Somewhere Over the Sun

“Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.” - Ernest Hemingway

These are not terribly surprising words coming from a man whose last action was to place the barrel of a shotgun into his mouth. A highly-renowned and influential writer, it’d be hard to say Hemingway was not an intelligent man. But then, as Joshua Ferris once wrote, intelligent people are not always guided by their intelligence.

What I believe Hemingway was saying is that smart people understand better than others that life ends in death, that it all gets wiped out, and that since no afterlife is provable or viable, then everything is meaningless and shitty and people are terrible and the world is awful and boo-hoo why are we alive. Hemingway is observing that intelligent people think that death is the biggest backdrop to life, and so all intelligent people who see this as the truth will not be able to hang onto their happiness for long. And I think many perfectly intelligent people still have this view today. But there’s something incredibly stupid about this mentality. Something lazy, fatalistic, simplistic about narrowing it all down to death. 

Most intelligent people believe in the theory of evolution, and isn’t the next rational step the evolution of thought? The evolution of perspective? If we are bound to a limited time in this life, isn’t the smartest thing to do is find happiness in whatever tiny thing might provide it? 

The developmental psychologist Howard Gardner had a theory about multiple types of intelligence and not a single one (Spatial, Linguistic, Logical-mathematical, Bodily-kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalistic) recognizes the ability to appreciate happiness. I think people who might excel at one or several of these intelligence areas might also fail at the ability to draw happiness from it.

This already feels like a rambling post, one of those things that’s hard to prove, that other intelligent people might call a poorly reasoned argument. But something within me, when encountering a quotation like Hemingway’s, or the oft-pessimistic viewpoint of many other people whose opinions can be found on the Internet, feels that one type of intelligence has been vastly ignored. Pushing psychological disorders and chemical imbalances as far away from the conversation as they’ll go, misery is stupidity, cynicism the aged degradation of brain cells. The ability to appreciate the lives we have been given is the utmost intelligence, the one that will some day decide who has the will or the strength to survive from those who do not. 

“The moral? to recognize that our best chance of contentment lies in taking up the wisdom offered to us in coded form through our coughs, allergies, social gaffes, and emotional betrayals, and to avoid the ingratitude of those who blame the peas, the bores, the time and the weather…Bad sufferers, wretched souls who have been betrayed in love or excluded from parties, who are pained by a feeling of intellectual inadequacy or a sense of social inferiority, but who learn nothing from such ills, and indeed react to them by engaging a variety of ruinous defense mechanisms which entail arrogance and delusion, cruelty and callousness, spite and rage.” 

” – Alain de Boton, How Proust Can Change Your Life

You know what’s pretty fantastic? That there are things that bring us pleasure and that we can often do several of them at the same time. I was just eating tacos and reading, simultaneously! I know that may sound mundane to some of you, but if you think about it, it’s pretty miraculous. 

We spend a lot of time griping and focusing on the absences in our lives. We’re either poor in love or poor in wealth or poor in something else. We love throwing out if onlys and pretending that fulfilling one tiny absence will make us happy forever. And that’s okay. That’s how we’re made. We’re psychologically designed to be drawn toward negative space. But sometimes we make our lives about the absences rather than what’s already there.

But listen: have you ever driven with the windows down on a nice day? Or sung along to your favorite tune in the privacy of a hot shower? Have you ever held someone’s hand and then had the good fortune to remember it fondly? Think about all pleasures that you are afforded on a daily basis, and then think about how many of them don’t cancel each other out, how many different combinations there are of all the things you love to do. Sleeping in cuddled up to a significant other. A long, gratifying, lonely walk to your favorite breakfast place. 

Despite the many things that each of us is lacking to reach happier, idyllic versions of ourselves, we are all afforded tiny joys. And big joys. And medium-sized joys that you can wrap around other medium-sized joys. 

As Louis C.K once said, everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy. Be happy, dear reader. 

When I was younger, I was really good at loving from afar. It’s one of those things you practice to get worse at, but I only got better. Over the years, I’d get closer and closer, promote myself from classmate to friend, and keep the love farther away, hidden in stories and midnight confessionals to fellow distance-lovers. The profoundest distances are never geographical, I read somewhere.

I realized recently, not entirely without a pleasant sense of nostalgia, that I’ve lost that part of myself. On purpose, of course. This isn’t a coin that slipped out of my pocket and through the cushions of a couch. I tossed it forcefully into the wind. Or, perhaps more accurately, slipped into the slot of a toll booth on my way toward reciprocity.

Eventually, like most people, I got tired of having the person I most wanted dangled in front of me without even attempting to reach out to get her, whoever she was. I learned long ago that loving someone from afar usually keeps you from loving them from nearby.

Now, at the first symptom, I act. I stopped letting those things fester. “Love grows inside like a tumor,” a great song says (Fuck Was I by Jenny Owen Youngs). I pump that sucker with so much radiation that I suddenly find myself attached to a human-sized tumor. Or, you know, I try to, get rejected, and then the tumor’s excised and everyone’s still relatively unharmed. Or the tumor becomes benign and  stops growing and I appreciate that it’s there in its friendly way. You’ve either gone through it yourself or have seen enough movies to not need the message repeated by me.

I just wonder if maybe there is something to miss about not acting. About letting a crush develop over months and blossoming into infatuation/self-torture. One of the basest human impulses is nostalgia, and I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. If your mind wants to highlight the past and edit out some shit, why not. I mean, there are wonderful things about love unrequited: it’s cheap, disease-free, it can last forever.

It’s different, at least. There’s having an entire day made from one simple comment. I’ve been in some pretty lovey-dovey, passionate relationships, and while I’d much rather have the immense joy of constant companionship and having someone to love and hold,  a single, seemingly innocuous comment made from a crush can bring unparalleled joy, at least in its ambition. It’s like that little bit of Jewish oil that stretched out for eight days.

In high school, the last girl I let myself love from afar was in one of my classes. And among the many reasons I could give for why I developed feelings for her, I can recall one simple movement. She sat directly behind me and rest her feet on my chair, on that bar between the chair’s back legs and seems to be there only to have some pretty girl rest her feet on. I, of course, knew her legs were there. As suave and debonair as any inexperienced 16-year-old, I slung my arm back over my chair, as if it was a comfortable thing to do. I probably put on that, “I’m so laidback and awesome,” look that 16-year-olds never understand isn’t an actual look. Even as my blood flow tingled to a halt, I was willing to keep it there as long as necessary for that slightest bit of incidental contact. One day, she let her knee fall against my arm, and that’s probably the closest I’ve ever been to amputation. I wouldn’t dare to move. And even if the fact that she didn’t move either now seems like an obvious cue for 16-year-old me to do something, maybe I was happy enough with just that square inch of contact.

So, you know, there’s that. That kind of unrivaled joy in tiny things, and the memory of them. Maybe loving from afar is for the brave, for those who don’t need happy endings or kisses or actual emotional connections or…you know…venereal diseases.

I suppose it’s common practice in many school: senior-class t-shirts. Hold a design contest, pick a winner, unify hundreds of kids with one inside joke of a message. My classmates picked a vodka bottle with the clever line: Absolut Seniors (the future marketing major in me appreciated the product placement). The school rejected the concept for various reasons.

Then came a kid named Doh Young. He introduced a back-up idea. “This Korean symbol means, ‘Enjoy!’” he explained. A black shirt, the Korean symbol in white, the English translation in brackets below. The design was approved.

What the symbol actually meant in Korean: Fuck you. What the symbol actually meant to us: Enjoy!

The simplest message I could ever hope to convey, Doh Young faked and somehow managed to actually express at the same time. I thought of it on the bus this week. Ten hours in motion. The first one and a half spent talking to a fellow traveler. The rest a combination of music, literature, podcasts, the view, solitude, textual companionship. It all seemed enjoyable.

I don’t know if it was the motion (“Make no mistake about it, moving is living,” a movie told me), or the acknowledgment that time would pass in this exact way, or that a destination was yet to be reached, or that the simple entertainment of these distractions kept me…well…entertained. But I thought of Doh Young and our black and white, lying t-shirts, and I could not feel anything but joy.

“Enjoy!” his hidden-in-plain-sight philosophy so wisely insists. Enjoy your bus rides. Your marriages. Enjoy sending surreptitious middle finger messages to the authority. Enjoy the sun and smearing yourselves with mud. Enjoy unenjoyable smells. Local pub musicians and the drunk people that invariably love them. Walks home. Being on the path to success in your dream career. Enjoy time and its passing. Its fullness or emptiness, the life that is there regardless.