books we check out are newer releases that are supplied to the library through a grant program. The McNaughton foundation sends new books to the library and eventually they get shipped back. So they are library books on loan to the library.

One of these is The Geography of Bliss by Eric Weiner. I had wanted to read it since I heard about it on NPR a couple of years ago.  Weiner is a correspondent for NPR and travels frequently abroad.  He also is an avid self-help book reader and amateur student of what makes people happy. After writing this book I guess he is a professional student of happiness.

I owe this one to the return box.  But first notes:

Weiner comments that we often speak of happiness as a place: paradise, land of contentment, searching for happiness, finding our bliss, the Blessed Isles. We think of happiness as someplace “out there,” although self help gurus all counsel us to seek within.  Sometimes we need to look outward, he points out, and quotes Henry Miller, “One’s destination is never a place but a way of seeing things.”

Studies have been done on happiness levels in different places, so Weiner sets off to tour some of these. The catch is that there is not one answer to what makes people happy, and the places Weiner visits all have very different versions of happiness. Aristotle believed a virtuous life made people happy and Epicurus believed it was pleasure. The places featured here fall someplace in between.

Weiner records some research findings: married people are happier than single, people with and without children report the same levels of happiness, Republicans are happier than Democrats, religious people are happier than nonreligious, those with a college degree are happier than those without, but advanced degree holders are not as happy as those with a bachelors’ degree. Women and men are equally happy. Busy people are happier than idle people. Wealthy people are slightly more happy than poor people. Healthy people are happier than unhealthy people. Or does their happiness make them healthy? Causal relationships can be deceiving. Most of the happy countries are happy for different reasons and sometimes surprising reasons: they are homogenous, secular, have income gaps, and have high suicide rates.  Sometimes the possibility of unhappiness makes people happier

Here's a summary of the happy countries Weiner visits and a brief list of things that make them happy:

The Netherlands – tolerance, research, marijuana, coffee

Switzerland – trust, order, regularity (boredom), clean toilets, proximity to nature’s grandeur

Bhutan – has a happiness policy: improving “Gross National Happiness.” Difficult for foreigners to visit. Religious/superstitious/spirituality, tranquil like Shangri-la. A wise man tells him that happiness is relational – depends on our relationships with others.  Weiner’s revelation after talking to locals: if he dies, “I would not have done anything differently.”

Qatar – wealth. But no culture or history. A new world full of luxury but little landscape. (recommended book by Rebecca Solnit “A Field Guild to Getting Lost.”) But they do have a connection to family – happiness comes from connections to others. Danger of being walled off in a world of air-conditioned spaces. We often crave something that doesn’t make us happy to possess. The author feels he is addicted to sadness.

Iceland – relationships, willingness to fail and start again so there’s not a lot of envy, cooperation is mandatory in cold climates, love of liquor, art, language. Happiness and sadness coexist here.

Moldova – This is the unhappiest country in the world, a former soviet block country, with no native culture or language to speak of. Income is low, food is bad, identity is lost.

Thailand – Represents a lack of worry, an unquestioning happiness. Permissive in a different way from the Dutch culture: more like a fact of life.Quotes Yi-Fu Tuan “Happy people have no reason to think; they live rather than question living.” I could incorporate some of this attitude into my life. If I thought lest about school issues my heart would be lighter. “mai pen lai” = “never mind, get on with life.” Thai smiles are authentic.

Great Britain – gets featured for a reality show about people in the town of Slough trying to get happier and then spread the cheer with the rest of the town. The people actually became happier after doing social projects and balancing their work life and randomly dancing. They also visit a grave yard to confront death and learn to vacuum with love and care. The participants in the show are supposed to plant seeds of happiness which as of yet, have not bloomed, but happiness, as Nathaniel Hawthorne is quoted as saying, is like a butterfly alighting unbidden. Robertson Davies says this: “If you are not happy, you had better stop worrying about it and see what treasures you can pluck from your own brand of unhappiness.”

Weiner mentions several people who are culturally one nationality but find themselves more at home in a different one. I sometimes wonder if I wouldn’t be happier in England. I like reserved people, bookish humor, cottage gardens, pragmatism, bad teeth.

India – acceptance of contradiction: poor/rich, chaos/peace, foul odors/ perfume, beauty and ugliness all coexist without irony. Weiner visits the ashram of a contemporary guru. and although he questions the guru-worship, he does leave feeling more peaceful after initially being unhappy about no caffeine rule. The lesson again is that love is more important than making yourself happy, a commitment to service can bring happiness. Have no expectations. Accept imperfections. More platitudes.

America – “happiness is home.” After all his travels to happy places, Weiner is happy to be home. He tries living in Miami, but doesn’t like it there. America is 23^rd on happiness list. We are losing our connections to community (See Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone). We are wealthy but waste our money on toys.But if you want to live in a happy place in America, try Asheville, NC, - Beautiful nature, kind people, good food…

In the Epilogue Weiner meets a bartender names Happy. The secret to being Happy: Be yourself. Keep on smiling. More than one path.  Happiness is sometimes beside the point. 

“The good life . . . cannot be mere indulgence. It must contain a measure of grit and truth,” says Yi –Fu Tuan. Sometimes in our desire to find happiness we forget about truth and beauty.  

Weiner's work is interesting, but impersonal. What I feel myself is that happiness is harder to find when you're looking for it.  And after all our moves, I can honestly say that we have been happy everywhere we have lived. Each place we seem to love more.  I'd say happiness doesn't seem to have much to do with physical location, but everything to do with the location of your heart.

 **************************************************************

With the kids I read A Wrinkle in Time. It had been so many years, I remembered very little – images of the soup with the mother in the lab, the blobbish brain of IT, the supergeniousness of Charles Wallace, and the return in the vegetable garden were bits that were familiar, but the rest of the book was like reading anew.  My neighbor and her daughter, along with one of her friends, and my daughter and I have our own little version of Mother-Daughter book club, and this was the first book.  We talked a little about the theme of free will vs. perfect happiness, but the girls were mostly interested in the possibility of time travel and whether or not Calvin and Meg should have a romance. It’s been a lot of fun to listen to the girls talk together. Now we’re reading an abridged version of Journey to the Center of the Earth, which isn’t as much fun since it’s abridged. I keep meaning to dig out the full book since I have never read it, to compare.

The other book I finished is Exiles by Ron Hansen. I like Hansen’s books, but this one didn't stir up any stronger emotion. A fictional biography about Gerard Manley Hopkins writing “The Wreck of the Deutschland,” Exiles was a quiet book, but hearkens back to Mariette in Ecstasy. Hansen tells each nun’s backstory, as well as Hopkins’ struggles and eventual death. The narrative of the death of the five German nuns on the Deutschland in 1875 is a bit morbid, but told dispassionately, unlike Hopkins’ own poem, which is hard to read. I still haven’t finished the other Hopkins book I picked up –  Mortal Beauty, God’s Grace, a Vintage Spiritual Classic collection of Hopkins’ poems and spiritual writings.  I haven’t yet finished all the poems, nor started on his spiritual writings – I’ve just finished the biographical remarks by Brad Leithauser. Hopkins’ life was marked by struggle with inner conflict. He felt he must suppress his desire to write, and yet he felt ill when he did so.  Still, he managed to create poems that outlive his friend’s, the former British Poet Laureate, Robert Bridges.  His originality and vision in poems like “Spring and Fall” and “Pied Beauty” may have confused his superiors, but his future audience has loved them. (Some of whom, were they to read his more explicitly religious poems, would be thoroughly put off.)

****************************************************************

I’d like to blame my inattentive reading to class planning, but I didn’t add many new works to the syllabus. In fact, I cut several things, although I replaced “Fences” with “The Glass Menagerie” because that’s the piece that the University was performing. The class enjoyed Tennessee Williams’ work, but I think “Fences” went over better because it has a happy ending. My class has been complaining about all the death in the stories we read. I try  to balance it out, but so much literature is produced by sorrow.

 *****************************************************************

Perhaps if we were reading more Victorian literature – I have to admit that more of my reading time has been lost to television than ever before.  My neighbor loaned me her copy of the BBC’s productions of three Elizabeth Gaskell works: North and South, Wives and Daughters, and Cranford (a mashup of 3 novels).  Can I tell you how much I love them? Lovely costumes, lovely sets, lovely voices.  The older boys even liked watching North and South with me. These period dramas have the best dialogue and love scenes. And although they may be marked by death and sorrows, they almost always end with a marriage. Ah, romance!

Now I must put away movies and books and get on with sorting, purging, and planning. We have a move coming up in about a month.